Ignored factchecks and the media’s crisis of confidence

Can the media stop politicians from misleading the public? That’s the question on the minds of many journalists and commentators after Paul Ryan’s speech at the Republican National Convention, which continued the Romney campaign’s pattern of disingenuous and misleading attacks on President Barack Obama. While President Obama and his allies have made many misleading claims of their own, the frequency and repetition of the Romney campaign’s claims has been particularly striking. This brazen disregard of pushback from journalists has brought on the latest episode in a recurring crisis of confidence among media types. Politicians have persisted in misleading claims before, but the ubiquity of online debunking in this cycle has brought the disjunction into sharper relief.