There really is a letter down there, but first I need to tell the background story. Early this month, Orcinus had a lengthy post on his blog calling for a campaign to reform the news media. Those of you who are interested in following the discussion will want to go read the whole thing. (Some of you already have.) For the rest, I'll summarize. He starts out by making the case that today's news media is failing to meet the traditional goal of journalism, which is to inform. He offers quite a bit of evidence, anecdotal and statistical, supporting the assertion, along with a little bit of discussion of how it has come to be this way and what the ramifications are. Prominent among the latter is that political discussions are dominated more and more by competitive sloganeering with less and less attention to discovering what the actual facts are.

My favorite illustration in this half of the discussion was a passage quoted from another blog (Rhetorica) describing a program on MSNBC earlier this year, during the Democratic primary, in which a pollster interviewed a panel of voters and reported back to a panel of MSNBC's pundits. What happened was that the voters kept trying to pull the discussion away from the facile "horse-race" type questions that which the station had scripted and asked instead about policy issues which the press never covers. In the face of this evidence, pundit-in-chief Chris Matthews concluded that none of the Democratic campaigns were succeeding, because none of them had managed to get the voters interested in their press-friendly buzzwords.

Having made his case against the state of journalism today, Orcinus goes on to recommend a movement to recapture and reinvigorate the news media, to which end he offers a proposed "manifesto" stating the mission of such a movement. It being just a rough draft, he invites discussion.

All of this was going on while I was in California and not keeping up with blog-reading, so I missed most of the discussion and read the manifesto only belatedly (following a link from RaptorMage). I had two reactions to the manifesto, one of which I emailed to Orcinus and which he later reprinted.

The second reaction, which I never got around to sending, is that if the problem is a lack of good journalism, then the answer is not to shout about and berate the idiot media that fails to provide it; the answer is to provide it, or at least to point to those who are doing so. If there really is a hunger for basic information -- as the aforementioned focus group suggests there is -- then the answer is for someone to sit down and answer their questions.

There is a little bit of this going on in the blog world, and Orcinus himself offers some great reporting on his own area of expertise (hate crimes, radical right-wing militias and other domestic terrorist groups), but mostly I see just a lot of name-calling and cheerleading which is no more informative than the mainstream media we all supposedly object to. For example, when the Bush administration releases a budgetary forecast, what typically happens is that the mainstream media reports the Bush the predictions without questioning their reliability. Then a gaggle of bloggers run their posts saying, "I can't believe what a bunch of f***ing liars these Bush people are! Why do the idiots at NYT and WaPo even run this crap? Where are their journalistic standards?" What I don't see from any blogger is a helpful discussion which calmly goes through the numbers saying, "Here is what the Bush administration reports: [link]. These numbers are based on [explanation]. The reasons they are misleading is because they fail to take into account [explanation], and they misrepresent [explanation]," and so forth.

Personally, I've heard enough that I do think any economic forecasts coming out of the Bush administration are suspect, but even I would appreciate a walk-through that demonstrates why. For those who are not yet convinced, such a reasoned argument is essential. Otherwise you're asking them to believe you based on nothing more than your assertion that the other guys are liars and you know better. Maybe you'll add a note saying "[insert name of credentialed liberal economist] has debunked all of this", but when we look at said economist's blog, we still don't find anything more enlightening than his assertion that no "grown-up" economist really believes Bush's story.

If the mainstream press is regurgitating political propaganda which is misleading or false (and I think it is), then the antidote is for someone to tell the story as it ought to be told -- in other words, do some real reporting. The antidote is to give those focus group voters whom Rhetorica discussed what they've been asking for, which the mainstream media isn't providing. To the extent that such a thing is out there, then all the blogs who are so gung-ho on Orcinus's new movement ought to start finding it and linking to it. To the extent that it's not, someone ought to get to work on writing it.

But I digress. My other reaction to the manifesto, the one which Orcinus later reprinted, was to complain about the partisan language. It seems to me that the ideal of a news media which provides real information needn't be a goal only of liberals. True, at the moment the right seems to be exploiting the culture of disinformation more effectively than the left, but it won't necessarily always be so, and in any case the right certainly doesn't have a monopoly on false or misleading political propaganda. With that in mind, my suggestion to Orcinus was that he trim his manifesto of every smart-ass partisan remark. I further suggested that a good way to identify such remarks is to have a thoughtful person who aligns with neither the right nor the left to read through it. I've found that those of us who are committed to one side, particularly if we spend all of our time hanging out in blogs which only reaffirm our preconceived beliefs, tend to be tone-deaf to partisan remarks which others find offensive.

To my dismay, I found that the great majority of Orcinus's readers disagree with me. For them, the real mission is simply to take back the media from the conservatives, and the ideal of good and informative reporting is secondary to the goal of deposing a media culture which supports the Bush regime. In the comments section attached to my email to Orcinus, the two most common responses were: (1) There is no such thing as an intelligent centrist who is undecided about the election. Anyone who isn't opposed to Bush must be a right-winger or a moron. (2) To tailor the manifesto to appeal to independents means a shift to the center, and since part of the problem with the media is that right-wing bias keeps moving the "center" rightward, to try to appeal to the "center" constitutes giving in to the right.

The first of these I think is stupid and naive, and is exactly the sort of shallow partisan cheerleading that I hate on both the left and the right. The second, I think, misses the point. Perhaps I wasn't clear in my email to Orcinus. I'm not suggesting that his mission needs to find a partisan middle-ground; I'm suggesting that it shouldn't be partisan at all.

I'm finally getting to the letter now. When I made my suggestion about having an independent spot all the partisan cheap shots which we liberals might overlook, I wasn't just being theoretical. One of my friends from RMO is in fact one of these rare creatures, a thoughtful person interested in politics who is not yet committed to either candidate. (But don't get too excited: He's not from a swing state....) I sent him the link to Orcinus's post and asked for his reactions to the manifesto.

For those who want to follow along, here again is the Orcinus post Paul is responding to. Note that he is considering the entire post, and not just the manifesto per se.

I don't know if Orcinus is going to link to this. If he does, welcome to any newcomers here. As you can see, I don't have a Comments box here, because that's just not the type of blog Benzene is. But I'd be happy to hear any comments. In spite of my harsh remarks about facile partisanship, I really do like most of the commenters on Orcinus, who are a much more interesting batch than I find on most political blogs. Feel free to send an email. Comments received may or may not be reprinted here, so if your message is intended to be confidential be sure to make that clear.

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