BANANA REPUBLIC PRESS CORPS! If you don’t like the facts in the New York Times, you should just wait a while: // link // print // previous // next //
MONDAY, JULY 25, 2011
Name that Murdoch aide/The Times does: On Friday, we asked you to name the Murdoch aide who sat right behind the great man at last week’s hearing. That aide is a former Bloomberg aide; he scored his big pay-day last fall.
For the New York Times’ (wide-eyed) account, click here. More on this striking story at the end of the week.
The nature of manufactured consent: Yesterday, the silly-bills were out in force in the New York Times “Sunday Review.”
As the nation slid toward the sea, Frank Bruni wasted everyone’s time with worthless predictions about who will win the GOP nomination. Mostly, though, he frisked Michele Bachmann—or at least, he pretended.
Dumbly, he started like this:
BRUNI (7/24/11): Michele Bachmann is the gift that never stops giving.
One week she’s confusing the Iowa birthplaces of John Wayne and John Wayne Gacy, two men separated by a bit more than two syllables. The next she’s signing a conservative pledge that contains language extolling the family values of slavery. Her library evidently differs from most. It stocks “Uncle Tom’s Little House on the Prairie.”
In that opening sentence, Bruni expressed the ethos of the Potemkin press corps—the chuckling belief that news events must be judged by how easy they are to write about. From there, he turned to an easy but bogus claim. Did Bachmann really “confus[e] the Iowa birthplaces of John Wayne and John Wayne Gacy?” We know of no reason to think so, although it gives dumb bunnies like Bruni an easy opening laugh. (In fact, Gacy was born in Illinois. The error there is Bruni’s, weeks later.) As Bachmann later explained, without contradiction, John Wayne’s parents did live in Waterloo, Bachmann’s home town; they moved away before Wayne was born. There is no evidence that Gacy was involved in Bachmann’s pointless error. But dumb-asses must be served.
By the way: In a long, utterly pointless column about Bachmann’s headaches and alleged prospects, Bruni is too dumb to mention a highly significant fact: Bachmann has pledged that she will never vote to raise the debt limit, a truly ridiculous posture. (We’ll guess Bruni hasn’t heard.)
In this utterly pointless column, Times readers are handed a pointless laugh at Bachmann’s expense—and they’re spared from hearing about her truly ridiculous policy stance. So it goes when hambones like Bruni are handed our highest press platforms.
For our money, Nicholas Kristof was fairly silly yesterday too, although, as always, he did a better job posing.
Kristof started with a serious topic; he made a serious claim. We face a “national security threat,” he said—a threat which is coming from “our own domestic extremists:”
KRISTOF (7/24/11): House Republicans start from a legitimate concern about rising long-term debt. Politicians are usually focused only on short-term issues, so it would be commendable to see the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party seriously focused on containing long-term debt. But on this issue, many House Republicans aren’t serious, they’re just obsessive in a destructive way. The upshot is that in their effort to protect the American economy from debt, some of them are willing to drag it over the cliff of default.
We’re inclined to agree with that highlighted claim, and it thrilled Steve Benen, who got busy kissing big keister. But as always, Kristof was very careful in the things he said. Most notably, he failed to name the names of those House Republicans who he described as “domestic extremists.” In this failure, he handed Bachmann her second free pass of the morning!
Should readers know that Bachmann is one of these people? Yes, they should, but Kristof is a very careful player—and careful players avoid naming names of very powerful players. Indeed, Kristof couldn’t even sustain a full column on this critical topic. Before he was done, he wasted your time with this feel-good, paint-by-the-numbers crap about the need to help low-income kids improve their reading.
In this passage, Kristof doesn’t have any idea if what he’s saying is true. Almost surely, it isn’t:
KRISTOF: While one danger to national security comes from the risk of default, another comes from overzealous budget cuts—especially in education, at the local, state and national levels. When we cut to the education bone, we’re not preserving our future but undermining it.
It should be a national disgrace that the United States government has eliminated spending for major literacy programs in the last few months, with scarcely a murmur of dissent.
Consider Reading Is Fundamental, a 45-year-old nonprofit program that has cost the federal government only $25 million annually. It’s a public-private partnership with 400,000 volunteers, and it puts books in the hands of low-income children. The program helped four million American children improve their reading skills last year. Now it has lost all federal support.
“They have made a real difference for millions of kids,” Kyle Zimmer, founder of First Book, another literacy program that I’ve admired, said of Reading Is Fundamental. “It is a tremendous loss that their federal support has been cut. We are going to pay for these cuts in education for generations.”
Did Reading is Fundamental really “help four million American children improve their reading skills last year?” More to the point, do you think Kristof has any idea if that claim is accurate? People! Of course he doesn’t! But in the second half of his column, Kristof finds a noble way to avoid naming Bachmann’s name—and he builds his second column in the past two week around fatuous, feel-good, know-nothing claims in favor of strong education.
You can write columns like that in your sleep; even Bruni could do it! People who care about low-income kids should be sickened by this rotten man’s relentless know-nothing, feel-good posturing—by this big hustler’s endless pose.
The Times op-ed columnists frittered along, with Friedman calling for a third party and Dowd off frisking the priests once again. But to gaze on the soul of manufactured consent, consider Steven Pearlstein’s column in yesterday’s Washington Post.
Pearlstein did discuss the budget debate—and he helped manufacture consent:
PEARLSTEIN (7/24/11): Here in the United States, the urgency of the budget deficit has been apparent for five years at least. And by last December, with a newly radicalized group of Republicans taking over the House, the Senate in perpetual stalemate and a wounded center-left Democrat in the White House, it was pretty clear where the center of political gravity was to be found.
Into that breach stepped a bipartisan blue-ribbon commission with a politically and economically credible plan to right-size the Pentagon and the civilian agencies, slow the growth of entitlements and reform the tax code in a way that lowered rates while raising a modest amount of money. Budget experts agreed it was pretty much what needed to be done.
Yet the only ones willing to accept that obvious reality were a bipartisan gang of six brave senators whose efforts got a cold shoulder from the same president and House speaker who just in the past several weeks were willing to acknowledge it was the way to go. By that time, however, the momentum had been lost and positions hardened to the point that reasonable compromise now appears impossible. Treasury can probably kiss its triple-A rating goodbye.
Referring to the Simpson-Bowles commission, Pearlstein said it was “obvious” that we need to “reform the tax code in a way that lower[s] rates while raising a modest amount of money.” A person may think that’s the right way to go—but what on earth makes it “obvious?” Given the massive growth of income at the top of the income scale; given the historically low rates of taxation visited on the highest earners; given the size of projected deficits; why would someone thing it was “obvious” that we need to lower rates, thus producing modest amounts of new revenue? Why couldn’t someone think that we need to “reform the tax code in a way that raises a substantial amount of money, especially from the highest earners?”
Many people do think that, of course—but their views will rarely appear in the upper-end press corps. Readers will rarely hear that such policies are even an option. This is how press corps elites manufacture consent. They simply air-brush options away, not unlike Brother Stalin.
As Pearlstein helped manufacture consent, Bruni was clowning around about Bachmann and Kristof was playing things very safe. (He favors the interests of low-income kids.) No one mentioned this manufactured consent and none of these tools ever will.
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