The Media's Instinct to Cover Crazy People

It's a universally acknowledged fact these days that Fox News is doing a rotten job covering the health care debate. But what about the liberal media? By constantly harping on the craziest of the crazy protesters to set them on a tee and whack their crazy lies with a three wood, maybe they're not helping to make the fundamental point, which is that crazy sideshow fanatics don't deserve to take up the bulk of every cable news hour. Matt Yglesias makes a really good point here:

If you decide you're only going to cover the one percent of those [public town-hallish Congressional] events that feature outlier events, then you present the public with a very distorted view of things. And to take a bit of a self-critical look at things, this dynamic wasn't helped by the rise of a left-wing mass media (blogs, Rachel Maddow, etc.) that was more interested in poking fun at the nuttiest voices on the right than in trying to amplify the concerns of pro-reform voters.

I think he's right. But I also have sympathy for the instinct to cover the crazies. Just this morning, a health reform supporter bit off a 65-year old's finger at a protest. It's on our Politics blog, and it's the Number One story at Talking Points Media. Is that news or distraction?

Well, it's both isn't it? There are two sides to this coin. The righteous point I often hear is: What a damned shame that journalism has been reduced to a wire report for banal idiosyncrasies. On the other hand: Look, it's the most-viewed story on TPM! Readers want more bloody pinkies. They need more bloody pinkies.

When I poke my head in the ongoing debate of whether journalism should bravely lead the high-minded discussion or react to and anticipate the baser wants of its audience, I'm reminded of Fareed Zakaria's favorite metaphor: Odysseus ordering his men to bind him to the mast of the ship, lest he heed the Siren's call to wreck it on the rocky shores. Zakaria uses the metaphor to call on democracy to ignore the vacillating will of the people (the Sirens) and bind itself to laws. But that's quite similar to what commenters like E. J. Dionne ask of the media: Ignore the easy, seductive call of red-meat sensationalism, and bind yourself to a higher standard of reporting. I don't know what the right answer is here, but it's easy to predict that journalism will not follow the advice Zakaria's fable. Not knock on Odysseus, but he didn't have a bottom line to worry about.