Media Matters: Coverage of economy repeats Iraq mistakes

[babylonsister]

Fri, Jan 16, 2009 7:05pm ET

Media Matters: Coverage of economy repeats Iraq mistakes

by Jamison Foser


Barack Obama is still nearly 100 hours away from becoming the 44th president of the United States, and already some in the media are looking ahead to the next election.

CNN senior political analyst Bill Schneider wonders, "How long will the voters give President Barack Obama to turn the economy around?" Looking back at Presidents Reagan and Clinton, Schneider finds that "Obama can expect midterm grades in two years, and final grades at the end of four. Another conclusion: Grades are based on many subjects, not just the economy."

Not exactly groundbreaking stuff -- at least not to anyone familiar with the fact that the United States has congressional ("midterm") elections every two years and presidential elections every four. So why would Schneider bother with such banal "analysis"? Maybe because the elite media can't help but approach serious policy questions from a purely political point of view -- even when there just isn't anything interesting to say about the politics of the matter.

The New York Times' Jeff Zeleny recently offered the warning that if Obama's stimulus plan "doesn't work out, he may very well be a one-term president." That sounds reasonable, right? After all, as Zeleny points out, "It's hard to imagine that he could be reelected if the economy's in the exact same position four years from now."

Then again, who could have predicted eight years ago that a man who became president by judicial fiat after he lost the popular vote could ignore warnings that Al Qaeda was "determined to strike in U.S.," watch exactly that happen on his watch, lie the nation into war in a nation that didn't attack us, divert attention away from capturing Osama bin Laden, and run up massive deficits by cutting taxes for his rich cronies would be re-elected after all that?

How many people predicted in 1966 that Lyndon Johnson wouldn't even run for re-election two years later? Remember how quickly the news media wrote off Bill Clinton after the 1994 midterm elections, only to see him win 370 electoral votes just two years later? (Or how they wrote him off in New Hampshire in 1992? Or after he wrapped up the Democratic nomination? Or at about a dozen other times during that campaign?)

Come to think of it, how many New York Times reporters predicted two years ago that Barack Obama would win the presidency in 2008?

Point being: Political fortunes can change in a hurry, and the media pundits are nearly as bad at recognizing that simple fact as they are at making predictions. Maybe it would be best to lay off the speculation that Obama won't win a second term -- at least until he begins his first. The time they save could be used to provide some much-needed balance to news reports about the current economic crisis.

more...

http://mediamatters.org/items/200901160012?newsref=www.eschatonblog.com

[hay rick]

1. MSM media anti-populism

from the article:

<snip>

Not only do the news media all but ignore the possibility that reforms that provide health care to millions more Americans could also reduce our overall spending, they typically assume the opposite is true. When covering health-care proposals, reporters often behave as though the single most important question is how much the proposal will cost and how it will be paid for -- never considering the possibility that, done right, health-care reform could pay for itself, with money left to spare. Throughout last year's presidential primaries, that was the health-care question the Democratic candidates got most often -- how would they pay for their plans?

On the other hand, the media tend to buy into the Republicans claims that tax cuts magically pay for themselves. The presidential primary debates offer a striking illustration of this contrast: Democratic candidates were asked how they would pay for their health-care plans, while Republicans were not asked what programs they would cut in order to pay for their tax cuts. To the contrary, at one debate hosted by MSNBC, moderator Chris Matthews invited the Republican candidates to each name a tax cut they favored in addition to making the Bush tax cuts permanent. Rather than pressing the GOP hopefuls on how they would pay for making Bush's tax cuts permanent, Matthews encouraged them to propose additional unpaid-for tax cuts.

<snip>

Good stuff. One basic fact that NEVER gets mentioned in on air health policy debates: we spend approximately TWICE as much per capita as our European peers on health-care. For that premium we get slightly lower life expectancies and higher infant mortality rates- as well as legions of the uninsured. Oh, the wonders of the developed world's most privatized health care system...

What to do about the elephant in the room? Ignore it, of course.

[babylonsister]

2. We can't afford to ignore it while we do. Not the brightest, are we. nt