The ubiquitous CNN pundit on Larry King last night:

KING: Could the pundits be wrong?

DAVID GERGEN: Absolutely. Absolutely. It was a wonderful piece in the Wall Street Journal this last week by Josh Lerner. He was a really interesting young man who went back to a lot of political science and said more often than not, pundits are wrong.

You know, we have a worse record than if you just did it randomly in terms of predicting the--you just flip a coin and you would come out with better predictions.

Take his advice, please.

But seriously: Dean Baker from CEPR has one of the best short takes on elections and media coverage over at the Politico, which is worth posting in full:

There is a serious problem with our political culture and is centered on the news media. The media take no responsibility for informing the public on the issues that will affect their lives.

Rather they focus almost exclusively on trivia and quirks. Of course the candidates respond to this, knowing that any effort at dealing with issues in a substantive way will be ignored. Instead of talking about real issues, they jump full force go along with the focus on nonsense.

How many people know that Social Security will be fully solvent for decades into the future, according to all projections? How many people know that the per person cost of healthcare in the United States is close to twice as much as in countries like England and France, both of which enjoy much longer life expectancies? How many people know that the projections of huge long-term deficits are entirely the result of our broken healthcare system? If our healthcare costs were like those in any country with a longer life expectancy, then the U.S. projections would show huge surpluses.

It is the media's job to give this information to the public. They don't have time to do the research on their own. If we evaluated the media by the same standard as we evaluate teachers (i.e., are the students learning?), we would have to fire almost every last reporter in the United States, because the public is not learning.

The effort by rich business interests to buy campaigns would also be considerably less effective if the media reported on what was taking place. For example, BP, Citigroup and Goldman Sachs may consider big contributions to a candidate to be a much worse investment if they knew that their contributions would lead to a major article that explained that BP, Citigroup or Goldman was giving money to candidate Smith because they know that Smith will let them wreck the Gulf without paying compensation and will take everyone's money and give it to the Wall Street banks.

Unfortunately, we don't get much real news. We get stories about witchcraft and Aqua Buddha. Until we get better media, we will not get better politics.

As FAIR documented in an August 11 action alert, CNN's The Situation Room was featuring alarmist views on Social Security, particularly from the network's political analyst David Gergen.

We know CNN has heard from activists; Wolf Blitzer's email response was,  "I am certain this subject isn't going away." Sure enough, the show was back at it on Friday (8/13/10)--though little had changed.

This time around, the guests were familiar CNN pundits Gergen and Gloria Borger. The problems began with Blitzer's teaser for the segment: "Are politicians too scared though to try to save the program?"

The issue isn't at all whether politicians are "scared"--the question should be whether they need to do anything at all right now.

Borger's take was this:

People right now are really concerned about spending in this country. And everybody understands that in order to control the deficit you have to get these entitlement programs under control.

As has been noted repeatedly, Social Security has amassed a $2.5 trillion surplus over the past two decades. If there are serious concerns about the federal budget deficit, it is unclear how Social Security would be a major factor. As the Economic Policy Institute put it recently (8/13/10), Social Security is "emphatically not the cause of the federal government’s long-term deficits, since it is prohibited from borrowing and must pay all benefits out of dedicated tax revenues and savings in its trust funds."

Borger went on: "So the question is, what can you do to get spending on Social Security under control?" That would seem to suggest that Borger thinks benefits that have been promised to workers—that those workers have paid for—should be cut.

Gergen echoed Borger's points, lamenting the idea that politicians (particularly Democrats) will "promise not to touch Social Security, to defend Social Security as it is. If you do that, you can't get the deficits under control."

Gergen added that "there is a real unwillingness to come to grips with what the underlying issues are, how high the benefits are and how little taxes we're paying in." That is a strange way to describe a program with a massive surplus. Perhaps Gergen's "we" is a reference to the wealthy; if the cap on earnings subject to the Social Security (FICA) tax were lifted, the additional revenues could go a long way toward shoring up Social Security's long-term finances.

It's doubtful that's actually what he meant, but if CNN is going to keep covering Social Security, perhaps they should invite some experts on who could explain these issues to viewers?

Brad Jacobson has a new Media Bloodhound post (4/21/09) lauding CNN anchor Anderson Cooper for his "refreshing" refusal of "a generic phony Devil's advocate stance" when scholar Mark Danner "torpedoed" CNN analyst David Gergen's claim that

the number of people who were interrogated [by U.S. personnel] with these harsh and, I think, torturous techniques was fairly limited. It was, of the thousands of people who were captured, it was about some 30 or 35 whom these techniques were used.

Instead, Cooper "actually set up Danner's response to Gergen's allegations with...facts and context":

Cooper: Do we know how many people died in U.S. custody? I've read reports of more than 100 or about 100 or maybe about a quarter of those were being investigated as actual homicides....

Danner: I think the rough figure is slightly more than 100 and 30, 29 or 30 were actually investigated as homicides.

But Jacobson also tells how this positivity actually illustrates the lacking state of corporate reportage overall:

This was not your normal CNN news program segment during which two guests spout differing opinions and the host plays the "fair and balanced" referee.

Cooper's approach in this circumstance, his effort to ferret out the facts from his guests and put those facts in context--however absurd it is that this should be unique--is unique for a CNN program, just as it still is for far too much of broadcast and cable network news shows.

Listen to the recent edition of FAIR's radio show CounterSpin: "Mark Danner on Torture" (4/10/09)