The cult of false equivalency

In case you missed it, President Obama gave a barn burner of a speech at the AP luncheon. The media narrative termed it partisan. I'd describe it as realistic.



It's long, so here's a part where he called out the false equivalence of the media coverage:

Health care, which is in the news right now — there’s a reason why there’s a little bit of confusion in the Republican primary about health care and the individual mandate since it originated as a conservative idea to preserve the private marketplace in health care while still assuring that everybody got covered, in contrast to a single-payer plan. Now, suddenly, this is some socialist overreach.

So as all of you are doing your reporting, I think it’s important to remember that the positions I’m taking now on the budget and a host of other issues, if we had been having this discussion 20 years ago, or even 15 years ago, would have been considered squarely centrist positions. What’s changed is the center of the Republican Party. And that’s certainly true with the budget.

Dan Froomkin wonders, "How would political coverage change if this became the new accepted narrative?"

Well, we're not likely to find out because it will never become the media narrative. Truth so barely laid out would make all too clear that the Republican party has become a seething mass of mendacious sociopaths. Neither does it fit the preferred form for stenography journalism.

Hell, it took less than 24 hours for the AP to prove Obama's point with ludicrous false equivalencies in their analysis of the speech. Even worse, for all their pretensions about having to maintain balance, they actually reinforce the GOP narratives with their skewed definition of balance.

Hard to believe they don't realize it.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]