Without digressing into a post on the health care act, the media was pretty bad in reporting on it.
But first, a song:
Consider that Congress and the president couldn't even get Republican Senator Olympia Snowe to vote with them. It would not have been difficult to craft a more centrist plan that wouldn't cost nearly as much yet address commonly accepted problems, and draw significant numbers of Republicans to support it. Instead, we have what we have. And it is a purely Democratic piece of legislation--which is all the fault of the Republicans, as the press releases cry.
The press went along with the defense of that line of defense by claiming that the Republicans are just reactionaries committed to saying "no"--and always have been:
PBS's Jim Lehrer on Tuesday wrongly accused Republicans of always being against major social legislation in this country including the Civil Rights Act, Social Security, and Medicare.
"[T]hrough history, recent history in particular, Republicans have opposed things like Social Security, Medicare, even civil rights legislation, but then, once they lost, they took some deep breaths and moved on, and then finally ended up embracing many of these major changes in -- in laws and in the way we do business here," the News Hour host amazingly said to his guest Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.).
It is not true, no matter how well a seasoned journalist like Lehrer remembers it. Read it all, as the saying goes. It even has voting numbers for those big pieces of legislation.
It is easy for the press to believe they are neutral and just reporting the facts--everyone they know is just like them, and so of course their views are the commonly accepted wisdom.
They just don't know what they don't know.
UPDATE: And they know who they sympathize with. It is unhinged to get angry at Santa Claus. Of course people get angry with evil people. Who wouldn't be mad?
I won't defend over-the-top Tea Partier actions that stem from that anger, but where was the "crisis of society" coverage during other campaigns of anger at people and policies our press didn't align themselves with?
UPDATE: More evil people who naturally just piss normal people off enough to incite or carry out violence. It's almost like the reporting class has biases, or something!
