From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media.

Broke Gladstone is away this week.

I'm Bob Garfield.

And here's President Obama speaking to a room full of journalists this week

at a luncheon of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

I guess another way of thinking about this is, and this bears on your reporting, I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing, then they're equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

And an equivalence is presented, which reinforces, I think, people's cynicism about Washington generally.

Barack Obama, president, commander-in-chief, journalism professor?

The luncheon is a tradition that has attracted every American president since

Coolidge to speak and field questions. What made this week's iteration unusual was that Obama got

into the nitty-gritty of a topic dear to our hearts here at Media Criticism Central, and that is

false equivalency, also known as he said, she said, reporting.

The Atlantic's James Fallows wrote about Obama's exhortation. He says that, in fact, the press

has gotten a bit better when it comes to this kind of reporting.

The main case in which we've seen the press sort of rise to that challenge, I think,

was with the birtherism controversy of maybe two years ago, where for a while it was reported as some

people say President Obama was not born in America. President Obama denies the charge. Eventually,

the press began saying the charge is not true.

Is it possible that in the midst of a campaign, the president's desire for the press to dig in to the various claims is going to redound to his detriment?

Yes, and I think the president was in a dilemma which he himself even seemed conscious of, because in the sort of lighthearted beginning to his speech, he was saying, we don't want you in the press to be reveling in all these gaffs and misstatements, unless, of course, it's the other guy, in which case, good job.

But I think that probably he was in the grips of an uncontrollable frustration.

And I say uncontrollable in that other Democratic presidents feel as if they have to give vent to their

...