Balance in the Media.

The referenced Daily Kos diary demonstrates a part of what is wrong with the mainstream media today. Balance the misdeeds of one side with lies about the other.

Even if there is no balance between two sides of an issue, the reporter feels he has to go out and create two equivalent sides. As a result, the readers end up thinking "They all do it" so voters wind up going with the likely winners because they have the power. Or they just don't vote because it doesn't matter.

This is the kind of journalism David Blair was fired for. He went out and created stories. This is more subtle. Journalists, afraid of choosing a side, beginning to sound strident and so no longer considered "even handed", will create a totally false picture of two sides both doing the same thing. In this case, while the Bush administration was paying off so-called journalists like Armstrong Williams to propagandized for them, there must be some kind of Democratic equivalent so the journalist creates a fiction that bloggers were paid to propagandize for Dean in 2004. Only it never happened.

But! The journalist reported a balanced story! That's what counts, right??