People who read newspapers have started noticing the slow but inexorable decay of a once great newspaper - The Washington Post. The Post has become a surreptitious mouthpiece of the right wing in recent times and the newspaper of Woodward and Bernstein has become almost undistinuishable from a Murdoch newspaper- albeit its conversion is more subtle. On a typical day last week, it had three cover stories - two touting the Republican candidates and one condemning the Obama presidency. The problem is not so much in the editorials - which somehow continue to be relatively sane- but in the way the news is slanted and the headlines chosen.
The rot has really spread deep. Last week a Post writer was given two pages to talk about a book on Obama which he admitted he had not even read, but he still waxed eloquent on how they were received in the media and how it showed Obama's team disfunction ! Another Post reporter managed to write a piece on the Job Act without mentioning the reason for its failure - the republican filibuster. It took a respected journalist to point out the "false equivalence"in the piece-- which is really a code word for blatant misrepresentation by the Post. In any other placed, the editor of the paper would have tarred and feathered and driven out of town for his papers continued bias.
Here is James Fallows "I heard angrily from a number of reporters in the last few days. They are objecting to my claims that mainstream journalism is "enabling" Senate dysfunction by describing it as dysfunction plain and simple, rather than as the result of deliberate and extremely effective Republican strategy. That strategy, over the past four-plus years, has been to apply the once-rare threat of a filibuster to virtually everything the Administration proposes. This means that when the Democrats can't get 60 votes for something, which they almost never can, they can't get nominations confirmed, bills enacted, or most of what they want done.
You can consider this strategy brilliant and nation-saving, if you are a Republican. You can consider it destructive and nation-wrecking, if you are a Democrat. You can view it as just what the Founders had in mind, as Justice Scalia asserted recently at an Atlantic forum. You can view it as another step down the road to collapse, since the Democrats would have no reason not to turn the same nihilist approach against the next Republican administration. But you shouldn't pretend that it doesn't exist.
That was my objection to a recent big Washington Post storyon what is wrong with the Senate, which did not contain the word "filibuster." And there is an example again this very day. I wish to Heaven that the item had appeared somewhere else, but it happens that it's also in the Post. A story on what happened to Obama's jobs-bill proposal in the Senate concentrates on the two Plains States Democrats, Ben Nelson and Jon Tester, who defected during the cloture vote -- and not on the 100% Republican opposition to even bringing this bill up for consideration. .. I will point out these features:
- Like the previous one, it manages not to use the word "filibuster" while describing why the Administration's programs have not gotten through a Senate that the Democrats "control." The Democrats would actually "control" the Senate if a 51-vote majority were enough to pass most measures. But they don't control it, with 53 Dem+Indep seats, when the 60-vote standard becomes routine. This is too important a fact to be left out of accounts of what is happening in the Senate.
- It reflects so thorough an absorption of the idea that the filibuster-threat is normal business that it describes the latest cloture vote as a vote on the bill itself: "Democratic Sens. Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Jon Tester (Mont.), who are both up for reelection next year, took to the Senate floor and delivered a sizeable blow to the bill's prospects by voting against it." No, they voted against the cloture measure, which they knew had zero chance of getting the necessary 60 votes. .And the story has this virtuoso suggestion that Democratic wavering really explains why the Republicans don't vote for Administration proposals."
The rot has really spread deep. Last week a Post writer was given two pages to talk about a book on Obama which he admitted he had not even read, but he still waxed eloquent on how they were received in the media and how it showed Obama's team disfunction ! Another Post reporter managed to write a piece on the Job Act without mentioning the reason for its failure - the republican filibuster. It took a respected journalist to point out the "false equivalence"in the piece-- which is really a code word for blatant misrepresentation by the Post. In any other placed, the editor of the paper would have tarred and feathered and driven out of town for his papers continued bias.
Here is James Fallows "I heard angrily from a number of reporters in the last few days. They are objecting to my claims that mainstream journalism is "enabling" Senate dysfunction by describing it as dysfunction plain and simple, rather than as the result of deliberate and extremely effective Republican strategy. That strategy, over the past four-plus years, has been to apply the once-rare threat of a filibuster to virtually everything the Administration proposes. This means that when the Democrats can't get 60 votes for something, which they almost never can, they can't get nominations confirmed, bills enacted, or most of what they want done.
You can consider this strategy brilliant and nation-saving, if you are a Republican. You can consider it destructive and nation-wrecking, if you are a Democrat. You can view it as just what the Founders had in mind, as Justice Scalia asserted recently at an Atlantic forum. You can view it as another step down the road to collapse, since the Democrats would have no reason not to turn the same nihilist approach against the next Republican administration. But you shouldn't pretend that it doesn't exist.
That was my objection to a recent big Washington Post storyon what is wrong with the Senate, which did not contain the word "filibuster." And there is an example again this very day. I wish to Heaven that the item had appeared somewhere else, but it happens that it's also in the Post. A story on what happened to Obama's jobs-bill proposal in the Senate concentrates on the two Plains States Democrats, Ben Nelson and Jon Tester, who defected during the cloture vote -- and not on the 100% Republican opposition to even bringing this bill up for consideration. .. I will point out these features:
- Like the previous one, it manages not to use the word "filibuster" while describing why the Administration's programs have not gotten through a Senate that the Democrats "control." The Democrats would actually "control" the Senate if a 51-vote majority were enough to pass most measures. But they don't control it, with 53 Dem+Indep seats, when the 60-vote standard becomes routine. This is too important a fact to be left out of accounts of what is happening in the Senate.
- It reflects so thorough an absorption of the idea that the filibuster-threat is normal business that it describes the latest cloture vote as a vote on the bill itself: "Democratic Sens. Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Jon Tester (Mont.), who are both up for reelection next year, took to the Senate floor and delivered a sizeable blow to the bill's prospects by voting against it." No, they voted against the cloture measure, which they knew had zero chance of getting the necessary 60 votes. .And the story has this virtuoso suggestion that Democratic wavering really explains why the Republicans don't vote for Administration proposals."
It should "come as no surprise" that all the Republicans end up voting against the bill, because that is the Republican strategy. You don't have to present this as some inside-dope subtle game-theory problem, with wavering Republicans watching Nelson and Tester for cues. The explanation is simpler: Mitch McConnell's Senate Republicans have been rock-ribbed in enforcing their strategic choice that opposing the Administration makes policy and political sense. "
The sad fact is that the Post has started hiring reporters who have little regard for truth or objectivity. In truth they are becoming the Fox news of the print media - "fair and balanced" trope included.
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