The Nation Escaped a Bullet

It is with a sigh of relief that I celebrate the reelection of Barack Hussein Obama.

However, I must warn my readers not to make the same mistake they made four years ago, when they thought the election of Obama would immediately and irrevocably bring in a new era. That since Obama had spoken of a nation that does not consist of blue states or red states, but only the United States, that he would bring in an era of bi-partisanship.

That since he was the first black American to achieve the Presidency, he represented the beginning of a post-racial era.

That since he had indicated that in the way that Ronald Reagan had been a transformational President, he too hoped to be a transformational President, and bring in a new era of governmental responsibility.

It was not understood that these were aspirational ideas, that might one day be achieved, not promises that would be achieved on day one, or after one year or after one term or maybe not even after a decade.

But I tried to disabuse my readers after the election in 2008 when I wrote my essay with the tongue in cheek heading "Obama Walks on Water." I don’t think many paid attention.

Now as we come into the President’s second term I hope people have more realistic expectations. We are a nation that takes great pride in its checks and balances. We don’t want our President to be a dictator. We want our President to have to look to Congress for legislation, to pass our budget, to confirm appointments, etc. and then when the President is hamstrung by the system and by an opposing party that brooks no compromise, we wring our hands and feel our President has let us down. I have said before and I say again, the President has no magic wand.

It is also a fact that no President should be held responsible for what happens in the first nine month of his Administration. During those nine months the President is working with his predecessor’s budget, with his predecessors appointees, and with the effects of his predecessor’s policies. Thus the campaign attacks, as mirrored by the media, were totally misplaced and unfair. If we look at the graph of job creation which I published in my blog post "We are Americans!" and we delete the job losses of the first nine month of the Obama Administration, the wild number of job losses vs. job creation look quite different, as would figures on how large the deficit was to be attributed to the Obama Administration and how much to the outgoing Bush Administration.

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Some may say why dig up old history? But it is not old history in the sense that it illustrates how the media fails to enlighten, and in fact acts as a medium for obfuscation and deception, and those who have been reading my blog post know how upset and angry I am with an institution that has a primary responsibility to elucidate and inform.

Please reread my blog post "The Media in General and the New York Times in Particular" where I refer the reader back to other blog posts criticizing the media and elaborate on recent sins of omission and commission including sources I most respect – PBS Newshour and The New York Times.

But even since then I have watched with dismay as the Romney campaign flagrantly distorted what the President said on job creation. The Romney campaign attacked the President for ostensibly saying: “If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that.” (See here for examples of how the Romney campaign extensively distorted this.) The media in their typical attempt to find equivalency in everything equated this so-called faux pas with Romney reference to the 47%. But in fact there was no faux pas on Obama’s part. What Obama had said was: “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that.”  It was more than obvious that Obama was referring to roads and bridges when he said you didn’t build that. Where was the faux pas? Only in the fact that Obama did not foresee that the statement could be taken out of context. Is that the same as Romney talking with contempt about 47% of the American people? Nothing taken out of context.

For that matter the media also equated the 47% comment by Romney with Obama’s comment about “Guns and Religion” which he made four years ago. For example, Mary Bruce of ABC News asked “How are Romney’s comments any different from what the president said?," ignoring both the time lapse and the fact that Romney was talking about most Americans and his own constituency, while Obama was talking about a much smaller segment and people who hate his guts. But the media is always looking for equivalencies no matter how false.

How did we get here? To be sure, as the media likes to point out in its defense, poor biased reporting was common at the early years of our Republic. But we had a much more responsible press not so long ago, though few would remember it. An Op-Ed article in the New York Times deals with this in part. (Yes, the Times gives us some excellent editorials and excellent columns –its news pages are often lacking) The article correctly points out that, “…In 1985, the conservative organization Fairness in Media, backed by Senator Jesse Helms, tried to arrange a takeover of CBS and “become Dan Rather’s boss.” It failed, but two years later conservatives set the stage for an even bigger triumph. For decades, radio and television broadcasters had been required to present multiple viewpoints on contentious public debates on the grounds that they were stewards of the public airwaves. But in 1987, members appointed by President Ronald Reagan to the Federal Communications Commission abolished this ‘fairness doctrine.’ The change facilitated the creation of conservative talk radio and cable outlets to combat perceived liberal bias. Liberals followed suit with programming (albeit less effective) of their own.…most news organizations (with notable exceptions) abandoned their roles as political referees. Many resorted to an atrophied style that resembled stenography more than journalism, presenting all claims as equally valid. Fact checking, once a foundation for all reporting, was now deemed the province of a specialized few.”

But there is even more to the story. While Jesse Helms failed in 1985, eventually the networks were taken over by large multi-national corporations, e.g. NBC is owned by General Electric. CBS is owned by Westinghouse Electric, which has renamed itself CBS. ABC is owned by Walt Disney Company, and of course Fox is a new huge conglomerate.

What does this mean for news coverage? Most importantly the old networks used their news division as loss leaders. News divisions were not expected to make a profit. Their new owners demanded that all divisions make a profit. This meant two things. The news operations had to seek the largest audience possible which led to yellow journalism, and they had to keep expenses as low as possible which led to inadequate resources. But that was fine with Jesse Helms and his Right wing cohorts.

Finally, in 2007 a Bush revamped FCC (Federal Communication Commission) “lift(ed) a 35-year-old ban on companies owning both TV stations and a local newspaper in the country's top 20 markets, saying it was no longer needed… Looser cross-ownership rules would benefit companies such as News Corp. NWSA +1.61% and Tribune Co., which already own newspapers and TV stations in certain big markets and have long operated with waivers of the cross-ownership ban. News Corp., for instance, owns the New York Post and two TV stations in the New York market. (News Corp also owns The Wall Street Journal.)”  The results of this has resulted in a concentration of the industry as summarized by Common Cause in a paper entitled: “Facts on Media in America: Did you know?” which I urge the reader to read here.

But to return to the campaign! As the campaign wound down some voices seemed to think that who wins wouldn’t make much difference, e.g. here is a quote from a Letter to the Editor of my local newspaper: 

“Nationally, I know one thing: If Barack Obama wins re-election, I will get up at 6:30 a.m. on Nov. 7, get my kids ready for school and go to work. If Mitt Romney should win the day, I will get up at 6:30 a.m. on Nov. 7, get my kids ready to go to school and head to work. Nothing will change that. It's fun to debate national elections, or even state elections, but much of what transpires afterwards does not help or hurt us too badly. Our success and failure is not reliant on public policy. Never has been. Will never be. Our nation generally speaking, survives and thrives because of the people, and in spite of the government, not because of it."

And the Des Moines Register, a paper that has consistently endorsed Democrats endorsed Romney because they felt he had a better chance to reach consensus with the intransient House Republicans, than Obama would, without examining what such a consensus would mean for future seniors, its health care system, its educational system, the rights of women and minorities, etc. and the country’s future. 

But the fact is that while the country has dodged a bullet we are still faced with what has come to be known as the economic cliff, with a Republican majority in the House pledged not to raise revenues to meet the nations needs and its looming deficit, and willing to force the nation into default and/or shut down the government unless it gets its way, regardless of the election.

Our President has his work cut out in meeting this challenge, which at this moment seems insolvable. A media that truly informs would be of immense help. But the signs don’t augur well. The last time around the can was kicked down the road with a sequester that called for reductions in discretionary defense spending to be cut by 9.4% and nondefense programs to be cut by 8.2%. The idea was that the prospect of this would cause the “super-committee” to work out a more practicable compromise. This failed because without additional revenues the choice became and becomes between such draconian cuts and not dealing with the looming deficit. 

Now with the looming crisis once again upon us they have already begun to demagogue the issue, demanding that the portion relating to the military must be repealed, without offering any means for offsetting this spending cut. Of course the equally draconian cut in domestic spending, which in the compromise was supposed to make the cuts balanced, they want retained, and possibly increased to make up for the elimination of the military cuts.

But again where is the media? They report extensively on the Republican demands and what the cuts would mean for our defensive capability but fail to mention what the domestic cuts would entail, though the White House has released detailed itemization of the consequences. For those who are interested enough, or masochistic enough, to want to read the full 394 page report it can be found here. But that is what we supposedly have media for. To read and summarize such reports. How many have seen such summaries in our media, whether in print, on TV or even in its electronic form. Oh yes, The New York Times gave us the information. But where was information of such great import? Was it on page one where it belonged? No, it was on page 17 under the heading: “White House Details Potential Effects If Automatic Budget Cuts Go Through.” This is worth reading and rather than being 394 pages long it is only two pages long. See here.

But in the final analysis what does the media give us front and center. They tell us about campaign tactics; who’s ahead, whose behind. They turn it into a sporting event. And worse, as the highly respected The Economist magazine tells us: 

The media, meanwhile, and this can't be repeated often enough, is overwhelmingly biased towards producing exciting political races. Horse-race reporting gives the media the collective ability to shape the kind of narrative it needs in order to report excitingly.

We deserve and should demand better!!!