651 Special report: In search of a winning movement! PART 1—GREGORY FAILS (permalink): Life can be sweet at NBC News! David Gregory was apparently being paid $2 million per year before he took over at Meet the Press.

For that kind of scratch, you’d think a nation could at least get minimal competence.

At a minimum, a Sunday host should challenge gross misstatements of fact. But alas! That didn’t happened when a gross misstatement was made on Sunday’s program.

The statement was made by Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, one of Gregory’s pundit guests. Castellanos uncorked a major groaner about the fate of Medicare:

CASTELLANOS (5/29/11): Republicans have a much better hand [for the 2012 elections], I think, than we're giving them credit for...We just got a heads-up on Medicare. And here's what I think Republicans are going to say: “You love your Medicare, seniors, don't you? You count on it. It helps you sleep good at night. Good. Did you know it's $35 trillion in debt? Our economy's going broke and dragging Medicare along with it. In a little over three thousand days, CBO says your Medicare's going to end.”

Sorry. Three thousand days is about eight years—and the CBO hasn’t said that Medicare “is going to end” at that time. In fact, the CBO hasn’t said anything dimly resembling that statement.

Gregory should have challenged Castellanos—but he just kept going, like nothing had happened. But then, NBC’s money-man also stared into air when David Brooks uttered the following:

BROOKS: I mean, this is a test of national character. Do the American people understand that Medicare is going to be bankrupt on its current trajectory, and can elites like McConnell and Schumer actually create a deal? I didn't see much hope today, from what the two were saying. I saw a little movement, maybe on both sides, but obviously a long way still to go.

Is Medicare “going to be bankrupt on its current trajectory?” Castellanos’ misstatement was wilder. But “bankrupt” can be a highly misleading term—and Brooks’ statement piggy-backed on the earlier claim that Medicare would be gone in eight years.

Welcome to the wonderful world defined by Millionaire Pundit Values! In large part, we started THE DAILY HOWLER in reaction to the press corps’ bungled discussion of Medicare issues back in the mid-1990s. At that time, pundits struggled with a sematic puzzle: Was the Gingrich Congress proposing “Medicare cuts?” Or would its proposal simply “slow the rate at which the program would grow?” For two years, hapless pundits floundered and flailed with this fiendish conundrum. The press corps was completely overmatched by this basic question.

Today, Medicare has come center stage again. Once again, major pundits don’t seem to be up to the challenge of conducting a clear discussion.

Let’s be clear about the problems dogging this new discussion:

Let’s be frank. One the one hand, our millionaire pundits just aren’t very smart. Ineptitude is always part of the equation when they attempt to discuss major issues. In this case, how well could Gregory and his guests explain what the CBO has actuallysaid? In fairness, we’ll guess that most of our major pundits really couldn’t explain such a matter, any more than they could handle that semantic debate long ago.

On the other hand, ineptitude isn’t the only problem. Mainstream pundits also tend to be in thrall to prevailing views of Medicare which have emerged from well-funded right-wing spin tanks over the past thirty years. The frameworks these spin machines have churned infest most mainstream discussions. That may explain why Ruth Marcus said the following on Sunday’s program, even though she was booked on the show as a center-left guest.

Please note: Gregory’s question didn’t exactly make sense. But Marcus got the gist:

GREGORY: So Ruth Marcus, what wins here? Bold leadership on Medicare and the argument that the Democrats won't do something courageous, or the Democrats who say, “Hey, those guys want to take away my Medicare?”

MARCUS: I regret to inform you that I think it's the latter. And I think when you were asking Senator McConnell if Medicare was the new third rail of American politics, I think the question was wrong in a sense because it's the old third rail of American politics.

GREGORY: Mm-hmm.

MARCUS: This play has been run time after time. If you go back and look at the quotes from President Clinton back when he needed to win re-election [in 1996], they sound a lot like the quotes from Democrats today about “Don't let those Republicans take away your Medicare.” The difference is that the debt is bigger, the deficit is bigger, the gap is bigger, and the, the situation is more dire. But I think that, sadly, the lesson of New York 26 is "Mediscare" works.

For unexplained reasons, Marcus was “sad” to see the Democratic argument work in that recent House election. To Marcus, the sad lesson of that campaign is that “Medi-scare” always works. Beyond that, she plainly implied that President Clinton engaged in “Medi-scare” tactics in the mid-1990s. Rather plainly, she implied that Clinton, not Gingrich, had been the agent of bad faith in that endless, press-bollixed debate.

Within the “mainstream press corps,” that’s the way the “center-left” thinks about issues like Medicare.

In fact, no one corrected Castellanos’ howler on Meet the Press this Sunday. David Gregory didn’t speak, but neither did Marcus, and neither did Brooks and neither did Harold Ford. Groaning misstatements about Medicare were the norm in the mid-1990s. Today, the program has come center stage again, and misstatement remains the norm.

Gregory failed to do his job. But all week long we’ll be asking a question:

What about liberals and progressives? Sure, we screech and yell a lot. (We didn’t do that in the mid-1990s.) But when it comes to topics like this, have we ever done our jobs over the past twenty years?

Tomorrow—part 2: Schumer was really quite clear