When even Mark Halperin decries the media's focus the inconsequential “freak show” rather than on the substance of health care reform, you know things have gotten bad. Here's Halperin:

HALPERIN'S TAKE: WHY EVERYTHING ABOUT THE HEALTH CARE MOBS IS A NATIONAL DISGRACE

1. Coverage of the mobs is playing into the hands of the mobsters.

2. Coverage of the mobs is crowding out a needed national debate about health care.

Yes. Exactly.

Meanwhile, the New York Times has what it bills as "A Primer on the Details of Health Care Reform." I don't endorse all of the points contained in the primer*, but this is exactly the kind of thing the media should be doing.

And MSNBC is, as I write this, doing a segment on “Heath Care: Fact & Fiction,” in which Dylan Ratigan and Politico's Jonathan Martin are discussing and assessing the truthfulness of various health-care related things you may have heard. Again, without endorsing everything they've said, the mere fact that they're discussing policy is a huge leap forward from Friday's madness.

And, in an example of how the media should approach insane and false claims, ABC's Jake Tapper provided a pretty strong debunking of Sarah Palin's off-the-charts false claims about “death panels.”

* Just one example: in the section on whether people could keep their current health plan and doctor under proposed health care reform, the Times repeatedly emphasizes that while the proposed reforms does not require anyone to change plan or doctor, their current plan may change, or their current doctor may stop accepting that plan. Well, OK, that's true -- but doesn't really have much to do with the proposed reforms; those things may well happen without reform. The Times doesn't make that clear.