1.) For once, a non-media conservative defending journalists for doing the work they’re supposed to do.

Larison says (and you should really click here and read the whole thing):

When someone at a restaurant asked Palin a question about Pakistan that generated some controversy because it seemed to contradict McCain’s previous statement at the debate, the McCain campaign dubbed it “gotcha journalism” and right away when Gibson stumped Palin with his Bush Doctrine question there was a great hue and cry about the “gotcha” nature of this question.  Apparently the questions on her reading habits and Court rulings has also been defined as a “gotcha” question by Palin supporters, even though it is as certain as the sun rising that journalists will ask nominees their views on judicial philosophy and Court rulings … In other words, the “gotcha” is no longer an ambush — it can include any question to which the candidate really should have an answer. …

When this year’s rulings came down, the presidential nominees either volunteered their opinions on the rulings or they were asked about them.  McCain denounced Boumediene and endorsed Heller. Obama supported both, which caused him some trouble because he had said that he thought the D.C. gun ban was constitutional …  If Ifill asks these questions tonight, is she playing “gotcha” or trying to gain information and a window into the candidate’s reasoning and understanding of the relevant policies?  This might be worth sorting out in advance so that we’ll know which flubbed answers to ignore and which ones are important.  If all questions are now “gotcha,” maybe we can just skip watching the debate and go have a drink. [bolds mine-R]

2.) Speaking of Gwen Ifill…

This is the argument: The moderator of tonight’s debate, a woman who is known throughout Washington for being a fair interviewer (and far from tabloid-esque, as with the more partisan likes of MSNBC or Fox News), is writing a book about “politics in the age of Obama.” She is black.

This has been translated into “she’s a member of the liberal media and is writing a book about politics in the age of Obama.”

This is the intellectually dishonest bomb-throwing that otherwise engaged people like myself simply detest, no matter which side of the aisle is throwing it. First, a book about the changing fortunes of black politicians is a far cry from a book “about” Obama or (as some have called it) “PRO-Obama” — she hasn’t event written the chapter about Obama yet. Secondly, do we think Bob Woodward would be a bad moderator? He’s written books about politicians, and all of them have been tough, hard-nosed — and ultimately fair. (There’s a reason President Bush keeps sitting down with the man, even though his books on the Bush White House have provided plenty of embarrassment.)

This is how it stands: Those who begin whining about “unfairness” are usually doing it because they know they’re losing (see previous post on the landslide that now seems imminent)… when Sean Hannity et al brought the Jeremiah Wright story to the forefront, Obama never claimed the story wasn’t credible because it was being reported by a right-leaning news organization; the story was true and so the questions were justified. He tried to spin it, sure, but not by beating up on the press. I’m guessing that’s because he knew he was winning then, and he surely knows he’s winning now.

…instead of real-ity.

Some 52.4 million people watched Friday night’s debate. That may seem like a lot, but it’s actually 16 percent fewer than watched the first debate between President Bush and John Kerry in 2004 — and despite the fact that 12 networks (all the majors, all the newsies and a few you probably don’t get) aired it live.

Why the drop? It could be because more people chose to enjoy their Friday nights out on the town, planning to watch it via Web the next day. (As far as I know, there’s no data on how many have watched it this way, nor even a way to accurately compile such data. Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that Bush-Kerry debate was on a Thursday night.)

But still, the numbers are surprising. Isn’t this “the most important election of our lifetime”? Isn’t this supposed to be the most exciting election in the history of the universe? More to the point, about 38 million watched Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, and about 500,000 more than that watched McCain’s.

Let that sink in for a minute. Assuming that two-thirds of the people who watched one candidate’s acceptance speech did not watch the other’s — and, based on my totally unscientific discussions with partisans on both sides the days after each acceptance speech, that’s a pretty good guess — it’s likely that fewer people watched the debate than watched at least one of the acceptance speeches.

Real questions by a real person, vs. speeches given via TelePrompTer. Do we really care where they stand?

Recent events lead me to think otherwise. Consider how much the debate coverage focuses on personality/image/composure (McCain didn’t look at Obama! Obama didn’t have any good zingers!), while policy differences are simplified and utterly false statements are just left hanging in the air (Pakistan was not a “failed state,” as McCain chastised; Obama and Michelle are coming up on their 16th anniversary, not 15th… I bet he’s in the doghouse!).

Debates are boring. I get it — I’m not even excited about Thursday’s between Palin and Biden, despite the fact that it’s bound to be rife with comic value on both sides. But seriously! The day we’d rather hear a prepared speech than an actual spontaneous discussion on the issues is the day we’ve lost the right to complain. (Re: Bush 2000′s “steady hand” vs. Bush 2008′s stubborn refusal to consider things commonly known as “facts.”)

P.S.: This should tell you a good deal about the intelligence of the average voter. (VodPodded at right, but bigger-screen here.)

Best podcast: “It’s All Politics” from National Public Radio. Hosts Ron Elving and Ken Rudin go over a week’s worth of presidential politics with wit, whimsy, astute analysis and just a bit of cynicism. It’s free, click here to get it.

Worst new TV show: Fox’s “Hole in the Wall.” The preview looked sort of funny, which compelled me to look it up on Hulu during a lull here at work. The contestants, hosts and audience are all WAY too excited about the stupid task that’s going on here: Namely, people trying to contort themselves to fit through (you guessed it!) holes in a wall. This further strengthens my urge to come up with some pitches for TV shows — if this thing can make it on the air, anything can. Click here to watch; it’s a great test of the human will to see how far you can get before turning if off. I made it almost 7 whole minutes!

“The simple-minded silliness of lipstick-on-a-pig filled at least one cable news cycle, but the question of what kind of executive Sarah Palin has been as mayor and governor didn’t lend itself to the bite-sized format of the nightly news or the constant low-grade babble of cable.”

— Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times

Last weekend, as I was putting together Saturday’s Daily News, I had to make a choice: Do I run the 40-inch analysis on Sarah Palin’s history as a chief executive, or a couple of shorter, fresher but less important stories about the day’s campaign trail antics (and a little something about that lipstick debacle). The longer story was, arguably, much more important. But I also know that the longer a story is, the less likely someone is to read it.

This is the conundrum wrought by a blisteringly quick news cycle, the Webification of everything. Thankfully, I’m not the only one who sees it (although it increasingly feels that way).

Some choice portions of a recent article in the Los Angeles Observer, lamenting the loss of in-depth analysis — or, more accurately, the loss of interest in such. (Full article here.)

“It’s obvious, and no crime against humanity, that the world has many, many places to turn for information, misinformation, analysis, rants, etc,” wrote Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, in an e-mail. “We—The Times, The Washington Post, Politico, the news outlets that aim to be aggressive, serious and impartial—don’t dominate the conversation the way we once did, and that’s fine, except it means some excellent hard work gets a little muffled.

“But we do want our work to be noticed,” he wrote, “and I’ve been repeatedly surprised at the rich, important stories that fail to resonate the way they deserve.”

On one level, more people read The Times, albeit in digital form, than ever. The pipeline piece did a brisk business as an e-mail forward. But so did everything else anyone had to say that day about the campaign—whether it was true or false, reported or simply asserted, fact or opinion. In-boxes crammed with New York Times articles and Huffington Post hyperlinks do not advertise their relative value or importance. Everything is equal, everything is a tie and nothing, it seems, is important anymore. …

“One of the casualties, I think, is that powerfully reported and written stories, especially investigative and accountability ones, do not land with the impact they once did,” (Politico editor Jim VandeHei) said. “They might still turns heads—and thankfully at times change things—but usually they get pushed aside as the new-media machine moves to the next ‘thing.’” …

“There’s so much content to fill,” said (Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi). “People who write for news magazines like Newsweek and Time, in the old days, they’d be writing one feature a week. Now they have to file every single day for Web sites, and do video hits, appear on TV shows, and that’s in addition to writing their features. The same people are doing four and five times as much work and, obviously, they’re not going to have a great deal of depth on any subject.”

The average voter may not know that a recent John McCain ad, claiming Barack Obama sponsored legislation to teach sex education to kindergartners, is entirely false (even the cut-throat GOP operative Karl Rove said so). She may not know that Sarah Palin’s claims about her opposition to earmarks and the infamous Bridge to Nowhere are stretched truths, to say the least. The average voter may have heard Barack Obama’s promise to cut taxes to most middle-class people, and McCain’s own promise to cut taxes and his insistence that Obama’s claims are untrue — but it’s unlikely they know which (if either) holds more water.

The reason? “Objective balance.”

For years (maybe decades), it’s been widely held in journalistic circles that the proper way to approach a story is to get all sides of a story, and pay equal attention to all the sides. But there’s an obvious flaw in this approach: Namely, that the reader is given no indication of which side is more correct. That’s beginning to change, however, thanks to a bustling blogosphere/new media that has no such convictions. It must be taken with many grains of salt, sure, but as Fox Mulder would say, “The truth is out there”… somewhere.

Ex-Clinton campaign co-manager Paul Begala recently mocked this approach as the Neil Armstrong situation. (I’m paraphrasing from here on.)

Candidate A claims the moon is made of green cheese, while Candidate B claims it is made of rock. Most news channels would call it “Candidates Clash on the Moon!,” invite representatives from each campaign and let them yell at each other for a few minutes. 

Instead of just calling Neil Armstrong and asking him which one is right.

As I mentioned above, the McCain campaign ads this cycle have been SO false, and the campaign’s claims SO absurd, that even the “old guard” media is starting to play truth detector. 

Meanwhile, I’ve been particularly upset with a days-long debate over whether or not Barack Obama called Sarah Palin a “pig.” (I’d be shocked if you haven’t heard too much about this already, but if so, click here and here and here.) The way this thing has been covered, you’d think this is a really important factor in deciding our votes! Yet the issues of the day (Fannie Mae? Lehman Brothers? Going into Pakistan to find bin Laden?) have been ignored. 

This thread from a feature called “The Arena” on Politico was particularly apt. Various experts were asked the question, “Why does the press cover seemingly trivial matters like the ‘lipstick on a pig uproar’? (Or name your own trivial uproar.) Is the press complicit — or even the principal engine — in making politics so conflict-driven and superficial?” A particularly apt bit of discussion is below.

Steven G. Calabresi, Professor of law, Northwestern University:

This story was newsworthy because Obama had promised to lead us to a new post-partisan politics of hope and has instead resorted to partisan attacks.  What other promises will Obama break?

Lawrence Lessig, Professor of law, Stanford (responding to the above):

The press is trapped by the view that it can’t say what’s true if that would be seen to have an effect on an election. Think about the New York Times’ decision to withhold what it knew about the Bush Administration until after the 2004 election, for fear that if it had revealed that before the election, it would have been called “biased.” Somehow we need to elevate the idea that truth is a complete defense to the charge of bias. Armed with that complete defense, I suspect more would be willing to call the McCain campaign on this shameful misuse of what Obama said. Talk about a question of judgment: If a student of mine had read what Obama said in context, and then suggested he was really talking about Palin, I would seriously worry about whether we should arm that student with a law degree. But a law degree is a much less dangerous power than the Presidency. [bold mine-R]

And come on, Steve. A “post-partisan politics” can’t possibly mean you’re not allowed to criticize the policies of your opponent. It should instead mean you don’t make truth a function of which party it happens to benefit. That ideal should begin with us. The “interpretation” of Obama’s statement offered by the McCain campaign is absurd. If we can’t say that, then how can we expect anyone to be able to speak it?

For my part, I think the media is complicit: Not just because it pays too much attention to the sensational and not enough to the substantial (old media, including cable news, is losing ad revenue at an alarming rate, and it shouldn’t be surprising that these people air the stuff they think is exciting, which seems to bring in more viewers/readers), but also because it tries TOO HARD to be “objective,” when really it is only being “balanced.”

Balance, however, tells you nothing about the actual merits of something, unless you already know the underlying issues well. And it doesn’t take an avid viewer of Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking” to know that, well, maybe a lot of us don’t know all that much.