Politics

Change of plans

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I’m going to try and get in some political thoughts each day over the course of the week, but my current post is going to be done “when it’s done”, and I’m going to move on to other topics in the meantime. The college football schedule is likely going to be a Tuesday proposition again, and the rankings and lineal titles should easily be up early Monday.

Al Gore, I’m waiting for my reward.

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I have another Pascal’s Wager on the topic of global warming: Regardless of whether you think global warming is primarily man-made, the last thing we should be doing is contributing to it.
 
But if we’re going to correct global warming as fast as I think we need to, we sure as hell better make sure we do it right. So what is causing global warming, and what can be done to avert it?
 
Well, there are some handy charts and data in this report from the EPA – admittedly all the data is from 2002 and the US, but it does suggest that in that year, 83.4% of US greenhouse gas emissions were from carbon dioxide. Methane accounted for 8.6%, nitrous oxide 6.0%, and other stuff 2%. I’ll focus on the first three, in part since they affect the climate in different ways; the report claims that methane is more than 20 times as effective as carbon dioxide in trapping heat, and nitrous oxide is over 300 times as effective as CO2, but also measures everything in terms of CO2 equivalents. Just because methane is more effective at causing climate change than CO2 per mass doesn’t mean it actually outpaces CO2 and doesn’t mean we should all go vegetarian, wannabe hippies out there, and if you wanna debate that I’m happy to open a Truth Court case. Even if it was contributing more to global warming than CO2, meat production isn’t even the majority producer of methane and nitrous oxide – admittedly also produced in agriculture – would be an even worse problem. (Oh, and methane gets decayed after a few years anyway.)
 
I’m reducing CO2 to fossil fuel burning even though CO2 is emitted in other ways because fossil fuel burning made up 97% of gross CO2 emissions. (.9% came from iron and steel production, the closest competitor, and another .7% came from cement manufacture, totaling about 98.6%. Waste combustion, ammonia production, and lime manufacture were negligible parts of the emission of CO2 but I mention them because they nonetheless contrubuted more to global warming than other, non-CO2-producing factors I mention below. Gross emissions ignore carbon sinks.) Scroll down to Table ES-5; if I’m interpreting things right (let me know if I’m not, as I’m performing similar calculations throughout this post), about half of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning, as of 2002, comes from generating electricity, with half of the rest coming from transportation, and 59% of the rest after that coming from industrial operations. (Later, the report says 31% of CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning came from transportation, 17% from industry, and the rest from residential and commercial uses, including electricity in that count. 40% of CO2 from fossil fuel burning came from electricity.)
 
The leading causes of methane production were landfills (32.3%), natural gas systems (20.4%), “enteric fermentation” or animal digestion (19.1%), coal mining (8.7%), manure management (6.6%), wastewater treatment (4.8%), and petroleum systems (3.9%). (That totals 95.8%. “Stationary sources” – wood-burning stoves mainly – was the largest remaining source at 1.1% with rice cultivation not far behind.)
69.1% of nitrous oxide emissions came from “agricultural soil management”, with most of the rest (12.7%) coming from “mobile sources” (related to, say, motor vehicle internal combustion). Manure management (4.3%), nitric acid (4.0%), human sewage (3.8%), and “stationary sources” (3.4%) accounted for most of the remaining 18%. Other causes of climate change are primarily used as substitutes for chemicals that were eating away at the ozone layer, but we’re now finding the cure isn’t much better than the disease; the production of a byproduct of most air conditioning systems, and leaks from electrical transmission and distribution, also are problems.
 
So let’s see… throw them all together… fossil fuel consumption accounts for about 80.9% of the total… N2O from agricultural soil management accounts for 4.1% to bring us to an even 85%… let’s throw in the three leading methane producers, landfills (2.8%), natural gas (1.8%), and “enteric fermentation” (1.6%)… that brings us to 91.2%. Split up fossil fuel consumption into electricity, transportation, industrial fossil fuel burning, and residential/commercial fossil fuel burning (think natural gas or oil heating systems) and that’s eight things to take care of and if we’re lucky, we can make global warming something akin to a distant memory. We probably can’t reduce emissions from all those sources to zero, so let’s make it nine (which if I wanted to, I could split up into groups of three over the weekend) by throwing in “substitution of ozone-depleting substances” (1.3%). That makes up over 90 teragrams of CO2 equivalent, and nothing else accounts for more than 60 Tg CO2 equivalent, so it’s a good stopping place. We could get rid of up to 92.5% of current global warming contributions right here on Da Blog!
 
Fossil fuel consumption is the 800-pound gorilla in the room and we’ll get to that over the weekend, but for now, here are my thoughts on the others, for the sake of further reducing warming. Each section will start with some words on what the same EPA report has to say on the matter, followed by my own comments that boil down to whatever I could find out on Wikipedia and the report.
  • Soil management: Anytime nitrogen gets added to (or is even present in) soil, microbes convert at least some of it to N2O. So use of any fertilizer that contains nitrogen, “nitrogen-fixing crops and forages”, dumping “crop residues and[/or] sewage sludge” onto soil, “high-organic-content soils”, and yes, animal droppings could be contributing to global warming. I know this is one thing the vegetarians will seize on and claim the best way to be green is to go veggie, but honestly, given the importance of nitrogen in helping plants grow, I’m not sure there’s much that can be done here. I mean, to get the most headway, we’d not only have to reject meat, but beans, corn, and barley (although less beer might be a cause for celebration) as well, not to mention rejecting any nitrogen fertilizer when that contains the most potential for sustainability. But don’t worry, I’ll throw in a few more things we can look at to make up for it: iron/steel production, “mobile sources” of N2O, coal mining, cement manufacture, and methane from manure management.
  • Landfills: Specifically, organic wastes such as yard wastes and food, which the microbes get into again. Recycling seems to be pretty strong in the United States, but composting as an environmental policy is only starting to gain steam. Some places have separate services for the collection of yard wastes. Also, according to the EPA report, many landfills, including the largest ones, collect the gas emitted by their landfills and combust them – which produces carbon dioxide, but again, CO2 is, all else being equal, much less of a warmer than methane. Still, stopping more stuff from going into landfills is the best approach here.
  • Natural gas: …is mostly methane. Some methane is leaked from petroleum as well because oil and gas are often found near each other, but gas is the major source. I’m not quite sure how that changes the relationships between the fossil fuels in terms of what’s most polluting. Read on over the weekend to find out why this is just one beef I have with T. Boone Pickens.
  • “Enteric fermentation”: Mostly applies to ruminant animals, so when you’re eating pork or fowl, compared to eating beef you’re actually helping the environment! Dairy might be worth foregoing, but improvements in efficiency have allowed cattle populations to decline from 1995-at least 2002.
  • “Substitution of ozone-depleting substances”: This refers to chemicals called HFCs and PFCs, which are regulated by the Kyoto Protocol, being used as replacements for the last environmental panic, ozone-depleting CFCs, which were long used in refrigeration and firefighting. It’s important that as alternatives are developed that don’t harm the ozone layer or cause a greenhouse effect, they are spread to developing nations like China and India, and to the rest of the developing world, with all due speed.
  • Production of iron and steel: Here’s something I had to go to Google to learn more about. Here’s what I learned from here, from an International Energy Agency report: This is largely because a lot of coal tends to be used in the process, and improvements in efficiency can only continue to help. Some countries engage in “waste energy recovery” which can be used to generate power and help the overall fossil-fuel issue. This is another thing that will probably never significantly go away entirely.
  • “Mobile sources” of N2O: Fuel combustion can produce N2O in addition to CO2, which is one reason I don’t trust biofuels. This will be one of my criteria when I look at alternative fuels for our cars: low nitrogen content, not just low carbon content.
  • Coal mining: Methane was produced when coal was formed and has been trapped since, and coal mining releases it. A lot of it is required by law to be directed to the atmosphere or else it’ll blow up. Obviously this will become less of a problem as we reduce our use of coal, but methane recovery schemes are progressing in the meantime and surface mining has grown popular, if sometimes controversial.
  • Cement manufacture: CaCO3 (calcium carbonate) is heated and produces CaO and CO2, the former of which becomes part of the process of making cement. According to the IEA: China, which produces nearly half the world’s cement, has gotten better at preventing too much in the way of CO2 emissions. Use of substitutes for clinker (unground cement) could improve CO2 emissions.
  • Methane from manure management: Basically, this means don’t keep animal manure in an environment that doesn’t allow oxygen to reach it. “Solid waste management” and cooler, drier conditions are better for taking care of manure.

So that takes care of nearly 20% of global-warming-causing emissions. Over the weekend, we’ll look at the other 80%.

Many early voting registration deadlines are tomorrow, and trust me, it’s not really as hard as you think it is unless your state is actively trying to get you not to vote.

I hope this is anywhere near as good as what I was going for.

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If it seems like there isn’t anyone it seems like you can trust these days, that’s probably because there isn’t anyone it seems like you can trust these days.

Once upon a time, most Americans got their news from a handful of sources. There was your local paper (which probably got its national news from the Associated Press or similar), there were the network newscasts, maybe newsmagazines like Time or Newsweek, and that was the definition of what was going on in the world today. Today there are more places to get news than you can shake a stick at, from local news to talk radio to CNN to MSNBC to Fox News to blogs to other Internet forums to just people in the street. It’s a bewildering array of news choices.

Once upon a time, a few suits in New York determined what Americans would talk about each day. Until conservatives in the 1980’s started finding a liberal bias in what they reported, most people took this system for granted. Now there is no news monopoly, no news oligarchy. If you want to find out about voting irregularities in Ohio in 2004, you can. If you want to find out about the case against man-made climate change, you can. If you want to find out about the happenings of the Joe McLonewolf party whose only candidate is its namesake running for mayor of Nowheresville, Montana, you can.

But all this has made it a lot harder to at least have the idea that you really know what’s going on in the world, at least if you’re not setting out to be a partisan hack. Will you get your news from Fox, or from CNN? Will you get your news from the ABC station, or the CBS station? From Rush Limbaugh, or from NPR? From Huffington Post, or Drudge Report? From Talking Points Memo, or from Town Hall? Or will you drive yourself insane by trying to take something from all of the above? You don’t need to know every single detail of what’s going on in the world, at least theoretically, but the new conventional wisdom is that you can’t trust anyone to decide what’s important. Best to just take it all in, even though no one has that much time in the day.

But wait! What happens when different sources contradict each other? Frustratingly, you will rarely hear any of Talking Points Memo’s claims debunked at Town Hall (or vice versa), you’ll just see its very existence torn down. If someone says everything is going great in Iraq, and someone else says Iraq is going into the crapper, which is right, or how right is each claim? There are groups that publish exposes of inaccuracies, distortions, and omissions in the media, but a) they are ALWAYS partisan (and often more concerned with bashing their target than actually critically examining it and acknowledging where it might be right) and b) they focus exclusively on the mainstream media. These organizations are either lefty and complaining that the media is biased to the right, or righty and complaining that the media is biased to the left. Read the two in unison, and you get the sense that if the media is anything, it’s just plain incompetent.

Seriously, after years of being pilloried by the right til the cows come home and seeing conservatives drift over to Fox News and the like, why on Earth would the so-called “MSM” still exhibit left-wing bias?

It’s been said that having certain preconceived notions simply comes with the territory of being human, and that “bias” is inevitable. It’s also been said that in response to complaints of media bias, the media started publishing all claims no matter how specious and started presenting every debate as having two sides, even if it’s an evolution-v.-creationism debate where every last shred of evidence favors one side. Maybe people who watched ABC, NBC, and CBS were more likely to vote for Kerry because those three networks were in the tank for him; maybe it was because honestly looking at the facts of what was going on in the world would suggest Kerry was the right man to vote for. I wouldn’t be able to say if the media has reacted like that or if it’s to the extreme often suggested. Certainly cable news has essentially become a series of shoutfests driven by ideologues who draw immense cults of personality around them, embracing partisanship rather than getting rid of it.

I would suggest, though, that in addition to legitimizing illegitamate viewpoints, point-counterpoint debates may make it harder, not easier, to escape charges of bias, because if one side is seen as “winning”, obviously you didn’t make the other side strong enough. It couldn’t possibly be that if both sides were as strong as they could be the first side would be shown to be correct.

I do know for one thing that regardless of whether the mainstream media is biased or even incompetent at what it’s trying to do, it’s not entirely blameless. The media has been slow to react to the new proliferation of voices and in many cases only pays lip service to the Internet and its allies – launching web sites and “I-Reports” or whatever they call their user-generated video with one hand while snickering at nerds-in-the-basement-bloggers the rest of the time, feeling that they’re not really all that popular and beneath their notice. There really isn’t much of a reason why the “mainstream media” needs to be separate from the Internet, strictly speaking, why it shouldn’t cover the same stories and discuss the same issues that people online are debating, even if they sound like the deranged rantings of a crazy person. Especially if they sound like the deranged rantings of a crazy person, because thanks to the Internet, they won’t go away if you don’t lay the smack down.

The media’s quest for journalistic integrity and sourcing is in many ways something that’s sorely needed in the… non-mainstream media, for lack of a better term. If the blogosphere concerns themselves with correcting the MSM, maybe the MSM can concern itself with correcting the blogosphere. 2004-election-stealing conspiracy theorists, 9/11 truthers, (in 2004) Swift Boaters, and the like may want the media to look at their claims and publicize them, but I suspect that if the mainstream media actually did investigate them they would lose much of their popularity. And the media would do a more effective job at losing their accusations of bias than their recent efforts have been capable of. In fact here’s an idea: Let’s take the most far-out, extreme lefty you can think of, pair him up with the most far-out, extreme righty you can think of, and have them hash out any argument they may have, bombarding each other with points and evidence, until one side is throughly decimated and both sides become more sane.

It was thinking like this, several months ago, that led me to launch Truth Court (okay, maybe the actual announcement was only a month and a half ago) after reading True Enough by Farhad Manjoo, proposing an initiative that would look at every shred of evidence at both sides of a factual debate and attempt to come to a coherent worldview or conclusion, if not by me then by someone else. At one time I had been considering also starting a new feature, possibly after the elections, that would take all the hot posts from the top blogs on all sides of the spectrum and unite them under a single post so you could see what all sides were talking about, which might encourage cross-pollination of information. Right now, I’m thinking I’m not going to do that – and that Truth Court may be becoming less necessary – for two reasons. One, the election will almost assuredly change the paradigms on all sides of the political debate, especially if Obama wins.

Two, the media itself is starting to shake into a new paradigm, taking to heart some of the suggestions I made above. People in media are starting to realize that they threaten to be overtaken by blogs and “new media”, that the Internet and talk radio is not beneath their notice, and if they aren’t, they should soon. The Edwards scandal may have largely shaken the mainstream media out of what complacency they may have had, by creating an easy base for accusations of liberal bias and generally embarrasing the media for getting scooped by the National Enquirer and following a policy of “the blind leading the blind” thereafter. And more importantly, it gave a preview of what could have been the media’s future of irrelevancy and pariahhood.

That the media called around looking to fact-check and get to the bottom of Sarah Palin’s qualifications and McCain’s and Palin’s statements caught some commentators by surprise and got them wondering if the press is finally serving the American people in the way they always should have. The recent popularity of “fact-check” segments is also an encouraging sign as well. Quite a few people on the left see the Bush years as the dark years that, they hope, Obama will pull us out of. It’s somewhat fitting that the red state-blue state meme was started after the 2000 elections, because we may finally be pulling out of the dark years of barbaric partisanship as well.

Nothing else matters. This is the ONE THING you should vote on.

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What is the most important issue in this election?

Is it the war in Iraq? Health care for all? Illegal immigration? Surely it’s the economy, right?

Wrong.

The most important issue in this election, the one that cannot be ignored under any circumstances, is global warming and climate change.

I don’t care whether you believe in it or not, never mind that it’s been confirmed to hell and back and the real debate is whether man caused it. To me, it’s as simple as Pascal’s Wager. If you believe global warming exists, and it turns out it doesn’t, maybe you’ve spent some money on some things you didn’t strictly need. Not the first time humans have done that. Maybe you even benefit from making those preparations. You reduce our dependence on foreign oil and thus our dependence on countries that hate us. You could just plain improve the quality of life for the average American.

Particularly important in these times, you could stimulate the economy with the investment. I don’t want to hear Republicans whining to me about how we should “let the market decide” and “government interference is bad” and about how if we wanted solar and wind, the market would have made us all convert a long time ago. Horseshit. Coal and oil have been subsidized for years; a true “free-market” Republican would repeal those subsidies today, but of course, they won’t. Any economist will tell you that when the economy gets tough, the best way to bring it out of the doldrums is to spend government money on investment, not tax cuts, because government investments create jobs and the government not only spends money on the people, it also directly buys from American companies who pass on the money they make to their employees.

But if you decide global warming doesn’t exist and you don’t need to do anything? And it turns out it does? Then… then you’re screwed. Here‘s just a short summary of what could happen: more extreme weather conditions on both ends of the spectrum (don’t you dare get the snowstorm of the century and say “what global warming?”), tropical regions (which means mostly third world countries) becoming desert and formerly fridgid climates becoming the world’s new breadbasket, rising sea levels resulting in catastrophe for coastal cities and maybe even wiping out small, low-lying islands, declining oxygen in the world’s oceans causing a complete breakdown in the global ecosystem, droughts galore and increased salt penetration into groundwater, diseases, all leading to more conflicts around the globe like what’s going on in Darfur, maybe even the release of methane from the world’s oceans and from Siberia potentially contributing further to global warming until the whole planet essentially becomes Venus. Oh, and it could mean more illegal immigrants crossing our border, more Iraq conflicts, and universal healthcare suddenly seeming like a quaint utopian goal.

You invest in stopping global warming, you help bring the economy out of what now looks like inevitable if not in-progress recession – you don’t invest in stopping global warming, and the recession may never end. Some studies suggest we may pass a “tipping point” at which warming would become unstoppable within five to ten years – if we’re not threatening to pass it already!

Wake up, world! There is no such thing as too much climate impact mitigation too fast! Let’s quit bickering between parties and nations and get to work! Yes, let’s help China move off coal now, and let’s reduce our own impact on climate change, and let’s have Europe and all the other nations of the world reduce their own impacts on climate change as well! As a planet and as a species, we either drop everything right damn now and put every last one of our efforts towards moving to a clean energy future or we might as well commit global suicide – consequences be damned because no matter what the consequences may be, the impact of global warming could be and will be worse!

What we need is a president that will declare war on global warming, akin to the war on poverty, but with the same fervor and sense of national sacrifice that we brought to World War freakin’ Two! We need a president willing to drop everything and get to work, and we need to get it THIS election! Unfortunately, actually saying that while still a candidate is a good way to LOSE an election, but all I want to hear is a sort of intimation, through low-level channels, not even sufficient to leak out to the general public, but enough to let people like me know that a candidate knows the scope of the problem and that they are willing to declare all-out war on global warming, to an extent even Al Gore would be impressed by.

The Importance of Voting

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This is very important to me. I know all ten of you reading the strip probably aren’t reading it for this sort of thing, and most webcomiceers would probably say go ahead and leave if you don’t like it, but if you yourself are wondering, “Why would I want to vote?” – and even if you’re not – I implore you to stick around. Not only because I want the readers for my own ego, but because I feel very strongly about this and I feel everyone I’m trying to appeal to needs to read this.

I understand why you might not think it’s worth it to vote. Writing this, I found myself questioning my own desire to vote. It’s been suggested, in an academic setting, that the impact of voting is so infinitesimal that, if the cost of voting is anything at all, it’s not worth it to vote. Of course if no one votes, the system breaks down – not to mention there’s suddenly a reason to vote again, because your vote suddenly becomes super-decisive. That remains the case for the first four or five votes before the value of your vote starts sinking back down to “why bother?” levels. You can see why even a member of the hundred-strong United States Senate might wonder why he’d bother to show up for all but the most narrow, party-line votes. (Of course, his votes are public so there’s at least a little bit of incentive there.)

But over the next few weeks, leading up to the election, I aim to demonstrate why you – especially if you’re in my demographic and age group – SHOULD vote, and hopefully deconstruct every reason you might have NOT to vote. That’s the goal; if anyone has anything to add, any arguments I missed, they can e-mail me at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com. You can also leave a comment (possibly on this post) if you have any suggestions fo the series. If, after reading this entire series, you’re still not convinced of the effiacy of voting, you can leave a comment as well and I’ll aim to take care of any concerns you may have.

Moving on…

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Sports Watcher later today. I hope everyone reading Da Blog or even Sandsday watches the debate tonight. Don’t worry, McCain will show up. Apparently some of the people in the room trying to hash out that bailout effectively told him, “You know, why don’t you just go off to that debate and we’ll work things out on our own. Seriously, go. Now.”

Meanwhile, my bank just failed!

Newsbusters v. Kilpatrick et al: Part II of the Truth Court announcement

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After subscribing to Media Matters and Newsbusters, I’ve realized – or rather, re-realized – an insight that may come across as novel.

The battle over media bias has three sides, not two: conservatives, liberals, and the media itself.

The problem is, the two political sides merely conflate the media with the other side, and see no difference between them. Conservatives simply see the media as part of the vast left-wing conspiracy, and liberals see the media as simply being an arm of the right. But the media is worse: it doesn’t see itself as part of the battle at all, or rather, it sees the battle as an altogether different battle with “new media”, with bloggers and the Internet, and ignores some of the reasons why people may not be following them onto their own new media platforms. The media goes after the wrong enemy without realizing that many of the accusations of bias are within its own pages – hardly “new media”. Because the media doesn’t fight back against the actual charges and goes after a strawman instead, someone reading Media Matters and Newsbusters dispassionately might be led to believe that the media isn’t tinted to the left, right, or balanced; it’s just incompetent.

I should add that in order to truly reach that conclusion, you’d have to add another liberal blog, because Media Matters only goes after specific instances of “conservative misinformation”, while Newsbusters attacks at any perceived slight, no matter how minor. For example, Newsbusters has been attacking the MSM’s coverage of Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s troubles for allegedly not labeling him as a Democrat, when they would be so quick to label him if he was a Republican! Hmm, could that have something to do with the mayor of Detroit being an officially nonpartisan position? Could it be that if they had called him, say, “Detroit’s Democratic mayor”, as Fox News did, they would actually be inaccurate and would come in for an even heavier pillorying from the left? Newsbusters itself has found enough exceptions that it makes me wonder if the rare cases of being quick to label Republicans as such that they cite are themselves exceptions… though I’d need more information to verify that for certain.

Farhad Manjoo (of True Enough fame, remember) appears to be one of the few to recognize that the left and the right are really putting forth two sides of the same coin. One of the studies he cites in True Enough (page 154) concerns an incident in Lebanon in 1982 and the reaction to news reports on the incident by students at Stanford – one pro-Israel, one pro-Arab, and one neutral group. Predictably, the partisan groups believed the news was biased against them and towards the other side, likely to turn viewers against their own side. What did the neutral group think? Funnily enough, they didn’t see any bias one way or the other. It would seem to be evidence that, at the very least, the news could in fact be perfectly fair and balanced.

But it’s unlikely to convince partisans in the United States who would just see it as evidence that the bias in the news is “subtle”, even subliminal. Even if the neutral group didn’t see bias, didn’t even claim to favor one side or the other more than before, that’s just because the media tries to hide its bias because they know people want a fair and balanced account. In reality, the media is sowing the seeds so that when people hear something closer to the truth, closer to what the partisans know is true, they will dismiss it because “well, what I heard on the news was…” Certainly the fact that Newsbusters is on the lookout for such minutiae as whether a politician’s party is identified – which would be, if a crime, one of omission – would seem to support this idea.

But consider that conservatives have been hammering the media for having a liberal bias for decades. If people are abandoning the MSM for blogs because of all the bias they see in it (a claim often voiced in Newsbusters’ comments), if polls show that media bias is a bigger problem than worship of the almighty dollar in campaigns, if operations like Media Matters and Newsbusters exist to call them on any perceived slight the instant they show one and shame them for thousands, maybe even millions, of readers to see, why, the media would be absolutely foolish to show any bias whatsoever. There should be less media bias than at any time in history.

But not only do Media Matters and Newsbusters still have plenty of targets, the exact opposite has happened: The mainstream media has become more biased, even blatantly so. Fox News is the most obvious example (and it’s telling that Newsbusters sometimes calls Fox “fair and balanced” with a straight face), but CNN (ex. Lou Dobbs Tonight) and MSNBC (ex. Countdown with Keith Olbermann) have more than their fair share of partisan screeds disguised as news too. Even the seemingly balanced shows on cable news tend to be debatefests between pundits and/or party surrogates. (As I’ll explain in a later post, it’s possible that if anything, these debatefests are too tame, as though their contestants were politicians running for office and chasing the center. Give me a strong, popular extreme righty against a strong, popular extreme lefty anytime.) Perhaps this trend – that to avoid charges of bias, the media has made them come true – suggests that the problem was never that the media wasn’t balanced, but that it was too balanced. (That said, the fact that liberals only recently have taken up the media bias cant may suggest that the media was once at least slightly tinted to the left. Or it could indicate, as the title of Arianna Huffington’s book suggests, that “Right is Wrong”.)

But trying to be balanced to everyone is too much work. Say a study comes out that says a bunch of stuff about offshore drilling but doesn’t come out one way or the other. But if you don’t report on the study, the next time you do a story about drilling Newsbusters will hammer you for not reporting on the study that proves how far we could drive down oil prices and declare our oil independence by drilling (ignoring that the report shows Republicans arguing exactly that, albeit not citing the study). So you report on the study, only to find Media Matters accusing you of ignoring that the same study shows drilling would actually do nothing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and would cause three species of marine life to become extinct. If you’d said the study had said that, Newsbusters would accuse you of purposely misrepresenting the study, so you have to present both the liberal conclusion and the conservative conclusion. And now both sides are accusing you of putting forth a partisan spin on the study “uncritically”…

What I’d like to see, then, is a blog defending the media from accusations of bias from both sides, enough of an insider to be privy to the discussions deciding what gets printed and how, but not so far inside the MSM that (s)he would be subject to some of its quirks like, say, not talking about the John Edwards scandal. The media doesn’t need to become what the news would look like if partisans ran it. It doesn’t need to see the enemy as this amorphous “new media” that’s just out to destroy it. We don’t even need to see a clear distinction between old and new media, and the fact that bastions of old media like the Los Angeles Times and ESPN have started sponsoring forays into blogging is evidence of that. It just needs people to credibly say, “no. We’re right, you’re wrong, and here’s why.” It needs someone to explain to Newsbusters why it won’t identify Kwame Kilpatrick as a Democrat (or why it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t), to Media Matters why it won’t report how closely John McCain has followed President Bush, to the right why it didn’t pursue the John Edwards story (and why it did pursue the affairs of Republicans – and even if more Republican infidelities are reported than Democratic ones, that may have more to do with the fact that Republicans are the party of “family values” than with any liberal bias), and to the left why it didn’t look more critically at the case for war in Iraq, and to sit through both sides’ rebuttals and patiently counter-rebut those.

Maybe no one in the mainstream media wants to put up a blog responding to the accusations of partisans. And maybe they don’t have to. Barring that, I’d like to see someone put up a site that employed both liberals and conservatives looking for bias from the mainstream media – but also looking for inaccuracies and shortcomings and distortions from Media Matters and Newsbusters and even its own analysts, and not just those but the entire conservative and liberal blogosphere. Its slogan could be “Keeping the media honest… and the people who watch them.” Or something like that. If blogs are the new place to get the news, surely they need a Media Matters or Newsbusters just as much as the mainstream media does. If I’m right, and the media itself is just as much a side in the debate as the left and the right, then it logically follows that it needs its own Media Matters or Newsbusters to keep the other two sides in check.

Or would that just be accused of being just as biased as the mainstream media itself? Newsbusters’ apparent decision to write off any explanation the mainstream media give for ignoring the Edwards story as “making excuses” suggests it may be. Still, if the consequenses otherwise are the “death” of the mainstream media made very real, replaced by a bunch of partisan outlets not speaking to one another, perhaps all sides would be better for a serious dialogue. Or rather, trialogue?