Atlantic (4/5/16)
The Washington press corps has gone into one of its great feeding frenzies over Bernie Sanders’ interview with New York Daily News. Sanders avoided specific answers to many of the questions posed, which the DC gang are convinced shows a lack of the knowledge necessary to be president.
Among the frenzied were the Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza, The Atlantic‘s David Graham and Vanity Fair‘s Tina Nguyen, with CNN‘s Dylan Byers telling about it all. Having read the transcript of the interview, I would say that I certainly would have liked to see more specificity in Sanders’ answers, but I’m an economist. And some of the complaints are just silly.
When asked how he would break up the big banks, Sanders said he would leave that up to the banks. That’s exactly the right answer. The government doesn’t know the most efficient way to break up JP Morgan; JP Morgan does. If the point is to downsize the banks, the way to do it is to give them a size cap and let them figure out the best way to reconfigure themselves to get under it.
The same applies to Sanders not knowing the specific statute for prosecuting banks for their actions in the housing bubble. Knowingly passing off fraudulent mortgages in a mortgage-backed security is fraud. Could the Justice Department prove this case against high-level bank executives? Who knows, but they obviously didn’t try.
And the fact that Sanders didn’t know the specific statute—who cares? How many people know the specific statute for someone who puts a bullet in someone’s head? That’s murder, and if a candidate for office doesn’t know the exact title and specifics of her state murder statute, it hardly seems like a big issue.
Vanity Fair (4/5/16)
There is a very interesting contrast in media coverage of House Speaker Paul Ryan. In Washington policy circles, Ryan is treated as a serious budget wonk. How many reporters have written about the fact this serious budget wonk has repeatedly proposed eliminating most of the federal government? This was not an offhand gaffe that Ryan made when caught in a bad moment; this was in his budgets that he pushed through as chair of the House Budget Committee.
This fact can be found in the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) analysis of Ryan’s budget (page 16, Table 2). The analysis shows Ryan’s budget shrinking everything other than Social Security and Medicare and other healthcare programs to 3.5 percent of GDP by 2050. This is roughly the current size of the military budget, which Ryan has indicated he wants to increase. That leaves zero for everything else.
Included in everything else is the Justice Department, the National Park System, the State Department, the Department of Education, the Food and Drug Administration, Food Stamps, the National Institutes of Health and just about everything else that the government does. Just to be clear, CBO did this analysis under Ryan’s supervision. He never indicated any displeasure with its assessment. In fact, he boasted about the fact that CBO showed his budget paying off the national debt.
So there you have it. The DC press corps that goes nuts because Bernie Sanders doesn’t know the name of the statute under which he would prosecute bank fraud thinks a guy who calls for eliminating most of the federal government is a great budget wonk.
Economist Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. A version of this post originally appeared on CEPR’s blog Beat the Press (4/5/16).
>> That’s exactly the right answer.
Yes … that’s Bernie.
What this is showing day after day is that our democracy
is dependent on solid clear information, but also on honest
brokers for that information, and expert people to interpret
and explain the issues for those who do not get this and can
be led astray by the disingenuousness of professional
propagandists that exploit the system.
This is very serious, and just shows Bernie is even more
correct when he speaks about Citizens United, campaign
finance reform and campaign donations. There is a lot of
work to be done before the US starts to represent its people
in a way in line with the way we talk about human rights
when we apply it to other countries.
Big Media is beholden to its financial bottom line, not the truth or “facts on the ground.” Without honest journalism, a free and open society cannot exist. Witness where the USA is now, and where it appears to be headed.
Bernie Sanders, while great (I hope), is a passing personality. The “man behind the curtain” is media ownership and the result is spin, spin, spin.
MAINSTREAM MEDIA — ALL NGO’s
All of mainstream media being owned/funded by the corporate rich, surely they operate at zero profit to keep competition at a minimum, to keep their propaganda from being diluted.
It’s obvious the status quo and their MSM don’t understand Democratic Socialism.
Bernie Sanders is only pointing the way. He does not have specifics because he believes it’s not up to him to make unilateral decsions. He is not trying to be a benevolent despot, like the presidents who have come before him. He wants the people to lead the government. That is who will create the specifics.
Sanders wasn’t specific, because he doesn’t have specific answers, why else would a politician fail to answer a question over specifics.?
Is this article about Paul Ryan or Bernie’s lack of knowledge? I couldn’t tell. I realize that there are many in the media that go out of their way to protect Bernie and cover for him. But, face facts, Bernie could not answer the questions. As for the murder analogy, all Bernie would have had to say was “I don’t know the statute, but it’s murder. I know that it’s murder.” The point is that Bernie attacks Hillary on these issues and indicates to his supporters and the country that he has a different plan. Well, if you go out and say you have a plan, then you’d better know what the plan is. Period. The media shouldn’t be covering up for Bernie’s lack of knowledge, especially of his own plans.
Dean Baker, even in your appropriate and overdue rebuttal to the MSM reaction – and it’s more a matter of mischaracterization of the entire Daily News interview than it is “spinning itself silly,” you yourself make a statement that imho grossly mischaracterizes the interview:
“Sanders avoided specific answers to many of the questions posed, which the DC gang are convinced shows a lack of the knowledge necessary to be president.”
That’s your second sentence. And I believe it to be unsupportable. There were not “many” such questions and he didn’t “avoid” either. He stated openly on 4 occasions within broader contexts that he “didn’t know” something – and imho each instance was reasonable. You do already flesh out two of them, but that sentence of yours gives a very misleading impression that he was being some sort of typical politician declining to answer or claiming or confessing ignorance – that is absolutely not the case.
Others should listen to the interview for yourselves and/or read the interview transcript.
Curious that one of the 4 “not knowings” had to do with Bernie saying he hadn’t thought about which prison he’d send a captured terrorist to: odd that no MSMer seemed to “spin itself silly” over that one.
However, most egregious was that the Daily News turned a very fleshed-out full and circumspect answer about Sandy Hook lawsuit matters into a completely vile and unfounded cover “shame” when there was a reasoned, very concrete answer about his position – namely that he would have banned the very guns that caused the massacre long ago – voting to ban them since 1988 – whereas holding a manufacturer now accountable for the deranged use by a 20 year old of the weapon that should have been outlawed but wasn’t – and included massacring his own mother who had legally purchased the weapons. It is an absolutely reasonable position – to me, a gun control advocate – that if you want these incidents eliminated, you ban the semiautomatic weapons, you don’t after the fact sue the manufacturer that the nation legally authorized in absentia of such a ban, to keep making them unless, as Sanders’ position notes, you can show that the sale of the weapons in this case knowingly put them in the hands of a dangerous threat to society.
I skimmed through the transcript, but didn’t watch the video. I thought Sanders didn’t come out as badly as the mainstream media made it out to be.
Sure, Sanders could have been more coherent in a few of his answers. Sure, he should have updated himself on how to ride the New York Subway. But he didn’t bumble big time.
On the other hand, the Daily News interviewers bumbled on some of their points.
I doubt Clinton would have been grilled for this long by the mainstream media.
These are Democrat primary voters, I do not think that these tactics will work. Clinton supporters themselves are very experienced with sorting out the details of precisely these kind of false outrages, and anyone likely to support Bernie Sanders even more so.
Sanders is simply a road to a Republican president. Anyone who can’t see that, is blind. All the media forces are arrayed against her, and I mean “all.” And not surprisingly, no one on FAIR is able to see this.
Allow me to suggest that it’s Ms. Clinton who would more likely lose in the general election. (kindly check the polls) As to the “media forces” being arrayed against Clinton: Your joking right? The media treats Sanders as if he didn’t exist mentioning him only when forced to and then all that they do is misrepresent what he says. And, of course, they never miss a chance to get the word “socialists” front and center.
Great article “Fair” if we could only get this article out into a large format that addresses more people sine Ryan is running for president now.
Media are covering for Sanders precisely by intentionally not showing him much attention, by inventing a narrative of his superiority, authenticity and purtiy, and by refusing to cover stories about him that are damaging, such as the one where he sought a meeting with the Pope.