What Do Journalists Think About The Debt Crisis? They Think Americans Got What They Deserved.

[rpannier]

This past Sunday, on "Meet The Press," panelist Tom Brokaw made a statement that was so utterly eye-popping that one had to conclude that it was either a clear sign that the man was showing symptoms of the early stages of senile dementia or had chosen to embark on a new career as an ignorant and horrible person:

This is not just a Democratic problem or a Republican problem -- the whole country was in on this to get us to this stage. Now, we're in a huge spending binge in this country. Everybody was along for the ride for a long, long time. President Bush started a war on a credit card. It's been going on for 10 years. We have prescription drug benefits for the seniors that are not paid for. SEC wasn't looking at what was happening on Wall Street. Democrats were pushing house ownership for people who didn't really deserve and shouldn't be buying houses. At the same time, they were not willing to step up on reforming Medicare and on Medicaid and Social Security. The country itself, they were spending money like crazy, and they were -- they'd gotten used to having Washington take care of whatever they needed.

snip

... Journalism is about choices. With millions of Americans out of work, the press decided to put all of its labor into creating the Beltway Deficit Feedback Loop. Because journalists had become so inured to being led by the nose by the important people to whom they needed "access," they abandoned the American people. Their excuse? "Well, no one in Congress is doing anything about unemployment, so what's to cover?"

snip

Well, as Rosen says, they should own this great mess. The media has ENDORSED: default threats on the American people as a means of making policy. The media has ENDORSED: a permanent state of governmental dysfunction. The media has ENDORSED: their own absolution in failing to adequately cover the unemployment crisis.

And their message to you? "Kiss our ass, America. You're on your own."

link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/01/journalists-debt-ceiling-crisis_n_915531.html

[butterfly77]

1. These lying sacks of shit..

are most of the problem,they throw out bullshit storylines for every issue and harp on them for months or until the next election. The media/RepubliCONS never stop campaigning.

They are the ones who enabled bush with their rah,rah,patriotic bullahit because they think that makes them look all "American". They enabled the teabaggers because a lot of them are the teabaggers.

They lie with and for the teabaggers as they keep pretending that Obama did all of the spending to get this deficit when Bush kept everything off of the books and Obama put everything on the books so that the "American people" could see what damage the republiCONS really did.

Now they want to tell us we are the problem.

[iamjoy]

2. Oh, But Haven't We?

Haven't the American people gotten what we deserved?

For thirty odd years, we have not demanded real wage increases. We have been satisfied with easy credit and cheap products manufactured overseas. We have complained about American jobs going away, but not really insisted our leaders come up with real solutions.

Many Americans have bought into the lie of supply-side economics. It's much easier than admitting that you have to pay for what you want. Other Americans still try to deny wanting anything from their government, but scream like little children if you try to take away the government programs that make their lives better. It's always raise some one else's taxes or cut some one else's spending, so finally Congress gets the "brilliant" idea that they won't raise any taxes or cut spending, they'll just borrow.

The Demographic puzzle that is Social Security and Medicare funding has been laid out for years. The proper solution would have been to put surpluses in a trust fund. Instead, we elected people who used it as a piggy bank for stuff that we couldn't have paid for otherwise.

So, in a sense, we have gotten what we deserved.

On the other hand, the deck is kind of stacked against the average person. Campaigns are expensive and the voices that fund them are more influential than ours. When you have those same interests helping deflect our blame from the real problem it's easy to see how average Americans have been scammed.

I think it began with Reagan. I wonder how many people who are miserable now and blame Dubya and/or Obama for our nation's sorry state, but still don't think Reagan was disastrous.

[xchrom]

3. +1