The gist of the piece, and the article comments Benji posted, is that a lot of partisans are intentionally ignoring the constant, year-long stream of negative press Trump has received, because it's soothing to believe that the media is the reason Clinton's poll numbers are underwhelming or the race is as close as it is. His point, which is reasonable, is that the public just doesn't care.
This misses the point of the criticism. Everybody sees that the media covers Trump's weekly atrocities. The idea is that this is basically balanced out by just as many stories about Clinton's wrongdoing, except that the stories about Clinton's wrongdoing lean heavily towards rehashing older stories about Clinton's wrongdoing. So while people are aware that Trump does bad stuff weekly, they also get this impression that Clinton's done a few
really bad things that make her just about as bad or untrustworthy or whatever as he is.
It's a hard thing to definitively show. But clearly lots of people are misinformed. In polling, the two score pretty close on things like honesty and transparency and what-have-you, and that's just kind of crazy. Taibbi isn't even really arguing that this isn't happening.
I'm not very impressed with the argument here. First, Taibbi's initial take that people complaining about false balance are being snobbish is just kind of silly in light of how he then goes on to complain at length about how it's dumb audiences who are responsible for the media being bad. But also surely it's obvious that the concern is less about stupid people devouring as much media coverage as they can but still needing things put in context and more about people who aren't paying close attention forming judgments about politics on the basis of vague impressions about how CNN's coverage feels. And so I think the hyperventilating like "Whether it's keeping "Fuck the Police" off the airwaves or news of the collectivist famine out of Pravda, the idea is the same: People can't handle stuff." is just dumb - it's not that people
can't handle stuff but that very few people
want to spend time handling stuff, and so they choose not to. This is Taibbi's
own argument about why the media sucks! Instead people often apply reasonable-seeming heuristics to figure out what's going on - "the truth is in the middle", etc. They see that there's a whole lot of negative coverage of Clinton and a whole lot of negative coverage of Trump, with the media itself not making any attempt to contextualize all of this, and pretty reasonably conclude that the take-home here is that both are shitty candidates.
What Taibbi's pointing at - how the media is shaped by what people want to see - is a real thing, but it goes both ways. Yeah, we get much more coverage of terrorist attacks in the US and Europe than elsewhere because the media figures that that's what people care about, but of course people then end up caring a
lot less about terrorist attacks elsewhere because they just don't hear about them very much.
I think The Technomancer's right that Taibbi's just totally ignoring the problem of information saturation. People are not turning to the media to collect contextless facts. People tune in to understand, and they draw conclusions from how things are presented just as much as from what is presented. They're trusting that the media is making responsible editorial decisions about what to talk about and how. They don't feel like turning on the news is like hitting the button to show a random Wikipedia page. Maybe this is part of their dumbness that Taibbi is snobbishly complaining about, but even if audience dumbness is an important cause of media dumbness it seems hard to let the media off the hook entirely unless the argument is that they don't have any obligation to do a good job.
Also this is pretty silly: "There's not much to say about this debate apart from the fact that it's phony and absurd and that the people shrieking for "balance" are almost always at heart censors who are really concerned with keeping a view of the world with which they disagree out of the news. "
Mostly the people being complained at
agree with the people doing the complaining - they all think that if you take a good look at this race you'll see that Clinton is a much less shitty candidate than Trump. The complaints are not about how the people at The New York Times actually do think that Clinton and Trump's scandals are comparably bad and are presenting their view. The complaints are about how the media is actually being dishonest or incompetent in presenting this "fair" picture of the race that they don't themselves accept - if they are failing to give their viewers an accurate understanding of the world, as they themselves understand it, then they are failing to do their job by their own lights. But, sure, if wanting things contextualized in the way that the people reporting think they are properly contextualized is asking for censorship, then you can cash out basically any objection to any reporting as someone being "really concerned with keeping a view of the world with which they disagree out of the news."
