The national media watch group
With an unemployment rate at just over 26 percent and regular street protests against government austerity policies, it's hard to imagine anyone holding up Spain as a model. But Howard Schneider, writing in the Washington Post, does just that–warning France that it had better shape up and be more like Spain:
Republicans and various right-wing commentators have had a thing for talking about the supposedly "anti-business" tilt of the Obama administration. It's never made much sense–and it doesn't make any more sense now that pundits are reacting to news that Obama will tap his current chief of staff Jack Lew to be his next Treasury secretary.
"It’s hard to watch Robert Griffin III play football and not think about education policy." Education "reformers" Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein begin an op-ed with this dubious claim, then go on to flesh out their absurd football/education analogy.
The Washington Post has never been fond of left-wing Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. As serious questions mount about the state of Chavez's health, the paper's editorial page found it a good time to take another swipe.
The December 30 episode of Meet the Press was, of course, devoted to discussion of the "fiscal cliff." And NBC veteran Tom Brokaw was on hand to recycle some of the most tiresome talking points about wealth and taxes.
If the country were to fall off the fiscal cliff, we were told, there were going to be some winners and losers. But CBS Evening News found a different kind of of fiscal cliff victim: people who inherited land worth millions of dollars.
"Both sides" made objectionable comments after the Newtown massacre, writes Campbell Brown. Right-wing bigots on the one hand, and on the other… Diane Ravitch? For praising heroic teachers? This is "false balance" of the most absurd kind.
Don't expect much help from corporate media on understanding the "Chained CPI," because selling the "grand bargain" requires citizens not really knowing what this part of the deal entails.
Are John Boehner's ideas about tax cuts evidence of his "philosophy"? Or are they just misleading?
USA Today's cover story today is a moving piece by Marisol Bello headlined, "For the Poor, 'Recovery' Is a Mirage." And then, right beneath this story, another bit of front-page news: a glimpse of an entirely different world.
When pundits wax rhapsodic about the "colorblind" era we live in–or fulminate against affirmative action policies as interfering with that "post-racial" state–some of us think of cases like Wet Seal.
The notion, coming from CBS reporter Anna Werner, that come January 1 an average family will be stuck with a bill for $3,500 is misleading–a deception in some sense borrowed from the faulty "cliff" analogy in the first place.
