End to He Said/She Said in Sight

The mainstream media is actually reporting today that it may be forced to abandon the balanced He Said/She Said style of journalism that has characterized its coverage of the country’s most pressing debates over the last several decades.

Explained the National Press Club’s Teri Richards, “It’s just not fair any longer to ask reporters to keep using the He Said/She Said method of maintaining the pretense that the right’s positions on the issues have anywhere near the same merit as the left’s.

“I mean maybe a generation ago that approach was viable. But good lord, after 30-plus years of nonstop neoliberal and neoconservative nonsense the right’s now so demonstrably wrong on so many issues that who could blame the Mainstream Media Reporter’s Guild for launching a Labor Relations Board complaint, if not a class action suit, against the corporate media’s play-callers for making everybody feel like a VW bug full of clowns?”

Added Wayne Mitchell from the American Society of News Editors, “It’s a big joke. She says waterboarding is and always has been torture and He says John Yoo and Jay Bybee. She says Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 and He says 9/11. She says our long, well-documented history of heaping indignities and hypocrisy and death upon the Muslim world may have something to do with their attitude toward us and He won’t stop saying they hate us for our freedoms.

“The right’s just not giving us anything to work with anymore. Seriously. She says when we haven’t regulated the fat cats they have screwed us blue every single time since time immemorial and He says just leave everything to the magic hand of the unfettered free market. She says rich people never ever willingly let money trickle down and He screams socialism. She says corporations are not people and He says Antonin Scalia for god sake. She says it’s not democratic or even American to suppress the votes of poor people and minorities and He says Mickey Mouse once voted in an election in Florida.”

“I mean, please. Come on. She says over 40,000 people per year were dying only because they couldn’t afford or even acquire health insurance, and this is to say nothing of all the people going bankrupt for the same reasons, and He’s still saying Barack Hussein Obama wants to kill your grandma.”

Added Ms. Richards from the National Press Club, “Certainly there are large swaths of the American Mainstream Media’s audience who are still perfectly mollified by this old approach to perpetuating the myth that there are two equal sides in the nation’s debates. But the reporters asked to implement this outdated approach have simply reached their limit.”

By way of illustrating this pretty pass the world of American journalism has come to, one mainstream media reporter asked this Shining City Gazette reporter, “How would you like the double whammy of finding yourself reporting on the record-breaking low self-esteem you and all your college-educated fellow reporters are feeling for half siding all the time with the unbelievable dumbshit He in the He Said/She Said scenario?”

“There’s hope, though,” says the American Press Institute’s Rachel May. “Don’t believe reflexive mainstream media reports that say He said the He Said/She Said style of American journalism is here to stay after She said its days are numbered.

“The truth is that we’re moving even as we speak to what’s called the Yes, But…style of journalism. To maintain the illusion that what She says is counterpoised by an equally believable body of positions, we’re going to start ignoring the right’s preposterous side altogether.

“When She says something like ‘Bush and company lied and cheated us into a mind-bogglingly stupid and inhuman war in Iraq,’ we’re no longer going to say ‘He says She hates her country.’ We’re going to say, ‘Yes, but there’s more than one side to the story’ and leave it at that.

“Certainly it’s not a perfect fix, but it’s that I’m afraid or stop reporting altogether on every single one of the major issues of the day.”