Why the Lies Get Reported

Ezra has a very solid analysis of how and why the nonsensical lies about health care get such play in the media.

The problem isn't in the particulars. It's in the profession. Namely, it's in the competitive pressures to drift toward sensationalism and hot stories. A smear like "death panels" emerges and catches fire because it's fundamentally interesting. You could write a great thriller, or film a poignant drama, about death panels. Not so about health insurance exchanges. That said, the New York Times would probably never mention the lie if given the opportunity. But after it hits talk radio and explodes onto cable news and rips through the blogosphere, it stops being a lie and begins being a story. And though you can refuse to cover a lie, you can't refuse to cover a story. Nor is it even obvious you should. After all, if you don't correct the record, who will?

The problem is that "The Media" is a big beast with a lot of component parts. Some of those parts are respectable and sober. Others aren't. But if the legs run somewhere, the head follows whether it wants to or not. That would be fine if the head commanded the legs. But it's generally the other way around.

The central conflict of interest in the media is that the same institution that's supposed to follow the conversation is also responsible for creating the conversation. That contradiction can be elided so long as everyone in the game is playing by the same rules. And for a brief period, when the "objective" institutions were the only major outlets, that worked out fine.

But with the rise of partisan and sensationalizing mediums like talk radio and cable news and the blogosphere, half of the outlets are now consciously creating the conversation that the other half are following. But the objective institutions haven't responded to this in any obvious way. They just get caught following a manipulated conversation, and so being part of the manipulation, part of the machine that focuses on cynical lies like the death panels rather than policy specifics like the exchanges. That's not the fault of an individual reporter, though. It's structural, and it requires a structural response.