NP: Allan Holdsworth, Metal Fatigue

Lots of talk about last week's "win" for Jon Stewart over Sean Hannity and Fox News over their self-aggrandizing use of different footage to make a Washington rally look bigger than it actually was.

The Washington Monthly piece does the obligatory hand-wringing about the media, but I think there's a bigger lesson to be learned here. Remember that Time.com online survey that declared Jon Stewart the "most trusted news anchor on television"? This is why. Fox reflexively dismisses whatever the left says as wrong. MSNBC -- at least the opinion shows -- reflexively dismisses whatever the right says as wrong. Jon Stewart actually shows why they're wrong, or hypocritical, or just clinically insane.

My biggest problem with politics and political punditry is that, in the age of soundbites, no one ever shows their work. I have no idea if this is out of pure laziness, ideology, or a tacit agreement between parties that politics is about saying one thing with 100% conviction at one point in time and then saying the opposite thing with equal conviction later. And the worst part is that a large part of the non-insider news network audience simply accepts it. If you were to confront someone who watches Fox News and point out the rally footage incident, they will say that Hannity said it was an accident, and that's the end of it. And the rest of us assume he's full of it, even without expert knowledge of how unlikely such an "accident" might be.

I don't have a solution, other than the obvious notion that any news organization that wants to gain credibility in such a fucked-up industry should give an opinion, and then support it with actual evidence. Also, when someone says they can completely understand the motivations of someone doing something when they have no real knowledge of that person, that's not evidence. That opinion based out of your own ideology and doesn't count.