Blaming Republicans for the government shutdown: The end of false equivalence?

In the flood of news stories about the government shutdown, media critics started noticing phrases that irked them. For instance, an Al Jazeera America story that went viral lambasted The Washington Post and New York Times for saying things like Democrats and Republicans had "failed to reach agreement" during their "bitter budget standoff."

"This sort of false equivalence is not just a failure of journalism," Al Jazeera America's Dan Froomkin writes. "It is also a failure of democracy."

House Republicans refused to pass what is normally a routine federal spending bill unless President Barack Obama and Senate Democrats agreed to defund or delay significant parts of ObamaCare, a law that was passed more than three years ago by both chambers of Congress, deemed constitutional by the Supreme Court, and at least tangentially endorsed by the American people when President Obama beat repeal-promising Mitt Romney last fall.

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The result of this latest standoff over ObamaCare is that the federal government doesn't have a budget, forcing a major shutdown for the first time in 17 years. Froomkin urges his fellow journalists to stop pretending that Democrats are even partly to blame.

Of course, plenty of liberal columnists for both the Post and the Times, including Greg Sargent and Paul Krugman, have been critical of Republicans since the very beginning. Now, however, each paper's editorial board is putting the blame for the shutdown squarely on the Republican leadership, too.

"The Republican leaders of the House of Representatives are failing," writes the Post, noting, "We don't come to that view as rabid partisans." Then it really goes after the GOP:

The editorial board of The New York Times narrowed its focus to one man: House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who has the ability to bring up a "clean" budget bill — one that doesn't defund or delay ObamaCare — for a vote on the floor, where it would probably pass.

"Mr. Boehner could have stopped" the government shutdown, the Times writes, but instead:

And lest you think it's only liberal columnists and editors: The Wall Street Journal's reliably conservative editorial board is also on record opposing the GOP's shutdown strategy. "Our advice is to give up on the impossible task of defunding or delaying ObamaCare at the current moment and focus instead on a quick if smaller policy victory."

All this said, the true "false equivalence" test will only be passed when straight news stories start taking a similar approach. But editorial boards are, at least in theory, the voices of their publications. And that makes these new editorials, in the words of The Atlantic's James Fallows, a welcome change.

"To anticipate the next 1,000 protest letters: the point here is not, 'the press should criticize Republicans,'" he writes. "It is that the press should recognize reality — and at moments when one party is behaving in extreme ways it should come out and say so, despite the powerful (and admirable-in-its-origins) aversion to seeming to take sides in political dispute."