With Friends Like These . . .
The 'liberal' media and the left

In the New York Review of Books, Michael Massing relates this interesting tale:

"In late October 2004, Ken Silverstein, an investigative reporter in the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times, went to St. Louis to write about Democratic efforts to mobilize African-American voters. In 2000, the Justice Department later found, many of the city's black voters had been improperly turned away from the polls by Republican Party officials. Democrats were charging the Republicans with preparing to do the same in 2004, and Silverstein found evidence for their claim. Republican officials accused the Democrats of similar irregularities, but their case seemed flimsy by comparison, a point that even a local Republican official acknowledged to him.

"While doing his research, however, Silverstein learned that the Los Angeles Times had sent reporters to several other states to report on charges of voter fraud, and,
further, that his findings were going to be incorporated into a larger national story about how both parties in those states were accusing each other of fraud and intimidation. The resulting story, bearing the bland headline 'Partisan Suspicions Run High in Swing States,' described the extraordinarily rancorous and mistrustful atmosphere that pervades battleground states in the final days of the presidential campaign. In Wisconsin, Ohio, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Oregon and other key states, Democrats and Republicans seem convinced their opponents are bent on stealing the election .

"The section on Missouri gave equal time to the claims of Democrats and Republicans.

"Troubled by this outcome, Silverstein sent an editor a memo outlining his concerns. The paper's 'insistence on "balance" is totally misleading and leads to utterly spineless reporting with no edge,' he wrote. In Missouri, there was 'a real effort on the part of the GOP . . . to suppress pro-Dem constituencies.' The GOP complaints, by contrast, 'concern isolated cases that are not going to impact the outcome of the election.' He went on:

"I am completely exasperated by this approach to the news. The idea seems to be that we go out to report but when it comes time to write we turn our brains off and repeat the spin from both sides. God forbid we should . . . attempt to fairly assess what we see with our own eyes. 'Balanced' is not fair, it's just an easy way of avoiding real reporting and shirking our responsibility to inform readers . . .

"As Silverstein suggests, this fear of bias, and of appearing unbalanced, acts as a powerful sedative on American journalists -- one whose effect has been magnified by the incessant attacks of conservative bloggers and radio talk-show hosts. One reason journalists performed so poorly in the months before the Iraq war was that there were few Democrats willing to criticize the Bush administration on the record; without such cover, journalists feared they would be branded as hostile to the President and labeled as 'liberal' by conservative commentators."