A few days ago my friend Fred Gooltz wrote about the great steps media outlets are going to appear balanced and in so doing fail miserably to report fact in politics.

Across town at the Old Gray Lady, the funniest headlines are the ones that try the hardest to not be criticized as liberal. The New York Times is apparently scared of being called liberal. How else to explain this headline:

Democrats See Risk and Reward if Party Sweeps

Holy. Slippery. Fuck. What!?

The point of a political parties is to win elections. This year, Democrats are going to win the big elections. To report such is not liberal. It is fact.

To feign an argument that a win for the Democrats is somehow a bad thing is so stupid that when the Philadelphia Phillies win the World Series on wednesday, and when there isn’t a pearl -clutching headline in the Times to the effect that:

Phillies Win, Worry Sinks In

or

Phillies Win, Will Phillies Lose?

or

Phillies Win, Lose

There’s a lot of this sort of nonsense going around and we’ll only see more of it into the election and in the immediate aftermath.

Chris Bowers of Open Left identified even more of this media concern trolling, both in terms of the Times’ article Fred posted about and bold pronouncements of risk for Obama purchasing 30 minutes of national tv time.

Look, the raison d’etre electorally focused political party is to win as many elections as possible. To argue that winning more seats is somehow a negative for any political party is exactly as stupid as arguing that it is bad for a sports team to win a championship. To even attempt an argument that winning an election is bad for a party is to enter the final level of concern troll mastery, where you begin to take on a light glow. …

Arguing that tonight’s commercial could hurt Obama is akin to arguing that campaigning at all could hurt Obama. It doesn’t quite give you the concern troll mastery glow, but it does mean you have almost achieved that level.

What has to be recognized in this is that this sort of coverage doesn’t stop after the election. Every positive action Obama and the Democratic majority take will be met in the press by some level of concern trolling about the potential risks associated with it. The source of these concern troll narratives will be the Republican Party, conservative business lobbies, and Blue Dog Democrats who will seek to undermine the progressive parts of Obama’s agenda.

It’s going to be a rough ride, folks, and we need to prepare for previously unimagined levels of stupidity from the punditocracy.

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