Politics, reality, and journalism, and why those three never meet

There’s been at least a little talk about political journalism and its separation from reality recently. There’s even been a little analysis of that contention. Both of the pieces I’ve mentioned admirably dissect a growing problem in American journalism, however they are both largely written with journalists (or news junkies) in mind. That in itself is more than a little unsettling for me.

To be fair, I admit to going over the top in naming this post, because it isn’t absolutely true – thankfully. However, it is difficult to find hard political journalism out there these days that has a firm grasp on reality. I suspect that the observations I mentioned above focused on the tea party movement primarily because that is the issue du jour – there is quite a bit of material out there on it. But if you’re going to start talking about the unreality of political journalism in America today, perhaps you should point out the elephant in the room – racism.

To be sure, the tea party movement has left us with many opportunities to explore the issue of racism. Why it hasn’t been done in earnest falls under what I’ve come to call a journalistic taboo. At best, it would open the proverbial can of worms President Carter broke the seal on when he suggested that America wasn’t ready for Obama in the White House. In a practical sense, it would make it more difficult for the administration to get anything done, since it could effectively justify civil rights organizations calling out the President to be their anointed leader in their cause. But all of that is assuming that journalists would approach it in the context of Obama the man, as opposed to focusing on the nature of racism in America in general.

And there, I’ve said it. There is racism in America. It is an ugly truth, and reality of the situation is that the perpetrators of it are being given a pass on it by journalists. That is a generalization, and bluntly, this is focused on the rule as opposed to the exceptions. When I say this, I mean that out of the countless times that the mainstream press has covered racist sentiments being paraded about by tea partiers, it has been little more than an aside – it has been rare when these individuals have been brought to task for these actions, called racist, or had to face rebuttals from civil rights leaders because the journalists bothered to make the calls to get those statements.

Ironically enough, I ended up thinking on this purely because I was accused of appearing like a Dixiecratic jingoist on Twitter. To summarize the context, since it involved quite a few posts from multiple users, @Shoq (a progressive politics Twitter icon for those of you that don’t know) was encouraging posts on GOP campaign slogans. Several racist posts appeared in the Twitterstream, and I reposted one to a local political journalist because he had pointed out that Jay-Z had been engaged in some racist activities of his own, against whites. The entire situation was an exercise in bad political humor, but was obviously taken rather seriously by at least one person.

At first, I started thinking twice about my “image” on Twitter, but my thoughts quickly shifted to the lack of reality in political journalism. While many of the posts that suggested new campaign slogans for the GOP were in bad taste, they were real. There was no tap-dancing around the issue of racism. They were what I have no doubt many journalists wish they could say when faced with the blatant hatred they see daily from many in the political scene. Some of the denial of reality in journalism today is probably from journalists, and some of it may be the result of editorial policies that cater to advertisers. Regardless of the source, the bottom line is that we’ve moved to the point where “news”, particularly where politics is concerned, is not about being neutral and reporting what is real. If the people want reality, they need to look beyond the headlines – even to places like Twitter and the blogosphere. But that’s not news either.