It occurred to me that I made a New Year’s resolution to offer more constructive suggestions in the new year. It’s hard not to complain these days, but at least we can offer some suggestions in the meantime. I talked about concentric circles yesterday without offering any constructive ideas to fix that. That’s on me. I need to do better.

Our mainstream media also needs to do better. They are caught up into a both sides narrative where they feel the need to give exposure to all points of view. In normal circumstances that seems okay. Furthermore, the idea of covering the horse race nature of this thing makes sense. It sells ad space. It sells newspapers. It gets subscriptions to the subscription only services. There is a reason why Steve Kornacki is a thing.

When we were going through journalism school, one of the things they taught us was that it was the journalist’s job to call balls and strikes. Somehow that evolved into making sure there were as many balls as there were strikes. We had an equal number of walks as strikeouts. That has been the case whether it was Greg Maddux on the bump or Nuke Laloosh (from Bull Durham).

Someone came up with another analogy that made more sense. Let’s say that it is pouring rain outside. It makes no sense to run a story where you have one expert saying it’s raining and another ”expert” saying it’s not raining. Look outside. You can see it’s raining, so why in the hell are we quoting some jamoke saying that it isn’t raining? Why do we need to both sides objective reality?

What that does is allow people to believe that objective reality isn’t all that objective. In a free society it is difficult to do anything about right wing media. That toothpaste is out of the tube, but this falls into another false narrative. People just naturally assume that both sides do it. Left wing media may distort the importance of things. They are certainly guilty of overhyping certain stories and ramping up the hysteria, but they generally don’t make shit up.

It’s about pushing back. Both sides don’t operate the same way. One side lies and the other side doesn’t. Period. End of discussion. Then, the mainstream media simply reports what is actually going on. The economy is doing well. Report it. Immigration is not nearly as bad as what it seems. Report it. The so-called crime riddled cities really aren’t all that crime riddled. Report it. Unfortunately, both sidesing this thing just isn’t creating an informed public.

Again, you aren’t reaching everyone. You have a segment of the population watching a steady diet of Fox News, OANN, and Newsmax. They might be reading Breitbart on the interwebs. There is no way you can watch a steady diet of that stuff and come away informed. Still, you can inform everyone else. You can at least allow them to have access to accurate information. If the right isn’t producing truth or building arguments on facts then don’t give them a lifeline. If they aren’t participating in substantive debate then they don’t get coverage. There’s only one serious party right now and they are the only one worthy of coverage.