Jon Margolis, former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.

Opinions over the shape of the world still differ.
So, it seems, do opinions over whether accurately reporting those conflicting opinions constitutes good journalism. Or even whether it deserves the label of “journalism” at all. 
This difference of opinion (about the journalism, not the actual shape of the world) is getting more attention this week, for which we can thank Grandma and the death panels to be created in order to deny her any more medical treatment because she’s not worth it.
 
As no doubt everyone reading this opus knows, there are no such death panels mentioned in any of the health care proposals working their way through Congress. But for some time after they were alleged (invented?) on conservative web sites and highlighted by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the established press corps of the oft-derided Mainstream Media (hereinafter MSM) dealt with the allegations simply by quoting Democrats to that effect.
 
For this, the MSM was assailed by liberal web sites horrified that reporters did not simply declare the allegations to be false. Once again, said the critics, the MSM was committing “he said-she said” journalism, a variant of “opinions over the shape of the earth differ,” journalism, presumably coined in outrage at all those news stories that dutifully quote global warming skeptics.
 
How about a little calm here, not to mention a little perspective. It isn’t that these critics are wrong. “He said-she said” stories do risk degrading journalism into stenography (see this impressive if over-long examination by Jeffrey Rosen) and the earth is, as it happens, round (or an oblate spheroid if you want to get finicky). It is also getting warmer, almost surely because of human activity, and assertions to the contrary grow increasingly absurd.
 
But reporters are supposed to be careful. Most of them write for the next day (or sooner), which does not give them enough time to read the language being perverted to declare unequivocally that the language is being perverted. In that case, quoting somebody else saying the language has been perverted ought to be perfectly acceptable.
 
 
By August 14, the New York Times weighed in with a front-page story explaining that Palin had not started this “false rumor,” but that it went back at least to a commentary by Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant govenor of New York, in Bloomberg News back on February 9.
 
The Times story by, Jim Rutenberg and Jackie Calmes, dismissed the death panel/euthanasia reports as garbage. And as it turns out, they weren’t the first to do so. Last month, Factcheck.org, part of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, had discredited McCaughey’s claims. 
 
By August 15, the reliably left-of-center MediaMatters proclaimed that established news organizations had debunked the “death panels” allegations at least 40 times.  
 
So altogether, the much-derided MSM seems to have acquitted itself rather well. 
But there’s something else going on here, something not being discussed, perhaps because it is far more complicated than the “he said-she said,” or the “MSM-versus-the blogosphere” arguments which are getting to be sooo 2008.
 
It was touched on right in the middle of the MSM (in the Washington Post) if by an outsider, author Rick Perlstein, whose op-ed piece last Sunday linked the misstatements (OK, the lies) about health care with the equally crazy claims that President Obama was born in Kenya and the anti-tax “tea party” assertions that he’s a socialist.
 
Not entirely new, Said Perlstein, recalling earlier right-wing conspiracy theories. He might have made a better case had he acknowledged the ample history of left-wing conspiracy theories, but in fairness probably none of them was as absurd as the one he called his favorite—the right-wing radio program during the Kennedy Administration that “had millions of Americans believing” that a proposed new mental health care facility in Alaska “was being built to intern political dissidents, just like in the Soviet Union.”
 
Back then, Perlstein noted, such craziness never made it to the mainstream media:
 
“You never heard the late Walter Cronkite taking time on the evening news to ‘debunk’ claims that a proposed mental health clinic in Alaska is actually a dumping ground for right-wing critics of the president’s program, or giving the people who made those claims time to explain themselves on the air. The media didn’t adjudicate the ever-present underbrush of American paranoia as a set of “conservative claims” to weigh, horse-race-style, against liberal claims. Back then, a more confident media unequivocally labeled the civic outrage represented by such discourse as “extremist” — out of bounds.”
 
But the media no longer have that kind of power. When Cronkite was keeping that madness from being broadcast, there were three television networks. Like the big newspapers and the news magazines, they were the “gatekeepers.” Today, for both good and ill, those gates are unguarded.
 
What’s changed? Almost everything, but for now, let’s just mention a few:

 --Technology. If that radio station with the Alaska mental health facility nonsense had an Internet connection, even Cronkite might not have been able to keep the accusation off the air;
 
 
--Money. More people have more of it. Yes, there’s more income inequality, but between economic growth and technological progress, the folks who believe this kind of paranoia, who in 1960 could barely afford a radio, and might have been embarrassed to stand in front of a television camera in their coveralls, now have cable TV, computers, credit cards, and pressed khakis;
 
--Politics. Barry Goldwater never lent respectability to conspiracy theories nearly as crazy as that one about the mental health center, or as today’s about the birth certificate or the death panels. But Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa said his constituents were right to be worried about “pulling the plug on Grandma,” and House Minority Leader John Boehner mumbled something about the possibility of “government-encouraged euthanasia.” On television a couple of weeks ago Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee refused to condemn the “birther” rumors, even as he said he believed Obama was American-born.

Here the difference might be that, outside New England and a few select precincts elsewhere, there is no more center right in America. It isn’t that there are no intelligent, honest, conservatives. There are. But the conservative rank-and-file now seems so dominated by extremists—perhaps by irrational extremists—that the intelligent, honest conservatives (by reputation Grassley and Corker both qualify) are afraid to displease them.
There’s nothing journalists can or should do about this state of affairs except be aware of it.

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