Yesterday morning, I published a post questioning whether Time was starting to position itself as a print media rival of Fox News, by openly tilting into Fox News-style unfair-and-unbalanced coverage of things political.

Yesterday evening I read this post by Jason Linkins on The Huffington Post, roundly ridiculing The Washington Post for the panel of experts they assembled to comment on Obama‘s healthcare reform Sunday morning talk show blitz (in a piece entitled Obama’s Media Offensive; for convenience, we can refer to it as the WP‘s offensive piece). It wasn’t just that the panel consisted of 7 Republicans to 2 Democrats. It was also who was specifically picked to be on the panel. And how all they produced was tired and empty flatulence.

First of all:

… the panel, in keeping with Washington Post traditions, is mostly a drab gaggle of Republicans. Here’s how they achieve “balance”: Republicans Karl Rove, Dana Perino, Dan Schnur, Ed Rogers, and Linda Chavez take on Democratic Pollster Douglas Schoen and Lanny Davis — who moonlights as Washington DC’s most unpleasant person.

Then there was the predictable tripe they served up:

Obama is ‘on the edge of being pedestrian and boring.’ He ‘will be disappointed’ when ‘his media blitz” fails to ‘move the needle’ and ‘affect public opinion.’ Benefits are going to be ‘short lived,’ he will not ‘persuade the large majority of Americans,’ and it is ‘hard to see what is going to be accomplished by this.’ He should have ‘gone on Fox News‘ to reach ‘swing voters’ and not ‘insult [Fox] on the record.’ I ‘thought that the administration would have something new to say.’ He ‘said nothing new.’ Also, ‘hasn’t really had anything new to say.’ I…recommend…bipartisan…’

That wasn’t even the worst of it:

Close readings of the individual pieces don’t make it any better. Karl Rove — a man who is credited with genius for driving the GOP into the ground while constantly intoning the most prosaic utterances about politics, ever — thinks it’s “expertise” to tell readers that there are five Sunday talk shows and then attempts to relitigate an argument between Obama and George Stephanopoulos that was much better when litigated by the original litigants. Linda Chavez thinks it’s a contradiction for Obama to want to “reward decency and civility in our political discourse” while simultaneously decrying the “lies” and “bogus claims” of “critics.” Lanny Davis, of course, likes the Wyden-Bennett bill — not because it achieves savings, not because it’s effective, not because it’s going to make Americans healthier — but because it’s covered in BIPARTISANSHIP SAUCE, the most precious substance in Washington.

And I don’t know why you pay editors if it’s not to stop Dana Perino from putting sentences like these into your newspaper: “All of that is fine and good. But is fine good enough?”

Can there be any explanation for the WP‘s offensive piece, for the The Washington Post choosing to inflict this absurdly asinine garbage on its readers, in which the word “pandering” does not play a recurring role?

For too long now, the facile explanation for what I’m calling pandering has been the notion that editors, having become oversensitive to accusations of liberal media bias, feel compelled to overcompensate by periodically publishing pieces that clearly and unambiguously lean in the other direction.

I’m not sure I really buy that any more. It strikes me that the real problem, the whole reason for all this pandering by print media publications to conservatives and wingnuts is that we somehow have this unoccupied market niche in the print media. There’s clearly a demand out there for Fox-style news-mongering in print as well, and despite the print media empire of Rupert Murdoch, there just isn’t a national print media analog of Fox News.

And so you have all these newspapers and magazines, with fast-eroding and/or badly-eroded profitability, looking at this unoccupied market niche through a haze of involuntary salivation, and somehow the thought that keeps floating to the top is: could it really be such a bad idea to shoot for a readership increase among Fox News viewers?

So far, no publication with a national profile has been willing to go the whole hog, and just switch over completely to Fox-style news-mongering. That would lead to a wholesale readership churn-over, which is probably not viewed as desirable. So they’ve started playing these games, making periodic little incursions into Fox-style news-mongering, hoping to bring some Fox News viewers to their existing circulation base each time.