Ten Things That Did Not Suck About The Media In 2009

It’s New Year’s Eve, that time of year when you toss aside your better instincts and succumb to America’s need for Contemplative Listicles that Explain The Year In Which We Lived.

And then, one day, you make a Listicle About Listicles, or you do one better and make a Listicle of The Best 85 Words Ending In -icle, In Order.

Of course, both of those things have already been done this year.

So, we begin today with Ten Things About The Media That Did Not Suck In 2009:

BLOOMBERG NEWS

One of the sad things about living through this dark time in our nation’s economy is the terrible way the media has addressed it. When they’re not praising the culprits or treating human misery as pornography, they’re trying to get us to sympathize with very well-off people who are surviving just fine, or just experiencing a fancy mid-life crisis about the recession.

But over at Bloomberg News, the reporters who originally set about bringing the complexities of the financial world into an open-source environment spent all year carrying on with their code breaking, and they routinely deliver the most clear-eyed, pom-pom-free, fact-dense, explained-at-length journalism on how the world was destroyed and what’s being done to put it back together. There are too many examples to count: Jesse Westbrook’s piece on Mary Schapiro is just the most recent example. And when others honored Ben Bernanke on the cover of their magazine, Bloomberg took on the Fed. That’s how they rolled, all year.

Underscoring this is a bit of sadness, as one of Bloomberg’s finest, Mark Pittman, passed away this year. You can see MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan leading a praise chorus, here.

STEPHEN COLBERT

Yeah, it’s getting to be a bit repetitive to constantly praise Comedy Central’s late night duo, but until more people crowd them out by making the same commitment to not suck at doing their jobs, it’s going to be obligatory. This year, Colbert’s been praised for doing all he can to bring residents of the District of Columbia some Constitutional rights, he’s been way out in front in the arena of Glenn Beck ridicule, and he inspiringly lit Barack Obama afire for his detainee policy at Bagram AFB. But my personal favorite moment came with his dissection of the health care lobby’s influence on lawmakers: “Folks, there are some things that everybody knows, but nobody says.”

You do realize that Colbert is one of the few people in the media who has noticed they way the health care lobby has worked to file down the teeth of health care reform, let alone give a shit about it, right?

The Colbert ReportMon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c