The missing filibuster

I’m rushing a bit today and don’t have a lot of time for comment, but Jim Fallows has been on a tear over at the Atlantic about the major media’s inaccurate reporting on President Obama’s jobs plan, pointing out that they keep saying it  has “failed,” in whole and in parts, when actually it has been the victim of a long-running, unprecedented Republican strategy to filibuster any bill that might possibly benefit Democrats or the president. His explanation of why the media approach to this obstructionist strategy is just … plain … wrong makes compelling reading (much more compelling than anything I could possibly tap out today — or, likely, any time). Perhaps more compelling is the entire string of Fallows’ posts on this subject; if you have time,  you should follow them out, which is easy to do from the post I’m highlighting. If you do, you’ll realize that Fallows is not writing inside baseball; he’s setting out a significant, repeated failure of major media to tell the truth. That failure has already had enormous impact on the country and could well have ramifications for who wins the presidency in 2012. I’m not quite ready to say the missing filibuster reportage is the equivalent of the media’s failure to question the Bush administration’s WMD justification for going to war in Iraq. But I’m not ready to rule out an equal sign here, either. And for those of you who wonder: This is not about ideology or partisanship. It’s about a failure of news organizations to do their job that leads to an unfair ideological/partisan advantage.