Fake Balance and Asymmetrical Polarization: A Dismal Combination

Krugman really can’t say this enough:

There are two central facts about 21st-century U.S. politics. First, we suffer from asymmetric polarization: the Republican Party has become an extremist institution with little respect for traditional norms of any kind. Second, mainstream media – still the source of most political information for the great majority of Americans – haven’t been able to come to grips with this reality. Even in the age of Trump, they try desperately to be “balanced”, which in practice means bending over backwards to say undeserved nice things about Republicans and take undeserved swipes at Democrats.

This dynamic played a crucial role in last year’s election; it’s one of the reasons major news organizations devoted more time to Hillary Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined. But it has been going on for years. It’s the whole story of Paul Ryan’s career: journalists trying to be centrists desperately wanted to show their neutrality by praising a Serious, Honest, Conservative, and promoted Ryan into that role even though it was obvious from the beginning that he was a con man.

And it’s still playing out, as we can see from what looks like a looming debacle in Facebook’s efforts to institute fact-checking.

[…]

Notice the implicit assumption here – namely, that impartial fact-checking would find an equal number of false claims from each party. But what if – bear with me a minute – Republicans actually make more false claims than Democrats?

Take a not at all arbitrary example: tax policy. The GOP is deeply committed to the proposition that tax cuts pay for themselves, a view that has no support whatsoever from professional economists. Can you find any comparable insistence on a view experts consider false on the Democratic side?

Similarly, the GOP is deeply committed to climate change denial, despite the overwhelming consensus of scientists that anthropogenic climate change is real and dangerous. Again, where’s the Democratic counterpart?

There are, of course, individual liberals who say things that aren’t true, on all sorts of issues. But huge falsehoods by major party figures – where by falsehood I mean something demonstrably false, not a view you disagree with – are far more common on the right than the left.

But are there major Republicans who are equally bad on the extraordinarily important issue of email management best practices? Oh, there are, and the media went back to remembering that nobody actually cares about this stuff? Well…did Paul Ryan ever personally deliver 100% of the world’s supply of uranium to Vladimir Putin? CHECKMATE LIBS!