Matt Yglesias

Fair and Balanced

Yesterday, Faiz Shakir flagged an LA Times inquiry into the massive dishonesty of Rush Limbaugh. The piece, by James Rainey, is quite strong but I didn’t like the lede:

You have to give Rush Limbaugh a perverse kind of credit. At least when he is demonizing Barack Obama, fabricating Obama policies, blaming Obama for single-handedly causing the recession and the stock market crash, he doesn’t pretend to be fair.

What Limbaugh doesn’t pretend to do is to be even-handed. His show is clear where it stands, on the conservative side. This blog, similarly, doesn’t apologize that it’s fighting for progressive policies and ideas. But at the same time, I try to be fair. I’m not going to peddle a damaging story about a person whose policy ideas I disagree with if I think the story is false. I’m not going to say Jonah Goldberg is secretly a fascist. I’m not going to claim that John Boehner wants to feed atheists to lions. That would be unfair. The whole point of Rainey’s article is that Limbaugh isn’t just right-wing — he’s inaccurate and dishonest. But he certainly does pretend that he’s both honest and accurate. He’s pretending to be fair. He just isn’t.