The media are lobbing softballs
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As post-mortems on the breakdown of the deficit-reduction "supercommittee" finger the president and Congress, the press -- particularly broadcast media -- have escaped blame for its failure to provide the news the American public needs to understand what went, and is going, wrong.
My gripe is not only with the shallow, horse-race reportage of the committee's work, or even with the partisan divide among the cable talking heads, but also with how the major network folks can't even pull off a decent, basic journalism interview.
A Q-and-A with a television correspondent has become the easiest public relations ticket going for today's politicians. The questioners lob softballs, inviting not only obfuscation, but lies that go unchallenged. To present themselves as fair and balanced, they then invite similarly murky pronouncements, counter-lies and name-calling from the opposition. Missing, though, is truth and evidence -- the stuff that used to comprise watchdog journalism.
Christiane Amanpour's "This Week" on ABC provided a glaring example in an interview this month with Speaker of the House John Boehner, R-Ohio. Early on, Ms. Amanpour invited Mr. Boehner to explain his opposition to increasing taxes on the wealthy. Mr. Boehner responded that the primary targets of these taxes would be "small business people ... the very people that we're hoping will reinvest in our economy and create jobs." He argued that the nation has "done all this stimulus spending the last couple of years, and clearly it has not worked."
Ms. Amanpour let those claims pass as fact without asking the necessary follow-up questions: Why have these businesses not provided more jobs in the current tax environment? And what is the evidence that stimulus spending of the last couple years did not work when the Congressional Budget Office estimated that it had created 3.3 million jobs?
Ms. Amanpour moved on to the prospect of the "rather draconian" cuts, including some to the Defense Department, if the supercommittee failed. She did not ask Mr. Boehner about reports that some members of his caucus intend to pursue legislation to avoid Defense Department budget slashing, but she did let him go on about how important it is "for our government to solve our deficit and our debt problem."
First Published November 30, 2011 12:00 am
