As the government shutdown began, the corporate U.S. media played its usual unhelpful role by not taking sides in what was clearly a one-sided argument.
“In shutdown blame game, Democrats and Republicans united: It’s the other side’s fault,” declared Washington Post’s headline. “Shutdown: Obama and Republicans Trade Blame as Deadline is Crossed,” TIME unhelpfully noted, sounding much like the pretend news outlet Fox “News”, which declared similarly “Partial shutdown begins: Can Congress, White House compromise?”
Never mind that Democrats had already compromised by agreeing to “Sequestration” level budget cuts, the only question was how would the two sides “compromise” on the Affordable Care Act which had nothing to do with the budget resolution itself, but has long been a bete noir for Republicans.
Meanwhile, the non-U.S. news outlet, The Guardian in the UK, accurately reported that the U.S. government shutdown occurred because Democrats refused to give into the Tea Party’s extortion-like demands. Specifically, they wrote, it occurred after “Republicans staged a series of last-ditch efforts to use a once-routine budget procedure to force Democrats to abandon their efforts to extend U.S. health insurance.”
Was that so hard? Apparently so, for the U.S. corporate media anyway…
Applying what Bill Moyers, in Moyers on America describes as the “charade of ‘fair and balanced,'” or what Eric Boehlert of Media Matters and The Atlantic’s James Fallows refer to as a “false equivalency,” major mainstream U.S. media outlets obscured the simple and straightforward facts of the Republican shutdown of the U.S. government.
Bereft of any historical context, e.g., what Boehlert describes as a “continuum” of past GOP “obstructionism” at the federal level or what The BRAD BLOG described as “several decades of GOP hostage taking in” California, the corporate-owned U.S. media largely failed to apply, in its shutdown coverage, what Moyers insists is the essence of “objective journalism,” to wit, “describing the object being reported on, including the malfeasance, deceits, hypocrisy and lies of powerful people.”
Although any attempt to blame the shutdown on President Barack Obama’s unwillingness to renegotiate the already passed and Supreme Court-upheld Affordable Care Act (ACA) is akin to blaming a bank teller for her own murder because she refused to hand over money in her cash register to a bank robber, that is precisely what has transpired in much of the MSM’s infuriatingly inaccurate “both sides are to blame” coverage of the ‘Tea Party’ shutdown of the U.S. government.
As Boehlert suggests, in the above-cited Media Matters article, not only does the MSM’s “false equivalency” coverage reflect a failure of journalism, but it can also be blamed, in part, for the shutdown itself. The corporate media’s failure to accurately describe the source of the shutdown has “emboldened” right-wing “radical Republicans”, who, Boehler contends, depend upon not only the right-wing echo chamber but the MSM to obscure their culpability. Boehlert’s reference to “radical Republicans” is appropriate, since, even in the House, not all Republicans support these extortion-like tactics.
“I have spoken with many of my Republican colleagues,” Rep. Julia Brownley (D-CA) wrote in an Oct. 3 letter to the author, “and am absolutely certain that we have the votes to pass the Senate-approved ‘clean’ continuing resolution — if Speaker [John] Boehner would only bring up the bill for a vote to allow the House to work its will.”
In his Al Jazeera piece, “Shutdown coverage fails Americans“, Dan Froomkin (formerly of the Washington Post) describes the latest application of the “fair and balanced” charade as not only a journalistic failure, but a “failure of democracy”:
When it comes to the conduct of the elected members of a legislative body, there is perhaps no more extreme tactic than that of holding a figurative gun to the head of the government and the world’s economy by threatening to either shut down the government or forcing it to default on its financial obligations by refusing to raise the debt ceiling in order to extract a concession on a particular issue.
But where The New York Times accurately described it as “a Republican ransom note” filled with “extortionist demands,” Jonathan Karl of ABC News denigrated similar apt and accurate descriptors coming from the President and both Democratic and independent Senators. Calling ‘Tea Party’ hostage taking “blackmail” or a form of “extortion,” according to Karl’s mindless mumblings, amounts to nothing more than “name calling;” a part of what Karl described as “Washington dysfunction at its worst.” That dysfunction, Karl suggests, includes not only “unreasonable demands” but a “refusal to negotiate” while, in the words of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), ‘Tea Party’ radicals are holding a gun to their heads.
“Both sides,” CNN’s Chris Cuomo proclaimed, “seem to be saying, forget that constitutional responsibility to pass laws to fund the government.”
Both sides? Neither Cuomo nor anyone else has pointed to a single instance in which either Democrats or independents have threatened to shut down the government or refuse to raise the debt ceiling in order to obtain, defeat or repeal a particular law. (They also seem to have difficulty pointing out that the Democrats already compromised, for their part, by agreeing to budget levels that include the radical “sequestration” cuts forced on them by intransigent Republican demands from previous “negotiations”.)
“We count on the press…to hold the powerful accountable,” Froomkin aptly observed. “That requires calling out political leaders when they transgress or fail to meet commonly agreed-upon standards: when they are corrupt, when they deceive, when they break the rules and refuse to govern.”
In its “both sides are to blame” coverage, however, the MSM has not merely, as Froomkin suggests, failed to live up to its Fourth Estate obligations of insuring an informed electorate. “Both sides are to blame” coverage in the face of irrefutable evidence that only one side is to blame, is nothing less than an act of deceit — one that only serves to further embolden the worst elements of the deceivers.
uhhh, both parties got the country into the debt mess and this has been brewing for decades. how many times do we want them to raise the debt limit? eventually it has to be paid back. i guess there’s more people, more information, more technology, more science, more everything…and not enough money to go around. maybe the US needs a fundamental restructuring of its economic system.
You tell em Brad..
I do not like Green Eggs and Ham
I do not like these games, ‘Gd’dmn
Speaker Bohener, at least put up a clean CR so your own party can vote on it. My goodness. This is beyond criminal to the American people at this point.
Bhomas Trown said @ 1:
Uhhh…what “debt mess”? And what does the Republican shut down of the federal government over the Affordable Care Act have to do with it? In any way, shape or form?
As many times as is legally required to ensure that we pay what we’ve already agreed to pay. That said, they can raise it only one more time ever by passing a law that says, “the debt accrued by the U.S. Government shall always be paid, no matter how much it is” and do away with the idiocy of a “debt ceiling”.
But, again, the current Republican government shutdown has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the debt limit. You do know that, right?
Actually, there’s plenty of money to go around. We are still the richest nation on earth. The only question is why we blow so much of it on shit we don’t need, that doesn’t actually provide for the general welfare of the citizenry. Suggestion: Start with the largest single expenditure amounting to some 56% of the federal budget and cut it in half. Tomorrow. Put one half of that into social programs and the other half to pay off the debt. Problem solved…Though NONE of that has ANYTHING to do with why Republicans decided to shut down the government and make our debt problems — if we even have such a problem — even worse than it already is.
Okay, you and they are welcome to fight for such a thing, but the Republican government shutdown is not about that in any way, shape or form. It’s about Republicans being babies, sore losers, and trying to take it out on America’s representative democratic system of governance.
Chas Holman @ 2:
I’ll do my best! But, just to be clear (since I think he’s off the grid for a few days), Ernie wrote this one! 🙂
We have not had a fair and balanced media since Fox started calling everyone else the left wing media. Then the media started trying to prove Fox wrong by having the majority of Republicans on their talk shows. What a joke to say the left wing media. When more people say that President Obama was the cause of the late response to Katrina than Bush should tell people that about 90% of the people have their head up their behinds and haven’t a clue to what is happening in Washington. It’s hard to believe how many vote against their own best interests. Propaganda works and it is sure working in the United States.
Exactly! Great post, Ernie! This shit drives me crazy, too.
I think another aspect of this rampant media dysfunction is a widespread inability to aggressively deconstruct talking points as they come out of the mouths of these ass-backwards hypocrites. Even Chris Hayes, in my opinion one of the brightest of the mainstream journalists, all too often lets the far right get away with their memes. He’ll object and clarify momentarily, but then often sort of leave the mindfucking meme as a repeated leftover when the ideologue of the day just keeps spewing it out. I do not think this is helpful to the overall integrity of public discourse. I know it doesn’t help me.
Somebody smart once said something to the effect that–you let me frame the argument, and I’ll win every time. It would be really nice if pundits would develop the rhetorical skills to deconstruct false frames in the moment and on their feet. As it is, about the only practitioners of this rare and highly desirable skill are a couple of comedians on late night TV.
Glenn Greenwald can do it. Here’s a satisfying series of exchanges between him and a BBC host.
http://www.commondreams.org/video/2013/10/04-1
Brad can do it, too. Wish we could see him more on TV.
(tiny proofreading note–In the 1st sentence of the post above “it” should be “its”.)
Seems to me, both parties, not just one, agreed to the
sequestration. It was not an agreement forced upon Democrats against their will by Republicans. And both parties, not just one, agreed to and voted into law all the years of unbalanced budgets that now place the USA in jeopardy of imminently defaulting on
one of the largest debts in world history.
The GOP is to blame if the USA defaults next week, yes, but this
whole problem could not have occurred at all, without many years of preparation. Specifically, every year of my entire life,
the USA has spent more that it took in. In both Democrat and Republican administrations. And that includes
the so-called Clinton “surplus” which actually was an accounting
trick fake — there was none. (Check the US public debt figures each year. They kept increasing. A real surplus, not an accounting trick scam, would have caused a decrease.)
Clinton actually did get us quite close to budget balance and
deserves credit, but it wasn’t good enough to get close, he had to create lies into order to pretend he’d reached surplus.
His successor Bush then created even more lies and accounting
fakery.
Meanwhile, the US voters have had no choice. They were unable,
for example, to elect anybody opposed to the massive bank bailout — despite enormous poll-margins against said bailout,
both McCain & Obama were for it, leaving voters no choice.
(Similarly in the preceding Kerry V Bush election, the top issue
was the Iraq war, a majority of the public said polls were against it, and they had no choice since Kerry and Bush had both voted for the war.) That is why the USA needs an actually-democratic voting system in which voters would actually have a choice on the top issue of the day.
To learn about a voting system that would allow voters to have real choices, see http://RangeVoting.org .
Warren D. Smith –
Wow! Talk about false and/or bad choices! Either give us direct democracy or make everyone use confusing, nearly impossible to hand-count Range Voting??? Really?
As I recall, in all of the Presidential elections you cite above, there were OTHER candidates on the ballot to be voted for. (I know this for a fact, because I usually voted for them!)
Why are you reinforcing the completely false notion that one must vote for either the Democratic or the Republican candidate for President??? Is that just so that you can push your RangeVoting scheme??
The Onion should do a story: “CONGRESS PASSES BILL TO GET RID OF THE ‘DEBT CEILING'”.
For those who might be interested, Credo Mobil has a petition to CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN asking them to stop blaming both sides for the shutdown.
That petition can be signed here.