Is gravity real? The reporter asks the question, and finds one person who will say it’s not, at which point it becomes an open question.
Conservatives have learned to use this laziness to create hosts of false controversies, destroying good people and good ideas because reporters are afraid to call a lie a lie.
Death panels are a lie. Obama’s Kenyan roots are a lie. The tea party’s charges are lies.
When large political movements are built on lies, reporters do not have a duty to give them equal time. They have a duty to call them out.
They have a duty to call the liars liars, and to stop using them as sources, to exile them from their newsrooms. Instead these self-created assholes are called upon again-and-again.
It has gone on too long.