Downing Street Memo

If you haven't already, check out Michael Kinsley's take on the Downing Street Memo in yesterday's Washington Post. On the one hand, Kinsley is a little too dismissive of the importance of the memo itself. He focuses a little too much on what the memo can "prove," which is hardly the point. If the Washington press corps wasn't such an emasculated shell of what it once was, it would have taken this memo and run with it. Kinsley's meta-point, however, is an important one. He observes that:

[M]oderate and reasonable right-wingers have enjoyed the presence of a mass of angry people even further right. This overhang of extremists makes the moderates appear more reasonable.

This is clearly true, and it goes a long way toward explaining the behavior of our mainstream media outlets. In the era of FoxNews and constant accusations of "liberal bias," our mainstream media outlets try very hard to stay within a "zone of reasonabless." Obsessed with appearing even-handed (even at the expense of reporting the truth), the mainstream media ends up balancing the loudest voices on one side of issue with the loudest voices on the other. Unfortunately, the loudest voices on the Right almost always come from the kooky-conservative far Right. The loudest voices on the Left, however, are nearly always from the center-Left or the center itself. This skews coverage of nearly every issue towards the right, making extreme positions suddenly appear more reasonable. After all, in comparison to Ann Coulter, Jesse Helms almost seems reasonable.