Michael Grunwald at Swampland:

If the debt-limit debate had anything to do with reality, every story about it would include a few basic facts. Starting with: President Obama inherited a $1.2 trillion budget deficit. And: Republican leaders supported the tax cuts and wars that (along with the recession, another pre-Obama phenomenon) created that deficit. Also: Republicans engineered this crisis by attaching unprecedented ideological demands to a routine measure allowing the U.S. to pay its bills. Finally, Obama and the Democrats keep meeting those demands—for spending cuts, then for more spending cuts, and even for nothing but spending cuts—but Republicans keep holding out for more.

These are verifiable facts, not opinions. But since they aren’t new facts, and re-reporting them would make “GOP claims” about the crisis look, um, non-factual, they’re rarely mentioned, except as “Democratic claims.” This is a real problem for journalism in an era where—now this is an opinion—one of the major parties has abandoned its grip on reality. I understand why objective reporters aren’t encouraged to contradict political lies with historical truths, but this hostage drama is one of the prices of our era of amnesia.

He’s absolutely right on the facts, but I don’t think it’s journalistic amnesia, I think it’s something else. I think journalists have forgotten that while there may indeed be two sides to every story, usually the preponderance of facts weighs more heavily toward one side than the other. Apparently, though, there’s an unwritten part of today’s journalistic ethos which says it’s bad form to point that out. I can imagine the following dialogue in a meeting between editor and reporter:

Editor: Okay, you’ve double-sourced all your material, right?

Reporter: Yup.

Editor: But you’re calling Politician X and his party liars.

Reporter: On these issues, they are.

Editor: But you can’t say that! It violates our objectivity standards!

Reporter: Since when is it biased to show that one side’s not telling the truth?

Editor: Not only is it not good form to do that, we’ll be called “liberal” if we report the facts that way. We can’t have that. No one will ever take us seriously again.

Reporter: But . . .

Editor: Here, change your copy to lead with “There are serious disagreements between Republicans and Democrats on these issues,” and take it from there.

Reporter: But what about all these expert opinions and analyses I’ve collected proving that one side is correct and one side is wrong?

Editor: We’ll put ’em in a sidebar. Nobody likes numbers anyway.