You got a sense from some of the coverage of the Simpson/Bowles deficit commission report that their right-leaning prescription was exactly the kind of solution the corporate media could get behind. Charlie Rose could apparently only find two panelists who wished the commission had gone further with its spending cuts.

On NBC's Meet the Press (11/14/10), the panel discussion featured former Fed chair (and Ayn Rand devotee) Alan Greenspan and far right former Republican politician Newt Gingrich.

On the "other" side was Harold Ford, currently the chair of the right-leaning Democratic Leadership Council. A debate from the near-right to the far-right, in other words. Vanity Fair journalist Bethany McLean was on hand too.

As if the panel wasn't tilted enough on its own, host David Gregory was posing questions designed to keep the discussion off to the right:

I don't see why, for instance, some of these suggestions, Harold, on Social Security are going to be demagogued to death. Why, in 50 years, people can't look at raising the retirement age and have that be a serious discussion point?

It's worth repeating (as Dean Baker did here) that the retirement age is already rising, and will continue to do so--though for whatever reason many reporters and pundits either don't know this or just don't mention it.

And for his part, Ford was doing his part to bash the liberal wing of the Democratic party:

There are smart, sensible people in both parties. As long as you don't allow the far left and the far right, again, to crowd out the predominant middle, we can get a lot of this done. If that means making tough choices on Social Security--I'm 40, I'm willing to give mine up, and I think a lot of people my age who may reach a certain income level are willing to do the same.

I guess the good news is that Ford is wealthy enough to not need Social Security. Of course, rich people deciding not to take their benefits would have no serious impact; taxing their income, on the other hand, would. As Doug Henwood put it, raising the cap on taxable income "would eliminate the system's alleged long-term problems forever, according to the Congressional Budget Office." I wonder if Harold Ford would get behind that idea.

On Wednesday night's broadcast of the PBS NewsHour (9/23/10), Gwen Ifill announced: "Now to the first of several conversations on whether or not to extend tax cuts that expire at the end of the year."

The first guest was Republican Glenn Hubbard, who Ifill told viewers "was the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush, and he helped to design those cuts." Not surprisingly, he is a big supporter of extending the tax cuts, and gave the usual laundry list of reasons why, and criticized Obama for creating uncertainty in the markets and so on.

So who else will they feature in this series? One clue came at the end of the show:

JUDY WOODRUFF: In our next conversation, we will hear from Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, who once testified in favor of the Bush tax cuts. He now argues, it's time to let them lapse.

Greenspan, it should be noted, is a conservative Republican, elevated to the Fed by Ronald Reagan, and a lifelong devotee of Ayn Rand. If the point of the series is to explore the tax debate among conservatives, the NewsHour is off to a great start.

Ifill has previously despaired at the partisanship of this debate--Republicans say one thing, Democrats say something else, which led her to wonder: "Is there any real way to sort that out, or is it in both parties' interest to keep that uncertain?"

Sorting it out is the job of journalists. NewsHour can't do that without finding some independent experts to talk about the issue.

Yesterday the Social Security and Medicare trustees' reports were released. This annual ritual often gives reporters a chance to exaggerate the long-term problems of the Social Security system.  This year, the news was more or less what folks were expecting: By the trustees' forecasting, Social Security's trust fund will be depleted in 2037, while Medicare's hospital fund will run out of money in 2017.

Somehow, the Washington Post decided that Social Security was the real concern--its page-one story is headlined "Alarm Sounded on Social Security."

The lead rings the same bells:

The financial health of the Social Security system has eroded more sharply in the past year than at any time since the mid-1990s, according to a government forecast that ratchets up pressure on the Obama administration and Congress to stabilize the retirement system that keeps many older Americans out of poverty.

Much less attention is given to Medicare, which the Post does tell us deep in the piece "remains the more urgent problem." The paper sure has a funny way of showing its urgent concern, though.

As FAIR noted, former Fed chair Alan Greenspan tried to provide some perspective about Social Security and Medicare two years ago. When NBC's Tim Russert asked him about the health of Social Security and Medicare, Greenspan said that Social Security's problems were minor. Economist and former Social Security trustee Robert Reich writes, "Don't be confused by these alarms from the Social Security and Medicare trustees. Social Security is a tiny problem. Medicare is a terrible one."

The Washington Post, for reasons that aren't entirely clear, are sending a very different message.  As Dean Baker has documented for some time, the paper just seems to have something against the program.