The following is an excerpt from ERIC PIANIN | May 3, 2012 | TheFiscalTimes.com |
Much of Washington journalism long ago abandoned any pretense of objectivity and instead found it more profitable to stake out ideological positions from which to tell larger “truths” about politicians and their conduct.
Notions about telling all sides of a story went out of fashion when news executives realized that readers or viewers were more interested in being told what to think, or in having their views reinforced, than in wading through detailed and often conflicting information. Witness Fox News or the Drudge Report on the right or the Huffington Post and MSNBC on the left.
This polarization of the news industry mirrors the deepening partisan divide in Washington, in which Republicans and Democrats and tea party members have given up talking to one another and instead do business by setting political traps. The era of bridge-building “moderate Republicans” and “Blue Dog Democrats” is almost at an end, with one of the last remaining prominent moderates, Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine, retiring at the end of the year.
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