The national media watch group
On the PBS NewsHour (4/12/13), the left/right debating duo of Mark Shields and David Brooks took up the issue of Social Security and "chained CPI"–and found that they didn't have a lot to debate on the virtues of Barack Obama's benefits-cutting plan.
"Today there's an elephant in the room: a huge, yet ignored, issue that largely explains why Social Security is now on the chopping block…. That problem is U.S. militarism and perpetual war."
Media remember Margaret Thatcher for turning around Britain's economy. But do the numbers tell a different story? Also: Barack Obama's plan to cut Social Security and Medicare is inexplicably deemed a move to the "center," and pundits are monitoring the 2016 election by paying close attention to… Hillary Clinton's haircut?
When it comes to elite media and political circles, there's no doubt that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were treated the same way when they died: with gushing, uncritical celebration. They just wish the public could have been so univocal.
The panicky style of reporting on North Korea doesn't seem to be changing much, if you glance at the front pages of the Washington Post and New York Times this morning. But both pieces, if read carefully, undermine the alarmism–and make you wonder why the stories are on the front page.
Who gets to the top of the journalistic establishment probably has a lot to do with what they think of Margaret Thatcher's hard-right policies.
it was striking to see the parallels between the way Margaret Thatcher's death was covered on the PBS NewsHour and Fox News Channel's most popular show, the O'Reilly Factor. Though some people like to think that PBS and Fox couldn't be further apart, they were basically singing the same tune.
The New York Times treats Iran's right to enrich uranium as a "claim," to be challenged by anonymous U.S. officials.
The new White House budget proposal is getting a lot of attention because it explicitly connects the Obama administration to an agenda that includes cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits. Some pundits see this as a way to appeal to the "middle." But does anyone– in the middle or anywhere else–really want to cut the safety net?
It's no secret that U.S. media loathed the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Much of that was purely political; sure, Chavez could have given shorter speeches and been nicer to his political opponents–but it's hard to imagine that would have mattered much to, say, the Washington Post editorial board. One thing that turned up constantly in Chavez coverage over the years was his suspicion that the United States government was looking to undermine his rule. As a Washington Post news article (1/10/13) put it: A central ideological pillar of Chavez's rule over 14 years has been to oppose Republican and [...]
The compelling interest in the public knowing that a high-ranking public official has taken part in highly controversial and perhaps even illegal actions, in the view of these news outlets, is apparently outweighed by their duty, as they see it, to keep the government's secrets.
This week on FAIR TV: A look at some of the media panic over North Korea, how the press is spinning the gun debate and why USA Today's front page headline about how "we" are all "feeling rich" might not not actually apply to us all of us.
It didn't take long for TV coverage of North Korea to enter the "Retired General Sketches Out War Games on a Big Map" phase. But a recent example of the genre on CNN demonstrated only the alarmism seems to be the order of the day.
