Scandal Mongering and Media Politics, cont.
Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, the executive editor and managing editor of the New York Times, have resigned as a result of the Jayson Blair scandal. Conservative pundits and other opponents of the Times are crowing, of course, but I think they miss a larger point.

The real scandal isn't the Times' poor fact-checking, editorial favoritism, or its supposedly left-wing bias. The real scandal is how poorly the Times reports the news, in terms of reporting what actually is happening and, more importantly, why what's happening is happening.

And that's a scandal that encompasses all of the major media in this country, left, right, and center. What gets reported is so circumscribed, neutered, and watered-down that it's nearly useless. The scandal at the NYT is simply an extreme example of the overall mediocrity of all of our major media outlets.

Unfortunately, this will have the appearance of legitimizing those news outlets who have replaced reporting with ideology. Ideology doesn't require fact-checking; it requires faith, the opposite of critical thinking.