“With Eyes Wide Shut”: Right Wing Spins The Media With “Job-Killer” Claims
The media is indiscriminately using the term “job-killer” to describe government policies and programs, but without verifying or substantiating the claims, according to a new study. Use of the phrase by major media outlets has exploded since President Obama took office and rapidly circulates throughout the press with little or no fact checking of the “job killer” allegations.
“Job-Killing” Rhetoric From the Right
“The news media, by failing to seek to verify allegations made about government policies and proposals, typically act more like a transmission belt for business, Republican, and conservative sources than an objective seeker of truth when it comes to the term ‘job killer,'” its authors found.
The independent study, Job Killers in the News: Allegations without Verification, conducted by Prof. Peter Dreier of Occidental College and Christopher R. Martin of the University of Northern Iowa, reviewed the use of the term “job-killer” in stories from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The Associated Press going back to 1984.
The vast majority of the “job-killer” allegations were directed at federal or state government policies to regulate business (particularly policies towards the environment, taxes, health care, and raising the minimum wage). Most of the sources for the “job-killer” charges came from business spokespersons and Republican Party officials, but in around 17 percent of the articles and editorials, news outlets used the phrase without citing a source. In 91.6 percent of the stories about “job killing” government policies, the media failed to cite any evidence or quote an authoritative source to corroborate the claim.
“With little or no fact checking of ‘job killer’ allegations, Americans have no way to know if there is any evidence for these claims or whether they are simply a cynical political ploy used to discredit opponents’ policy ideas,” Dreier and Martin noted.
Indeed, according to the authors, “There is no correlation between the frequency of the phrase ‘job killer’ and unemployment rate. Instead, ‘job killer’ allegations correspond much more closely with political cycles,” particularly during election season and under Democratic administrations.
“Job-killer” allegations were barely used under the Clinton administration and virtually disappeared during the eight years George W. Bush was president — despite job growth under Clinton and job loss under Bush — and skyrocketed once Barack Obama became president. The number of news stories alleging that a particular government policy would be a “job killer” increased 1,156% between the first three years of the George W. Bush administration and the first three years of the Obama administration.
“The cavalier nature in which the ‘job killer’ allegations are reported suggests that term is used loosely by those who oppose government regulations, and they can get away with it because news organizations fail to ask—or at least report – whether they have any evidence for the claims they make,” the study’s authors wrote.
The Wall Street Journal was the most likely news organization to use the phrase with no attribution.
By: Emily Osborne, Center For Media and Democracy, June 22, 2012
“About As Screwed As You Can Get”: The Uninsured Continue To Annoy Us With Their Pain
There are a lot of reasons why the United States is the only advanced democracy that does not guarantee basic medical services to all its citizens. One reason is that the convoluted construction of the U.S. health-care system has made it hard to fix the dysfunctional elements without threatening to change existing arrangements for people who profit from the status quo, or at least fear change. (That’s why both Presidents Obama and Clinton have tried so hard to convince Americans with health insurance they could keep what they have.)
Another reason is that people without health insurance are politically weak. They lack political organization, and many, reports Alec MacGillis, lack even the awareness that there was this big health-care law that gives them help:
As Robin Layman, a mother of two who has major health troubles but no insurance, arrived at a free clinic here, she had a big personal stake in the Supreme Court’s imminent decision on the new national health care law.
Not that she realized that. “What new law?” she said. “I’ve not heard anything about that.”
The circumstances of MacGillis’s story itself tell you something else about the weakness of the uninsured: Their cause is slightly disreputable. MacGillis straightforwardly and without advocacy examines up-close the conditions of the uninsured and their level of awareness, or lack thereof, of the Affordable Care Act. MacGillis reported the story for Kaiser Health News, and offered it to the Washington Post, which planned to run it on its front page but decided against it.
It is certainly true that a story examining the plight of the uninsured, and one that notes that they would stand to gain from a law subsidizing their health insurance, would tend to make readers think more favorably of such a law. But that is not the sort of objection a newspaper normally considers fatal. It all depends on whose plight we’re talking about. The complaints of business leaders who want more favorable regulatory and fiscal policies have received blanket coverage. Even when such complaints have a strong partisan tilt, beliefs like “we need less regulation” or “we must focus on reducing the deficit” carry a presumption of public-spiritedness.
The uninsured are in such bad political shape that even describing their physical suffering in a political context is considered dangerously partisan. That’s about as screwed as you can get.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, June 18, 2012
“Rooting For America To Fail”: Republicans Are Deliberately Sabotaging The Economy
Raise your hands if you think Republicans are deliberately sabotaging the US economy to prevent the re-election of Barack Obama. Me too. Okay, knowing what you do about the Republican Party, raise your hands if you can think of any reason why Republicans wouldn’t throw a monkey wrench into the machinery of our economic engine to accomplish Mitch McConnell’s stated goal of making Barack Obama a one-term president. Me neither.
I wouldn’t have said this earlier, but I have no doubt now that Republicans are deliberately making the economy worse for political gain. I’m trying to picture a Republican consultant advising his clients against such a move on grounds of, say patriotism and propriety, and I just can’t. Probably because they would be out of a job. It’s amazing what people can convince themselves it is okay to do once they’ve convinced themselves they are in the right.
The filibustering of every conventional and sensible proposal the Obama Administration has put forward to help stimulate the economy — up to and including tax cuts that were Republican ideas to begin with — was only our first clue that Republicans were rooting for America to fail.
But neither does it take a genius to imagine the phone calls being made by Mitt Romney’s henchmen or the candidate himself (properly filtered, of course, to provide maximum deniability) to all of those bankers and business types sitting on their $2 trillion in uninvested cash that, if they want access to a future Romney Administration, they’d better keep sitting on that cash until after the November election. Think of this strategy as just an extension of the Republican Party’s K Street Project, the one where America’s trade associations and lobbyists were informed by partisan mob enforcers like disgraced Majority Leader Tom DeLay that doing business with the new Republican House was on a strictly pay to play basis.
But what I am also sure about is that Greg Sargent of the Washington Post is certainly correct when he says the establishment media will never let Democrats get away with accusing Republicans of deliberately doing harm the country because the establishment media has far too much to lose from allowing such a suggestion to take root.
As an elite establishment itself, whose place and privileges in American politics comes from its having mastered the rituals of our two-party system, the mainstream media is threatened by anyone who challenges the comfortable status quo of two evenly-balanced, sane and sensible, political parties. The media sees its own interests as neutral observer and referee threatened when people begin opening up that Pandora’s Box which exposes one of those major parties to be exactly what congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein said about the GOP, that it: “has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
It’s been more than a month since Mann and Ornstein dropped that bombshell in the pages of the Washington Post and there is still no discussion of its ominous implications on the Sunday political talk shows, says Sargent. Indeed, for their troubles as pundits too hot to handle, Mann and Ornstein have been effectively blackballed from Meet the Press, Face the Nation, and State of the Union.
Most of the time the media loves to talk about itself, says Sargent, so you’d think Mann and Ornstein’s allegation that “the press’s addiction to fake even-handedness has led them not to acknowledge, or at least grapple with, a fact that is absolutely central to understanding what’s happening with our politics right now,” would have Sunday show producers burning up the phone lines trying to book the duo on their shows.
“But what continues to strike me is the radio silence on these shows about both these themes,” Ornstein told Sargent. “The Republicans bear a lot of the onus for rank obstructionism. But there’s a false equivalence here, and the press corps has been AWOL in its duty to report the truth.”
Ornstein said that judging by the communication he’s had with elite reporters, his description of the GOP as a radical party “has generated lots of discussion in the newsrooms. But the shows are making a conscious decision to ignore it.”
So, despite all you hear about the so-called “liberal bias” against Republicans, you can see why the mainstream media is predisposed to shoot down the idea that Republicans might be secretly planting Comp-4 explosive around our economy’s foundation in order to detonate it while Barack Obama and the Democrats are the ones likely to suffer the collateral damage.
Which is why it’s good to see Democrats making the charge anyway.
As Sargent reports, Harry Reid called out Republicans on the Senate floor the other day for their opposition to the Paycheck Fairness Act, saying that from the GOP perspective the act to help ensure women get equal pay for equal work already has two strikes against it because “it would be good for women and good for the economy.”
Obama senior adviser David Axelrod said on Face the Nation this weekend in regard to the disappointing May jobs reports and Republican efforts to obstruct Obama’s job creation policies that: “Instead of high-fiving each other on days when there is bad news, they should stop sitting on their hands and work on some of these answers.”
And on Friday after the bad jobs numbers were released, Democratic National Committee executive director Patrick Gaspard went on MSNBC to accuse Republicans of “cheerleading for failure,” notes Sargent
“There was a time when charges like these were approached with a bit more caution by Democratic leaders,” says Sargent. “Now top Obama and Dem officials are going out into every conceivable forum and repeating the claim that Republicans are actively rooting for widespread economic misery and are doing all they can to block solutions designed to alleviate it.”
Paul Krugman says Obama has no choice but to make Republicans the issue and to note we’d all be better off were it not for deliberate GOP sabotage. Ed Kilgore at Washington Monthly is not so sure. He thinks swing voters will always hold the President and his party accountable for the state of the economy no matter how much the other guys are gumming up the works.
And even those of us who think Democrats need to call out Republicans for their obstruction have to admit that, despite everything Republicans have done to make the jobs situation worse, the Republican counterattack against charges they are sabotaging the economy practically writes itself: “Stop whining, Mr. President, and lead.”
Nevertheless, while there are many things I thought the GOP capable of doing, deliberately standing in the way of America’s economic recovery with all of the hardship and misery it would entail for millions of their fellow citizens, wasn’t one of them. That was actually one of the few outrages I was not willing to impute to these radical Republicans in their heedless pursuit of power.
But even that low ceiling above my scorn and contempt for the modern GOP was shattered by last summer’s debt-ceiling debacle when Republicans showed just how far they were willing to go to achieve their narrow ideological ends.
The subsequent credit rating downgrade that, for good measure, Republicans even blamed on Democrats for not parleying in good faith, was an abject lesson in how quickly and easily even responsible Republican opinion can be herded into line by today’s conservative movement. Within a matter of a few short weeks, the initial indignation among sensible conservatives at the suggestion by House Republicans that the full faith and credit of the United States should be put on the table as a bargaining chip to bully Democrats into caving on spending, was converted into accepted conventional wisdom on the right.
Compared to the game of debt-ceiling chicken that threatened what the White House called “economic Armageddon,” what’s not to believe about Republicans intentionally keeping the economy in the doldrums for another six months if the reward at the end is absolute political power?
By; Ted Frier, Open Salon, June 5, 2012
“Can’t Touch This”: It’s Time To Stop Letting Mitt Romney Off Easy
Mitt Romney wants the presidential election to be all about Barack Obama. If the press doesn’t start asking Romney some difficult questions about the core arguments upon which his entire presidential candidacy is based, he may very well get his way.
Case in point: Check out Mike Allen’s preview this morning of the Romney campaign’s next attack on the President’s economic record…
A senior aide tells us Mitt Romney plans to begin hitting specific stimulus projects as he travels, arguing that President Obama has actually subtracted jobs:
“Were these investments the best return on tax dollars, or given for ideological reasons, to donors, for political reasons? He spent $800 billion of everybody’s money. How’d it work out? It was the mother of all earmarks, not a jobs plan. By wasting all of this money, you had the worst of all worlds: It destroyed confidence in the economy, and makes people less likely to borrow money. Dodd-Frank has been a disaster for the economy. Where are the steady hands? Who’s in charge of energy? Where’s the strong, confident voice on the economy?”
So Romney will now go back to claiming Obama subtracted jobs. But there’s a new twist: Romney will claim that the effect of the stimulus has been to destroy jobs. As it has in the past, the Romney camp will justify this by pointing to a bogus metric — the net jobs lost on Obama’ watch. That includes the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs lost before the stimulus went into effect. Really: The Romney camp’s claim is that we can calculate that the stimulus destroyed jobs overall with a metric that factors in all the jobs destroyed before the stimulus took effect. That’s not an exaggeration. It really is the Romney campaign’s position. It’s time to ask Romney himself to justify it.
The Romney camp will also begin claiming that Obama has “never created a job.” Will anyone ask Romney about the two dozen straight months of private sector job creation we’ve seen?
And if Romney is now going to start hitting individual stimulus projects, it’s also time to ask him what he would have done if he had been president in January of 2009. He has previously said positive things about stimulus spending. Are those no longer operative? Would Romney really not have proposed any government spending to stimulate the economy when it was in free fall? What would he have done instead? This question is absolutely central. How about asking it?
Then there’s the claim that “Dodd-Frank has been a disaster for the economy.” Romney has pledged to roll back financial reform completely, but he hasn’t said with any meaningful specificity what he woud replace it with, beyond claiming (after the J.P. Morgan debacle forced him to do so) that he supports “common sense regulations.” How about asking Romney what, if anything, he would do instead to guard against future Wall Street recklessness after rolling back Obama’s regulatory response to the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression?
Many of the claims that form the foundation of Romney’s entire case for the presidency are going without any meaningful national press scrutiny to speak of. Why?
By: Greg Sargent, The Washington Post Plum Line, May 29, 2012
“Beat The Press”: How Mitt Romney Avoids Most National Interviews
It wouldn’t be fair to say that Mitt Romney is hiding from the national media, exactly. Why, on Thursday morning he went on Fox & Friends, fielding such tough questions about his challenge to President Obama as: “You’re beating him with independents. How are you going to outdo him in that department?”
And Romney did sit down—with his wife, Ann, which seems to have been the point—for a chat this week with Diane Sawyer, which focused on Ann Romney’s role, a handful of issues, and why he once transported the family dog on the car roof.
But as he makes the pivot to general-election nominee, Romney remains a remote figure to most of those who are covering him. And some Republican campaign veterans say that makes political sense.
“Of course he should be wary of the media,” says Ari Fleischer, the former Bush White House spokesman. “The media are increasingly adversarial. It’s always in the candidate’s interest to talk to the media on his terms and his timing. Why would he want to turn his agenda over to the press?”
Steve Schmidt, who managed John McCain’s 2008 campaign, also sees a risk of being knocked off message.
“If you field 75 questions a day, your chances of giving a bad answer are relatively high,” Schmidt told me. “If you give 74 good answers and slip up on one, guess which one will be on cable news and driven to the comedy shows?”
Instead, says Schmidt, he expects Romney to visit more venues like Jay Leno’s show, perhaps accepting an invitation from Saturday Night Live, “where he has an opportunity to connect with audiences or demographics where he’s weak.”
The Romney campaign says the candidate has been quite available in ways that don’t register on the national radar. Since March 30, spokeswoman Andrea Saul points out, Romney has done 21 interviews with local television stations. He has also done six cable interviews, five of which were with Fox News—two of them with Sean Hannity—and one with conservative CNBC commentator Larry Kudlow. Romney has also done 10 radio interviews with such conservative hosts as Hannity and Mike Huckabee.
During the primaries, when Newt Gingrich was snarling at John King and other debate moderators and Rick Santorum was accusing a New York Times reporter of peddling “bullshit,” Romney generally refrained from press bashing. He did grumble in a speech to newspaper editors that “in 2008, the coverage was about what I said in my speech. These days, it’s about what brand of jeans I am wearing and what I ate for lunch.”
But Romney took aim squarely at the Fourth Estate this week in an interview with Breitbart TV, founded by the late conservative provocateur Andrew Breitbart. After complaining about a “vast left-wing conspiracy” aligned against him, Romney said that “many in the media are inclined to do the president’s bidding.” That undoubtedly plays well with the Republican base, but sniping at the press may do little to attract the independent voters he needs in November.
Romney may well be frustrated by the rolling coverage of his wealth, his car elevator, his stumbles, his religion and, yes, that incident with the Irish setter. But he pays a price for his strained relations with the journalists who follow him around the country.
Most view him as stiff and awkward, and as a Beltway outsider, the former Massachusetts governor has given them few glimpses of the person behind the political mask. A subtle resentment factor may develop when reporters feel they’re being stiffed month after month.
“Keeping the press corps at arm’s length doesn’t pay off in the end,” says Doug Hattaway, a spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign. “They drive the storylines that define the conversation in social media and entertainment. You need to be in that game as well. You can’t ignore it.”
“Fundamentally, we weren’t going to be held to two sets of rules,” Schmidt says. “Obama gave very limited access to the press pool.”
The era of journalists sizing up candidates through background conversations is a casualty of today’s Twitter age, says Schmidt: “On the bus, the average age of reporters was 24, each with a handheld camera or cellphone looking to file the most politically damaging thing they could file that day.”
Fleischer says it is often a matter of not having a stray comment obscure your message. “If President Bush gave a speech and made news, we wanted that to stand on its own,” he says.
What’s more, “the press still has a hangover from the love affair in 2008, even though they’re not as in love with him as they used to be. It’s much easier to be Barack Obama than Mitt Romney when it comes to press coverage.”
But the inescapable fact is that Romney has a propensity for damaging slips of the tongue. The morning after the Florida primary, he stepped on his victory by telling CNN’s Soledad O’Brien that “I’m not concerned about the very poor.”
Such gaffes have undoubtedly made his team more cautious about putting Romney in television studios.
“They’re in a tough position because more exposure doesn’t necessarily help Romney—the more you see him, the less you like him,” Hattaway says.
Romney, who has not appeared on any Sunday program other than Fox News Sunday, clearly recognizes the need to broaden his approach. In that Breitbart TV interview, he said that Fox is watched by “the true believers.”
But he has had testy moments even on Rupert Murdoch’s network, such as when he grew irritated with anchor Bret Baier for pressing him last fall on his changing positions on several issues.
By November Romney will have to demonstrate that he can hit major-league pitching in less friendly confines than Sean Hannity’s set. How often he does that will depend on what he views as the risks and benefits of facing the vast left-wing conspiracy.
The upside of forging relationships with beat reporters, says Hattaway, is that “when they know the candidate as a person, they’re likely to be a little less cynical or snarky.”
Of course, Romney doesn’t have much of a cheering section even on the right. National Review editor Rich Lowry, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, columnist George Will, Red State blogger Erick Erickson and others have all displayed varying degrees of skepticism or hostility toward him. And the Romney camp has made little effort to court the conservative cognoscenti, with top adviser Stuart Stevens insisting they have no interest in running “a green-room campaign.”
Every presidential candidate, including Barack Obama in 2008, has wrestled with how much to deal with the traveling press corps. This was a particular dilemma for McCain, since the Arizona senator spent endless hours during his cash-strapped 2000 run for president chatting up reporters on his Straight Talk Express. That approach abruptly ended once he clinched the 2008 nomination.
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