Bad Media, Bad

From Right Is Wrong -- How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America by Arianna Huffington:

A key to understanding the fanatical Right's takeover of the Republican Party and how these ideas spread to the rest of the country is looking at the role of the media -- not the Fox News pseudo-newsmen or the talk radio blowhards -- but the respectable, supposedly liberal media. Without the enabling of the traditional media -- with their obsession with "balance" and their pathological devotion to the idea that truth is always found in the middle -- the radical Right would never have been able to have its ideas taken seriously. If not for the media's appeals to balance, movement conservatism would have been laughed out of the court of public opinion long ago. And when the press does attempt to dig into the ideological underpinnings of debates about policy and current affairs, it becomes trapped by another form of the media's bipolar disorder. Besides seeing two sides to every issue, they insist on seeing most political battles through the lens of right vs. left. By reporting everything that's happening in American politics through this prism, the media missed the big story: the hijacking of America by the lunatic Right.

Read the rest here.