There is an illuminating little spat going on between Jeff Cohen, a former producer for MSNBC and one of the founders of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), the lefty media site and Jonah Goldberg, the syndicated right-wing columnist. (Goldberg’s mother is Lucianne Goldberg, the arch-conservative who convinced Linda Tripp there was money to be made in doing her patriotic duty by taping her “its just us girls” chats with Monica Lewinsky. The Republic owes the Goldbergs an immense debt.)
There is no doubt that Goldberg bet $1000 that Iraq would not fall into a civil war, would have a viable constitution and that in two years time a majority of Iraqis and Americans would agree the war was worth it. There is also no doubt that Goldberg, like Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard (and thousands of hours of cable news air time) and so many other pundit-hawks have been stunningly wrong about almost everything they’ve ever said about Iraq. But that never puts a dent in their standing with “balance”-driven mainstream media.
And, sadly, there is no doubt whatsoever that mainstream newspapers like our Star Tribune will continue running Goldberg’s stuff out of a misplaced sense of balance, I guess. You know, a little Molly Ivins (RIP), who was accurate on damned near everything she said, counterbalanced by the Jonah Goldbergs of the pundit-sphere, reliably wrong about everything that escapes their brain.
But all that withstanding, by refusing to pay on his bet, Goldberg looks about as no-class as that Chicago Bears player who stiffed the cable access schlub on the training camp promise to get the guy tickets if the Bears made the Super Bowl. The way the modern media game is SUPPOSED to go is: You shoot your mouth off and win, and your publicist gets to hype it all over the planet. You’re a hero for 15 seconds. But … if you shoot your mouth off and lose, you pay up, make a joke and insist you’ll get even tomorrow … but YOU PAY UP.
If you don’t pay up and admit defeat/error like a man, you get righteously hounded — “tortured” isn’t too cruel a word — in the shiny, bright accountability chamber of the world wide web.
Goldberg is of course a putz. The kind of guy who is probably always in the john when the check comes. But what’s the Tribune Syndicate’s excuse for not paying the $1000 for him? Cohen’s description of the Tribune vulture-culture is spot on. They’ve got huge credibility problems everywhere they look. $1000 to a charity could buy a few hundred bytes of good will.
But the larger question is, “What responsible purpose are you — mainstream media institution — serving by continuing to run alleged ‘think pieces’ by people whose thinking has been proven to be consistently flawed and erroneous? ‘Both sides of the debate’, is one weak excuse, and sure, everyone is wrong occasionally. But don’t you have a higher responsibility to the truth than continuing to run stuff that the judgment of time has rendered so conclusively foul?”
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