“Skepticism Of Conservative Ideas Requires No Bias”: When Will Conservatives Get Over The Liberal Media Myth?
It’s the perfect recipe for conservative apoplexy: On the one hand you have the Politico reporting that journalists are dissatisfied with their access to the president and, on the other, you have Chuck Todd saying the media isn’t liberal.
The response has been predictable. “Are you kidding me?” conservatives say. “What difference does access make when you agree with everything the president says? And your kneejerk agreement is proof enough that you are biased.”
It’s a line of reasoning that folds neatly into a larger conservative narrative: If only the media were doing its job and accurately reporting on the White House we all would be as disenchanted with the administration as they are. If that argument seems familiar to you, it should. We’ve been hearing it from conservatives for a long, long time.
Back in 1944 Gunnar Myrdal wrote a book on American race relations. One of his theses was that change would come to the segregated South when journalists began reporting on the conditions there. Myrdal’s notion was that most Americans didn’t understand just how bad things were for African-Americans under segregation, but that once they learned they wouldn’t be able to ignore it.
You can argue the merits of Myrdal’s work, but one thing that proved prescient was his understanding of the role the media would play in changing public attitudes about segregation. When Northern press turned its attention to the civil rights movement, the stories and photos they published helped shape the national debate about Jim Crow and arguably hastened its end.
The reaction of Southern conservatives to these news reports, however, was a little different. The problem, they said, isn’t segregation, it’s the way a Northern press infected with integrationist sympathies reports it. Of course, that was hogwash. Segregation was exposed and, eventually, ended. But in the embers of an ideological defeat, conservatives found a handy bit of linguistic Jujitsu. If the facts prove inconvenient, don’t argue them. Instead, shift the focus and question the integrity of the fact-finder. If you’re successful, then in one broad stroke you may be able to disqualify the facts without ever having to argue them on the merits.
Impugning the motives of those we’ve entrusted with separating fiction from fact has proven an effective strategy for the right. Don’t agree with a judicial decision? Blame the “activist” judge. Think an academic paper might be damaging to your cause? No worries. Academia is “liberal” and “elitist.” Worried that global warming might prove nettlesome? It’s the product of scientists harboring a “hidden agenda.”
And today a news media that might otherwise be making reasoned judgments about what’s news and what isn’t has become so cowed by conservative complaints that just about any allegation, no matter how outlandish, must receive “equal time.” Donald Trump’s birther claims are a terrific example. Trump has all the credibility of a squirrel monkey. And the charges he mounted in 2011 were completely bereft of anything resembling a fact. Yet when he was pressing his “questions” about the president’s place of birth, the media felt compelled to put him on the air in an endless loop, and to book guests to argue “both sides” of the “controversy.” Ridiculous.
But suggest that the media might not be so liberal after all, and you elicit ferocious conservative push-back. Just ask Chuck Todd. Last week, when he said media bias was a myth, the conservative response was perhaps best typified by Greg Gutfeld’s 90 second uninterrupted monologue on Fox, which I think can be fairly boiled down to: The media is liberal because the media is liberal and it’s preposterous to think otherwise.
There’s another way of looking at this, of course. As hard as this may be for conservatives to swallow, it may be that 65 million people voted for the president precisely because they have a clear understanding of his record, and what he wants to do—and they agree with it.
Look, in my work, I have found many occasions to be frustrated with reporters. Sometimes they do a good job and sometimes they don’t. But clinging to the notion that they are wittingly or unwittingly involved in some kind of mass liberal conspiracy is a little nutty.
If that’s the case, you may ask, how can it be that I sometimes find unflattering coverage of conservative ideas? Well, one might ask in return, have you taken a look at the ideas conservatives have championed over the years? Segregation is the way to go. Women shouldn’t work. The government is filled with hidden communists. People on the lower end of the economic spectrum are there because they are lazy. Cutting taxes for the rich is the best economic program for everyone. America is one step removed from becoming a totalitarian state. Etc.
In other words, my conservative friends, it may finally be time to come to terms with the following: Its your ideas that leave something to be desired, not the media’s coverage of them.
By: Anson Kaye, U. S. News and World Report, February 28, 2013
“Interfering With Primaries”: GOP Thieves Staging A Phony Fight To Help Each Other Raise Money
Even before the howls of rage have subsided in the wake of Karl Rove’s expressed intention to intervene in Republican Senate primaries to keep stone losers from gaining nominations, one of the chief howlers, the Club for Growth, has announced its own “purge” initiative aimed at House GOP “moderates.” For starters, they’ve identified nine House incumbents at a new website called PrimaryMyCongressman.com who need to be taken out:
“Big government liberals inhabit the Democratic Party, but they are far too common within the Republican Party as well,” said Club for Growth President Chris Chocola in a statement announcing the site. “The Republicans helped pass billions of dollars in tax increases and they have repeatedly voted against efforts by fiscal conservatives to limit government. PrimaryMyCongressman.com will serve as a tool to hold opponents of economic freedom and limited government accountable for their actions.”
This is the same Chris Chocola who earlier this month attacked Rove for his arrogant national interference with the sovereign discretion of primary voters:
“It’s those pesky voters,” Mr. Chocola said in an interview. “They get to decide who the nominee is.”
So why is it an outrage for Rove’s Texas gazillionaires to meddle with Republican primaries but AOK for the Club’s (or the Koch Brothers’) plutocrats to do exactly the same thing? Well, because the latter are “true conservatives,” while the former are trimmers and hedgers, if not actual RINOs. It’s part and parcel of the belief, which I noted a couple of weeks ago in discussing the implications of the “Buckley Rule,” that there’s really no such thing as being “too conservative” unless it means losing a general election, while any even vague step towards moderation is inherently immoral and must be justified by unimpeachable evidence that’s it is necessary. So Rove and company are “interfering” with local voters, while Chocola and company are vindicating their obvious interests.
Now it’s also entirely possible that Rove and Chocola are thick as thieves and are simply staging a phony fight to help each other raise money. But anyway you slice it, the Club’s hypocrisy is pretty amazing.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, February 27, 2013
“Sequestration Stupidity”: By All Measures, Austerity Policies Are An Unmitigated Disaster
A Mediterranean diet, the New England Journal of Medicine reported Monday, can lengthen one’s lifespan. So inhabitants of southern Europe can look forward to long lives — of anxiety and privation.
Already mired in a depression comparable to that of the 1930s, Spain, Greece and Portugal are going to see things grow worse this year, according to an annual economic forecast released by the European Commission on Friday. Unemployment rates in both Spain and Greece — where a quarter of the populations are unemployed and the share of jobless young people exceeds 50 percent — will rise to 27 percent.
At least the leaders in power in 1930 had an excuse when the economy began to collapse. Then, there was genuine bewilderment among economists and governmental chieftains across the political spectrum about how to induce a recovery. From British Laborite Ramsay MacDonald to the German centrist Heinrich Bruning to American conservative Herbert Hoover, leaders cut spending to bring their budgets into balance.
These austerity policies proved an unmitigated disaster. By reducing government spending while business and consumer spending were tanking, these heads of government constricted all economic activity. In turn, unemployment continued to soar. Frustrated with the inability of mainstream political parties to stop the collapse, voters in some nations turned to extremes — most notably, of course, in Germany.
Unlike their predecessors, today’s leaders have models on how to revive depressed economies. The example of Franklin Roosevelt, whose public investments in jobs and defense turned the U.S. economy around, and the writings of John Maynard Keynes, who demonstrated that the solution to depression is boosting demand, are plain for all to see. Seeing isn’t believing, however, when ideology dims the eye.
Today, in the spirit of the Bourbon kings who reclaimed power in post-Napoleonic France, having learned nothing during their years in exile, many European leaders are repeating the mistakes that their predecessors made in the ’30s: demanding that governments reduce spending even as their private-sector economies limp along. Only this time around, the miracle of the euro has greatly the reduced the autonomy of many continental nations while giving their creditor, Germany, control over their destinies. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is imposing austerity budgets on other nations, even Spain, which had a string of balanced budgets before the 2008 collapse.
The economies of Mediterranean nations, the Merkelites complain, lag behind the productivity rates of their northern European neighbors. But boosting productivity — a goal that everyone embraces — requires more, not less, public investment in worker training, education, new industries and unemployment support. The relationship between austerity and heightened productivity, whose existence Merkel continually proclaims, is real enough — but in Europe’s current economy, the association is inverse.
As in the 1930s, despair about the economic options before them has driven many voters to bizarre extremes. A quarter of Italian voters cast ballots this week for the anti-austerity xenophobic party of a professional comedian. In Spain, a movement for Catalonian separatism is growing. More ominously, in Greece, an avowedly racist, fascist party involved in numerous instances of violence has won a bloc of seats in parliament. You might think Merkel would be cognizant of the links between economic hopelessness and the rise of fascism — but if she is, it hasn’t affected her austerity economics by so much as a pfennig.
The euro zone isn’t the only part of Europe where austerity is turning out to be a disaster. Britain is the one European nation that, since Prime Minister David Cameron’s conservatives came to power in 2010, has deliberately opted for punishing austerity to bring its budget into balance. As a result, the British economy has slowed to a crawl, and its budget remains in the red. Last week, Moody’s stripped Britain of its AAA credit rating. In anti-Keynesian theory, austerity economics are supposed to protect one’s triple-A rating, not endanger it. So much for anti-Keynesian theory.
The United States isn’t immune to Europe’s madness. The sequester slated to begin taking effect Friday is a particularly mindless form of an already stupid policy, poised to inflict a kind of blindfolded austerity at a time when unemployment remains high. Republican opponents of government spending, not to mention tea party activists, like to think of themselves as true-blue Americans while disparaging the Democrats as Euro-socialists. But it’s the Republicans who are embracing Europe’s failed economics while Democrats attempt to adhere to the American success story of the New Deal. Republicans might want to bone up on American history; it contains all kinds of valuable lessons.
By: Harold Meyerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 26, 2013
“A High Tech Filibuster”: Congressional Hazing Of Chuck Hagel Was A Waste Of Time
Chris Dodd was a new, young senator in 1982, when C. Everett Koop was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to serve as the nation’s surgeon general. A lot of liberals like then-Senator Dodd didn’t like Koop, who was anti-abortion, and saw him as the embodiment of the Moral Majority conservatism they despised. Dodd, who was then in the Senate barely a year, voted against Koop’s nomination. The surgeon general was approved by the Senate anyway, 60-24.
Dodd matured as a legislator, and Koop developed into a surgeon general Democrats had not expected him to be. Despite heavy pressure from social conservatives, Koop refused to declare that abortions performed by a qualified medical doctor were bad for a woman’s health. He was a leader in the battle against AIDS—a no-brainer now, but in the considerably more conservative ’80s, when it was seen as a gay man’s disease, something of a scandal. Koop, who died this week at 96, also was aggressive in the fight against tobacco use, particularly among children.
Koop may have forgotten Dodd’s vote against him. Dodd didn’t. Years after the confirmation, Dodd wrote a letter to Koop apologizing for his “no” vote. “He did a wonderful job as Surgeon General of the country, and I voted against him over issues that I didn’t really think through very carefully. And I regretted that,” Dodd told an NBC interviewer.
Fast-forward to this week, and the world of the U.S. Senate looks much different. Threats to hold up nominees for a slew of offices, from cabinet secretary to U.S. Marshall, are appallingly common. Sometimes the filibuster threat is a means to another end, a way to pressure Democrats or the Obama administration to give in on an unrelated topic. And sometimes the holdup hinges on an argument that is difficult to defend: The nominee isn’t who the minority party would have picked, so he or she can’t have the job. It’s remarkable that anyone in the Senate could presume to tell the president who he should hire to advise him, even when the paychecks come from public funds. It would be wrong for a Democratic senator to attempt to withhold funding, say, for the payroll of a GOP colleague who hired like-minded staffers to advise him or her. So why can’t President Obama pick his own cabinet, short of selecting someone corrupt or blatantly incompetent?
Chuck Hagel has been on both sides of the equation, serving in the U.S. Senate, where he had to vote on numerous nominations, and facing a battle to be confirmed as defense secretary. Hagel is a Republican, he won two Purple Hearts in Vietnam, and served two terms in the U.S. Senate. But he was nominated by Obama, which is enough to taint any nominee in the eyes of some Republicans. They grilled him in the Armed Services Committee, which was to be expected. Some questioned whether he was anti-Semitic, based on a cheap and pejorative interpretation of comments Hagel had made about a pro-Israel lobby. And one senator, Ted Cruz of Texas, had the audacity to suggest, with zero evidence, that Hagel had received income from North Korea.
Hagel went through a high-tech, waste-of-time hazing before he was finally confirmed Wednesday evening, 58-41. In coming years, will any senator write a note of apology to the new defense secretary?
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, February 27, 2013
“In The Mosh Pit”: The Self-Centered Political Media
With many Americans alternately bored and infuriated by the latest made-for-TV fiscal melodrama in Washington, something highly unusual happened. A prominent, name-brand pundit published a column about the “sequestration” battle that was not merely smug, lazy and condescending, but factually false.
So what else is new, right?
What’s newsworthy is that when somebody he couldn’t ignore called him out, the columnist was forced to publicly eat his words. Newsworthy for two reasons: first, because regardless of what they claim about their strict code of professional ethics, Washington political journalists normally cover for each other like cops and Roman Catholic clerics.
It’s been going on for a generation, and worsening as TV stardom and the lecture circuit have made celebrity pundits wealthy.
Second, because of what David Brooks’ blunder says about the “fever swamp of the center,” as New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait calls it: a mindset reflecting the desperate pretense that “both sides” are equally responsible for Washington’s endless budgetary crises, and all that’s necessary to resolve them is a mature spirit of compromise.
And maybe too what the whole charade says about the audience for such piffle: an American public that’s better informed about Tom Brady’s new contract and Kim Kardashian’s cup size than the national budget deficit.
How New York Times editors waved David Brooks’ column into print is a mystery. One had the impression things had improved there since the heyday of Jeff Gerth and Judith Miller—whose inept reporting helped bring us the Whitewater hoax and the Iraq War, respectively.
“The DC Dubstep,” Brooks called the column; the joke being that budget sequestration gave Democrats and Republicans alike a chance to do “the dance moves they enjoy the most.”
“Under the Permanent Campaign Shimmy,” Brooks wrote, “the president identifies a problem. Then he declines to come up with a proposal to address the problem. Then he comes up with a vague-but-politically-convenient concept that doesn’t address the problem (let’s raise taxes on the rich). Then he goes around the country blasting the opposition….The president hasn’t actually come up with a proposal to avert sequestration, let alone one that is politically plausible.”
Ha, ha, ha! See, Obama’s failure to lead then encourages Republicans to do the “Suicide Stage Dive,” working themselves “into a frenzy of self-admiration,” and leaping “into what they imagine is [sic] the loving arms of their adoring fans” only to “land with a thud on the floor.”
Probably a sober-sided fellow like Brooks shouldn’t attempt satire, which requires a subversive imagination. Also a regular on PBS and NPR, he plays a non-carnivorous Republican—conservative, yes, but not somebody who’s going to carry an AR-15 to a Washington cocktail party.
But the problem with Brooks’ column is more basic. Because love it or hate it, the White House long ago presented a detailed plan for averting sequestration. President Obama has been flying around the country talking it up every day. You can read it here.
Kevin Drum neatly summarized the contents: “specific cuts to entitlements, including the adoption of chained CPI for Social Security and $400 billion in various cuts to healthcare spending, along with further cuts to mandatory programs as well as to both defense and domestic discretionary programs. Altogether, it clocks in at $1.1 trillion in spending cuts and $700 billion in revenue increases, mostly gained from limiting tax deductions for high-end earners.”
In short, you can call the White House plan anything you like. But you can’t call it non-existent. The entire premise of Brooks’ column was false; the political equivalent of criticizing Bill Belichick’s poor coaching in the 2013 Super Bowl. (His team didn’t get there.) A sportswriter would be laughed out of the press room; maybe out of journalism.
But hey, it’s only national politics, and only the New York Times.
Enter Ezra Klein, the Washington Post’s ubiquitous blogger. An ambitious lad of 28, Klein had the temerity to pick up the phone. Apparently, the youngster didn’t understand that these things simply aren’t done. His column, he informed Brooks, was rubbish. Would he like to talk about it?
To his credit, Brooks did, but not before adding an online postscript to his column explaining that he’d “written in a mood of justified frustration over …fiscal idiocy,” and “should have acknowledged the balanced and tough-minded elements in the president’s approach.”
A transcript of Brooks’ deeply embarrassing conversation with his younger rival was posted online. Give him this much: Brooks definitely faced the music. So frank an admission of error rarely appears in the high-dollar press.
And what about you, dear reader?
Recently Bloomberg News published a poll. Asked if the nation’s budget deficit was growing or shrinking, only 6% answered correctly: it’s going down. This year’s projected deficit is $600 billion smaller than when President Obama took office.
If you didn’t know that, maybe you’re also part of the problem.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, February 27, 2013
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