Our worthiest newspapers are once again declaring the virtue of bending over so far backwards to prove they don't tilt leftward that they topple over and turn into laughingstocks.

Over at the Washington Post, according to ombudsman Andrew Alexander, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli says:

we are not well-enough informed about conservative issues. It's particularly a problem in a town so dominated by Democrats and the Democratic point of view....I challenge our reporters and editors with great frequency to look at what is going on across the political spectrum . . . at the extremes, among the rabble-rousers, as well as among policymakers.

The Executive Editor does not express himself clearly. Take a close look at the evasive phrases "conservative issues" and "what is going on." Does Marcus Brauchli believe that WP reporters and editors should closely scrutinize the right-wing campaigns that diffuse untruths (Swift boats, death panels, missing birth certificates) and absurdly distorted uproars (Acorn as hooker counseling service, Cass Sunstein as Antichrist, etc.)? That it's time to investigate the organization and funding of such attacks, the ways in which they command the attention of Hannity, Beck, Limbaugh, Savage, O'Reilly & Co. and then seep from the rightosphere into the mainstream? Apparently not.

Rather, it would seem (though again, Brauchli's ambiguous wording, if accurately quoted, might be at fault) that Executive Editor Brauchli means that his editors and reporters should take these attacks seriously, let the birther-deather crowd set their agenda, let their obsessions be the Post's obsessions.

Alexander goes on to brandish the canard of canards that has thrilled wingers for some 30 years now:

The most authoritative recent research into the political leanings of newsrooms (including television, radio, magazines and wire services) shows they are considerably more liberal than the general public. At daily newspapers, those who "lean to the left still far outnumber those who lean to the right," said Indiana University journalism professor David H. Weaver, whose researchers surveyed 1,149 journalists in 2002 and recently conducted a follow-up study of 400.

It's as if reporters run newsrooms all by themselves. As if we still lived in the 18th century world of one-man publications. As if there were no newsroom traditions or unwritten rules; no publishers; no markets; no corporations; no stockholders. Just journalists opining their liberal-liberal-liberal (did I mention liberal?) opinions. We all remember how that went in the run-up to the housing bubble, the Iraq war, don't we? All those liberal reporters busting our eardrums blowing their whistles?

It's as if my colleague Herbert J. Gans had not written the resounding rebuttal to such profoundly shallow claims almost a quarter of a century ago ("Are U.S. Journalists Dangerously Liberal?" Columbia Journalism Review, Nov./Dec. 1985, pp.
24, 29-33, unfortunately not online so far as I can see). As if whole curricula of research reports had never been published to demonstrate the economically and internationally unliberal (as well as socially liberal) biases of the mainstream. As if the argument had not been presented meticulously, at considerable length, in Eric Alterman's What Liberal Media?

Speaking of Alterman, he and Mickey Ehrlich have just posted on the Right's latest collective uproar about an Obama appointee, the Department of Education's Kevin Jennings, who has the temerity to be gay and once, more than 20 years ago, having counseled a gay high school student in a manner that the Family Research Council and other homosexual-hating slime-buckets deem unrighteous.

NYT public editor Clark Hoyt also wrote last week about the paper having "trouble dealing with stories arising from the polemical world of talk radio, cable television and partisan blogs," and quoted Jill Abramson, the managing editor for news, as having "agreed with me that the paper was 'slow off the mark' [on the Acorn story] and blam[ing]
'insufficient tuned-in-ness to the issues that are dominating Fox News and talk radio.' She and Bill Keller, the executive editor, said last week that they would now assign an editor to monitor opinion media and brief them frequently on bubbling controversies." Is a bubbling controversy a controversy that the gay-baiters and Glenn Becks of the world decree to be bubbling?

Why isn't it a bubbling controversy that the right-wing rage machine has a direct pipeline into the newsrooms of the would-be respectable organs of American news?