CT Blue

So far as I know Paul Krugman is the only voice in the mainstream that calls out whataboutismand bothsiderism. His columntoday seems like a polite channeling of the always on target rants of Driftglass, a blogI highly recommend. 

There’s a major difference, however. See if you can spot it in the excerpt below:

False equivalence, portraying the parties as symmetric even when they clearly aren’t, has long been the norm among self-proclaimed centrists and some influential media figures. It’s a stance that has hugely benefited the GOP, as it has increasingly become the party of right-wing extremists.

You might have thought that the horrifying events of recent days would finally break through that norm. But you would have been wrong. Bothsidesism is, it turns out, a fanatical cult impervious to evidence. Trump famously boasted that his supporters would stick with him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue; what he didn’t point out was that pundits would piously attribute the shooting to “incivility,” and that Sunday talk shows would feature Fifth-Avenue-shooting advocates and give them a respectful hearing.

This needs to stop, and those who keep practicing bothsidesism need to be shamed. At this point, pretending that both sides are equally to blame, or attributing political violence to spreading hatred without identifying who’s responsible for that spread, is a form of deep cowardice.

The fact is that one side of the political spectrum is peddling hatred, while the other isn’t. And refusing to point that out for fear of sounding partisan is, in effect, lending aid and comfort to the people poisoning our politics. Yes, hate is on the ballot next week.

Unlike Driftglass, who calls out the hypocrisy with exhaustive documentation, when it comes to the media, Krugman names no names. This may be because prime examples dwell alongside him on the editorial pages of the Times, exemplified by a man whose name sort of rhymes with “kooks”. Maybe it’s just not the thing to explicitly criticize fellow journalists for enabling Trump, though, again, in a prime example of what Krugman is talking about, there is no reticence among the alleged journalists at Fox when it comes to criticizing actual journalists. Krugman has raised these issues before, often making veiled references to that rhyming fellow I mentioned above, but I’ve noticed that he never gives concrete examples of media bothsiderism. 

If we’re going to shame them, as Krugman recommends, we have to name them. We’ve come to a point in our history when we can’t afford to be polite.

As a sort of afterthought: there’s a good chance we’ve arrived at this bothsiderist point precisely due to the fact that the press was subjected to years and years of pointed and explicit criticism by the right for having an alleged liberal bias, whenever it reported the facts. That criticism had at least something to do with the emergence of bothsiderism. The fact that there was no pushback from the left (except from people like Driftglass, who they can safely ignore) and there continues to be no pushback (looking at you, so called Democratic leaders) means that bothsiderism is a safe harbor for media figures more interested in their salaries than truth.