Does journalistic ‘balance’ hurt America?

A Q&A with Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Mann and Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, are savvy political scientists who know Washington politics well. And they have been regarded as middle-of-the-road guys, centrists, for a number of years in DC. That is why their book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, published by Basic Books in May, has startled some media types with its thesis, which argues, in a nutshell, that the core of Washington’s political dysfunction lies with the Republican Party. CJR’s Trudy Lieberman sat down with Mann to explore where he and his co-author think the media have gone awry.