FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
“The question of whether to expand or cut Social Security is a matter of values. We are the wealthiest nation in the world. We’re at the wealthiest moment of our history…. If we want to expand benefits, we can do so responsibly.”
Reporting on Mitch McConnell’s threat to Social Security didn’t include any questioning of media’s own role in laying the groundwork for claims that Social Security is a “controversial” or “troubled” program in need of “addressing.”
The average reader would come away thinking some dispassionate government body was issuing a warning about Social Security and Medicare based on verifiable and objective fact, as they would issue a warning about the Zika virus or an oncoming hurricane.
The Washington Post calling for “reform” of Social Security and Medicare is a bit like the morning coffee, although somewhat less pleasant.
The Washington Post editorial page decided to lecture readers on the meaning of progressivism. The villains are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who, it tells us, “are embracing principles that are not genuinely progressive.”
“When there’s not enough demand in the economy, the government absolutely has the responsibility to run large deficits, because it has to make up for the shortfall in demand elsewhere.”
Donald Trump is now claiming that if he doesn’t win, the thing must be rigged. It’s concerning that his supporters may believe that, but also concerning that others might imagine that the fact that Trump mentions the idea of voting improprieties must mean there is no such thing.
The fascinating part of all this concern with “stealing from future generations” is it almost never includes military spending or the trillions in offshore tax shelters. Even if one accepts the claim that Social Security and Medicare are urgent issues “bankrupting” our country, it’s curious why other things that also cost trillions don’t appear as part of that conversation.
The New York Times ran a major news story on a study by Citigroup that was designed to scare people about the state of public pensions and encourage them to trust more of their retirement savings to the financial industry.
While the advocates of a policy certainly have the right to assign whatever name they like to the policy, it seems a bit extreme to criticize its opponents for using the term that advocates themselves had used in the recent past.
The moral is that the government is part of the economy, whether George Will likes it or not.
Clearly there are judges who are too lenient and accept claims that probably should be denied; however, there are also judges who are too harsh and reject claims that should probably be approved.
McClatchy wants us to be alarmed that Obama’s budget plan would move the federal government’s share of the economy from 20.9 percent today to 22.2 percent in 2024–a trivial redistribution of what is expected to be a much larger economic pie.
Pundit David Brooks thinks the way to fix American democracy is by having less democracy. Let elites dictate policy and have pundits cheer them on!
Veteran CBS anchor Bob Schieffer slams the influence of big money in politics. But when he says he wants more bipartisanship, what does he really mean?
Pundits were mad about the news that Barack Obama was backing away from “chained CPI” Social Security cuts. An announcement about troop cuts caused some reporters to panic. And Arizona’s discriminatory SB 1062 is given the “some say” media treatment.
Media comments after the Obama administration backed off attempts to cut Social Security benefits exhibited a curious notion about where the “middle” is and what “majority support” means.
After reporting that “the government has trouble determining exactly which Americans are deceased,” the Washington Post notes, almost as an afterthought, that the “vast majority” of deaths are recorded without incident.
60 Minutes was so excited to hear that its report made their audience eager to inform on their neighbors and family members, it sounded like the viewer’s mailbag at the end of an East German TV news show.
CBS should have tried to settle whether there’s any actual evidence that widespread cheating of the disability program is going on. CBS was either uninterested in that, or decided that its stacked panel of talking heads provided the answer they wanted to hear.
