Malinformed

If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you do read the newspaper, you're misinformed.

- Mark Twain

I'm not worried about being misinformed. The thought that I'm being actively malinformed is what makes me so suspicious of the media.

There's a difference, of intent. Bernie Madoff committed malfeasance; he knowingly defrauded his investors. Meaghan Cheung committed misfeasance; her department at the SEC was incompetent in their investigation of Madoff, but she didn't mean to drop the ball.

David Brooks seems to have stepped into a big ol' pile of Class Warfare. Pretty smelly stuff, too:

What Brooks, with his touching faith in "pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise" doesn't want to talk about, of course, is just how badly the Ivy League class has failed over the past couple of decades. All those rows of degrees from Harvard didn't keep a pack of Brooksian elites--mostly members of the Democratic Party--from running Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac straight into the toilet, and taking the private economy with them. Hiring out of the Ivies also didn't save Lehman Brothers or AIG from doing remarkably stupid things with other people's money.

Collier properly takes him to the woodshed and thrashes him soundly, so I won't bother. What I am interested in is what's published in the papers, and whether it's intentionally or unintentionally misleading.

I'm actually willing to cut Brooks some slack on this particular rant of his. He no doubt goes to all sorts of Manhattan dinner parties with the bankers who got us into the current mess, and possibly has friendships with some. It's simply human nature to not look too closely if what you'd see would tend to embarrass a friend. Put that one down to misinformed.

But there's a whole set of topics you see in Brook's paper where the only logical explanation is that the writer is so offended by the subject that their world view insists on suppressing evidence that contradicts the Newsroom Group Think. How the media covered Obama until the spring of last year is one example. How the media covers Sarah Palin to this day is another. Joe the Plummer. Gun control. Climate Change. The list goes on and on.

Misinformation is addressed differently than malinformation. A journalist who is misinformed but honest can be reasoned with, and might even print a correction. The honest journalist will want to learn when he's wrong.

But David Brooks doesn't want to learn where he's wrong about Gun Control, or Climate Change, or Sarah Palin. Neither does the rest of the New York Times' newsroom, or the dinner party buddies. Fair enough: he's entitled to his opinion.

As am I, when I say that I no longer follow the media because I think that the source is poisoned. Not just wrong, or incompetent - malicious. Actually, I often do follow the media, under the assumption that reality is reliably 180° from their thesis. This quite frankly is a weakness, because it's likely that much of what they publish about, say, Sarah Palin is actually correct. However, I recognize that their motivation is to see her (and those like her) defeated, and there's no easy way to sort the truth from the drek (Wassilla rape kits). And so I discount basically everything they say about her.

So, how do you solve a problem like David? The market is taking care of that, as people like me decide not to be malinformed anymore.
This is a shame, and a danger to the Republic. We need an honest media, and a population that trusts it. We have neither.

UPDATE 6 January 2010 18:38: Good example of press bias on display here. And here. And that's just today.