How journalism helps lunacy become reality [View all]
Al Jazeera
How journalism helps lunacy become reality
If the US is to return to a fact-based world, reporters need to recommit to objective reality
by Larry Beinhart
After the second prime-time Republican presidential debate on Sept. 16, The New York Times published an astonishing editorial. It said the candidates must be no longer living in a fact-based world and described what they said as a collection of assertions so untrue, so bizarre that they form a vision as surreal as the Ronald Reagan jet looming behind the candidates lecterns.
It was about time that someone as authoritative as The New York Times editorial board said it as bluntly as that.
One of the things that made the editorial so striking is that the news coverage of the same events, in the same paper as well as in the rest of the media, treated what the candidates said as almost entirely unremarkable.
That prompts interesting questions. Why was this only an editorial? Why wasnt it in the news? Shouldnt it be newsworthy that the leading contenders for the Republican nomination are no longer living in a fact-based world and that what they say is untrue
bizarre
surreal?
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