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.