On the 19th, the AP's Jim Abrams published a piece on efforts to limit or reform the filibuster. There's some decent information in there on efforts by McCaskill, Bennet and Udall each of whom have their own particular reform effort going. In what I attribute to an attempt at balance, the piece includes a skeptical quote from the Senate Historian, Dave Ritchie (and I have to ask, should he be allowing himself to be quoted in a way that appears to take sides in Senate matters?) and this far more irksome bit:
Supporters of the 60-vote supermajority say it helped prevent Democrats from attaching a government-run public option - an idea unpopular with many Americans - to the health care law. And growing national sentiment that Congress should quit adding to federal deficits was reflected when Democrats needing Republican votes to reach the 60-vote threshold were forced to cut future food stamp benefits and an energy program to pay for a $26 billion jobs bill this month.
Aside from the view-from-nowhwere "supporters say" construction here (Which ones?) the big problem is the vague and misleading statement "an idea unpopular with many Americans" about the Public Option. This is technically true, "many" Americans did disapprove but the implication is that a public option was net unpopular. I'm not aware of any poll which found the public option negatively popular. Quite the reverseactually. The consensus of numerous polls was that it was popular, in some cases strongly and under other formulations with only a plurality in favour.
Then there is next sentence about how the filibuster is working to limit the deficit. It might be worth mentioning that the CBO scored at least one version of the public option as deficit reducing to to the order of about $53B by 2019. So this is the best that AP's unnamed "supporters" can say in defence of the filibuster: It saved America from a deficit reducing, popular legislative proposal and took food out of the mouths of the hungry. Hooray!
The saddest part about this attempt for balance, is that it predictably failed to impress the right as Newsbusters shows in its flailing and bizarre attempt to claim that a factual article about 3 Senators' reform ideas is "praise" of the effort to eliminate the filibuster. Abrams went out of his way to find some scintilla of good policy outcome that could be credited to the filibuster, straining credulity to do so, and it wasn't enough. We know this is because organizations like Newsbusters and the Media Research Center only exist to work the ref, but still AP strives to appease the unappeasable.
Earlier this week, over at DKos, Jed L called attention to another outrageous example of AP promoting rightwing propaganda. Rather than focusing too narrowly on it--especially since Jed pretty much hammered AP for its role, I'd like to use it as an occasion to step back and comment on bigger picture involved, the nature of liberalism, conservatism, and the role of conceptual games. First, though, here's how Jed started off:
AP Attempts A Fact Check by Jed L
Tue Feb 10, 2009 at 02:35:04 PM PST
The AP accuses President Obama of lying during yesterday's events:
President Barack Obama had it both ways when he promoted his stimulus plan in Indiana and later at a prime-time news conference. He bragged in Indiana about getting Congress to produce a package with no pork, yet boasted it will do good things for a Hoosier highway and a downtown overpass, just the kind of local projects lawmakers lard into big spending bills.
To be precise, what President Obama said was that this plan has no earmarks -- local spending projects inserted by members of Congress without review, things like millions for a goat herding museum in Alabama, or a moose-hunting education exhibit in Wasilla.
And as the AP notes further down in its story, President Obama told the truth about this.
("There are no 'earmarks,' as they are usually defined, inserted by lawmakers in the bill," the AP wrote.)
This week, President Obama made news when he called on Sam Stein of the Huffington Post at his first press conference. It was, indeed, a significant occasion, a milestone in loosening the death grip that old media has had on our nation.
Examples of this death grip are legion. A few of the biggies include Whitewater, the multi-million dollar manufactured media scandal over a decade-old failed land deal. The media-assisted suppression of scientific evidence that global warming is a real and serious threat to human civilization as we know it. The media-assisted theft of the 2000 election. The media-assisted lie-based invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the arch-enemy of bin Laden. These are not minor failures. Indeed, they're not failures at all: they are evidence of old media's true function, which is not to inform, but to deceive, and to do so in the interests of powerful reactionary elite interests.
I'm planning on writing about several major examples this weekend, but I thought I'd start off with something seemingly minor, a single story highlighted by Media Matters for America (MMFA) earlier this month. Because sometimes it's easier to grasp a problem by seeing it in minuature. And because one sees such seemingly minor examples virtually all the time.
STATE BLOGS
