Death Of Journalism: Elites Manipulating Media Creates Phony Reality (video and pictures)

f all the sins against the craft of journalism, the one I find the most mortal is the acceptance by journalists as axiomatic the notion that “Perception is reality.” This is a fine thing for ad men, and for consultants, and for the other witches and warlocks that make up the tangle of fauna infesting our political system. It is death to actual journalism. Perception is perception and reality is reality and, if they don’t match up, then it is the job of journalism not to accept the perception as the reality, but to hammer home the reality until the perception conforms to this. If you want to see someone who has tumbled all the way down the rabbit hole on this issue, check out the quotes collected here at Salon from The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza.

After it was pointed out to Cillizza that his piece got a number of things wrong (the CBO said Obamacare would reduce workforce participation by the equivalent of 2 million workers, not that it would cost 2 million jobs) he nonetheless stuck to his original analysis. “The CBO report means political trouble for Democrats this fall,” Cillizza wrote the following day, arguing that the guts of the matter are secondary to how people perceive the law. “My job is to assess not the rightness of each argument but to deal in the real world of campaign politics in which perception often (if not always) trumps reality. I deal in the world as voters believe it is, not as I (or anyone else) thinks it should be. And, I’m far from the only one.”

So it is the journalist’s job to accept that which sells, no matter how dishonest it is, simply because it is sold well? Truth, as someone wrote in a book once, is defined as that which enough people believe? Dear Jesus, what a mess. Note to my old boss Marty Baron: congratulations on yet another gutsy Pulitzer on yet another risky story. (In his first year at The Boston Globe, Baron went after the Catholic Church, and won. This past year, his first at the Post, he went after the NSA, and won. Say what you will about him, the man does not aim small.) Now, please take young Mr. Cillizza in hand before he hurts himself badly.

As a matter of fact, the Affordable Care Act is a case study in the damage that adopting this axiom can do. There was yet another Congressional Budget Office report released yesterday that was yet again chock-full of yet more good news about the Act’s implementation. The Affordable Care Act is making health-care more, well, affordable. MOREHERE