So, this is Kind of about Politics...

But not really.

I do my share of surfing every day, I hit the sports pages, CNN, Wash Post, etc... and one of the places I check out on a fairly regular basis is Bloggerman by Keith Olberman, late of ESPN and currently host of Countdown (8pm MSNBC). In reading Keith's musings yesterday, i came across this passage:

"On December 27th, we got an email from the lead lawyer for John Kerry in Ohio, Daniel J. Hoffheimer (remember him? It seems like only yesterday…) cautioning reporters “not to read more into” what the Kerry-Edwards campaign had just said about the authenticity of the election. “There are many allegations of fraud. But this presidential election is over. The Bush-Cheney ticket has won.” We ran several quotes from the email on Countdown that night, and more here on the blog.

Now, we can debate the merits of the email, and whether or not Senator Kerry’s people tantalized some of their supporters in the weeks after the election by first saying what seemed to be election-challenging things, and then saying “no, we didn’t mean thaaat.” But we can’t debate who Daniel Hoffheimer was, nor his standing in the Kerry camp, nor the fact that I wouldn’t get very far if I just made the news up every day, including quotations and even entire people.

Stop it. Stop that Fox joke you were thinking of.

Nonetheless, I got an email that night from a woman who identified herself only as Alexandra, who insisted “something clearly has happened to your coverage. Looks like ‘bait and switch’ to me… your quote (was that really true???) from the Kerry attorney saying they believed Bush really won (no fraud???) is so far fetched, I may as well have been listening to Karl Rove or Scott McClellan…”

Remembering the countless nerves frayed in the preceding two months, I replied gently to Ms. Alexandra, forwarding her Hoffheimer’s email.

The next afternoon she was back. “Can someone get a statement DIRECTLY from Kerry’s office that ‘Hoffmeier’ (sic) is INDEED his attorney? No one’s heard his name before (though maybe Bush/Cheney lawyers, or Karl Rove might have a clue)…”

As Charlie Brown used to say, arrrgh!

I sent Alexandra the name of Hoffheimer’s firm and suggested she check him out herself, and noted again that I wouldn’t get very far just making this stuff up out of whole cloth. Even the nutbags at both far ends of the political spectrum get called on that.

What wore me out, of course, was the idea that because I was presenting news that a viewer didn’t like, I had to have sold out to one party or another, and/or fabricated it. The woman presumed that I had created a fictional character, was stupid enough to quote him on national television, and was guilty of both these crimes and had to get a note from John Kerry that I wasn’t making it up."

Now, I know, some of you will get angry about the Fox rip, but wait - My thoughts have nothing to do with either news outlets nor the 2004 Presidential Election. My thoughts deal solely withthe state of Politicis in America, and what might be the source of all the divisivness we have at the moment. The idea, shown in the last paragraph above, that just because the viewer got news they didn't agree with they believe the provider has "sold out" to a special interest is a dangerous one.

Now, we can all believe that this is a random incident, and that the above story is an outlier, but I would call that dangerous. I believe that there are a lot more poeple out there, like this lady, who think much the same way. Though Blogs, and also mainstream media, continue to tilt further and further towards partisanship, i think we need to refocus, and make sure that we can get back to the origin of journalism: Reporting that favors no one and just provides facts so that the reader/viewer, not the reporter, decides what they think about the story and how to go from there.