media responsibility

The title should probably be placed in the definition of oxymoron. A minister friend asked me: Should it be the responsibility of the media to correct such shams as “Obama is a Muslim”? (For those of you who have been out of touch, a recent Pew Research survey shows that 18% of Americans believe that Obama is a Muslim.) My answer would be yes they should. But that should only be the beginning of their attempt to prevent these politicos from misrepresenting things. To choose one topic from each side they should explain: a) why “tax rate cuts will not increase revenue unless the rates are much higher than they are right now” and b) what a Ponzi scheme is and illustrate it with - Social Security as currently configured.

PS Any critique of the media should keep in mind two things:
1. Whatever their political bias is their primary bias is in hyping the story. (For a small example, in the  poll above they call 18% “1 in 5”. One in 5 is 20% while 1 in 6 is 16.67%, therefore 18% is closer to 1 in 6 than it is to 1 in 5. But 1 in 5 sounds more ominous, doesn’t it?)
2. Sometimes they get things really wrong.  For example, they didn’t know that “begging the question” is the name of a logical fallacy in which the proposition to be proved is assumed in the premise. It has nothing to do with the way they use it, which is to mean “suggesting the question”. In fact, the latter is a perfectly good description for what they mean when they say “begging the question”.