On the one hand, NBC's Meet the Press gives us Republican Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (2/5/12):

DAVID GREGORY: Governor Daniels, one of the things you hear from the campaign trail, Mitt Romney said it just the other day, is that the recovery should have been so much stronger. You know, it's very difficult to prove something like that, just like it's difficult for the president to prove the economy would've been weaker if not for his particular policies. How could it have been stronger had a Republican been in president, in your judgment? Been in the White House, I should say.

DANIELS: Well, for one thing, for one thing, national policy wouldn't have been so relentlessly anti-enterprise as it's been. If you'd assembled a team of Nobel economists and said design us a policy to stifle and strangle investments and small business growth and innovation in this economy, you couldn't have done better than what's happened the last three years. The mindless piling on of new regulations, every one of them very expensive, and in the aggregate extraordinarily so, that's all drained away dollars that could've been used to hire someone. New taxes and the threat of more, all the uncertainty that's come with that. What we know is this, David, I don't have--no one can prove what might have happened, but this is the weakest recovery, by far, from a deep recession that we have in--since the records have been kept, and I don't think that's an accident.

Wow--anti-enterprise tax-hiking regulatory excess!

Instead of the reporter in the room quizzing his guest on what he's talking about, let's get another guest to weigh in.

Like, say, a billionaire mayor:

GREGORY: Mayor Bloomberg, as an independent voice in all of this, is that your judgment as well, that that's a fair criticism?

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG: I think I agree with most of what Mitch said. I think if you want to have growth, number one, you have to have the financial industry be strong and willing to take risks. And this relentless criticism and investigation of them, whether--regardless of the facts in the past, if we want to have a future, we have to have people have confidence.

At a time when millions of Americans are are experiencing massive unemployment, a painfully slow economic recovery, wage stagnation and the after-effects of the bursting of a multi-trillion dollar housing bubble, isn't  it time someone demanded that they suffer a little bit?

Of course not, you might say. But that's why you don't work in the media big leagues.

Here's NBC Meet the Press host David Gregory yesterday (1/29/12), speaking to Obama adviser David Axlerod:

But if you look at how dire the fiscal situation is in the country, we just came off a debt debacle this past summer. Alan Simpson, responding to the State of the Union, said: Where's the guts? Where's the hard stuff? Where's the beef? Where are the hard choices that Americans are going to have to make? What are Americans going to have to do with less of if this president gets re-elected?

Axelrod, to his credit, noted that plenty of people are actually hurting. But that didn't seem to impress Gregory:

GREGORY: But we're not dealing with the big drivers of the debt, as you know. The debt commission that the president convened is not advice that he acted on. And the reality is that the fiscal situation is dire. If we're not dealing with entitlements--what, you talk about shared sacrifice, would the president...

AXELROD: Listen, the...

GREGORY: Wait a second. He--there was a stimulus plan. There was a new healthcare entitlement, but there was nothing dealing with the big drivers of the day.

It's hard to overstate just how committed elite media are to the concept of government austerity as the fix to our current economic problems. Economists like Paul Krugman and Dean Baker might disagree, and the public would seem to think the "hard stuff" could be spending less on, say, the military. But that doesn't seem to register with people like David Gregory, who demand that politicians must be brave enough to cut Social Security--a program he's falsely declared to be one of the "big drivers" of the debt.

The general line in corporate media coverage of the so-called "Supercommittee" tasked with coming up with a long-term budget plan is that both sides aren't willing to budge: Republicans won't agree to raise taxes, and Democrats want to protect "entitlements" like Social Security and Medicare.

While some might find the idea of Democrats standing up for Social Security and Medicare, it's not really true--Democrats have offered to make such cuts if there are some tax increases to go along with them. This insistence that a compromise involve a compromise has been depicted, oddly enough, as a refusal to compromise.

But things got slightly more confusing when it was reported that the Republicans had broken their anti-tax stance, and were putting a $300 billion revenue increase on the table. In the Washington Post, Lori Montgomery's piece led with this:

Congressional Republicans have for the first time retreated from their hardline stance against new taxes, offering to raise federal tax collections by nearly $300 billion over the next decade as part of a plan to tame the national debt.

That is big news. In the New York Times (11/9/11):

Republicans, long opposed to tax increases, said Tuesday that they might allow $250 billion to $300 billion of additional tax revenue as part of a deal to shave $1.2 trillion from federal deficits over the next 10 years.

One slight problem: The GOP tax increase is, it turns out, a massive tax cut for wealthy Americans. As Steve Benen noticed (Political Animal, 11/9/11):

Way down in the same article, in the 16th paragraph, the piece gets around to mentioning that Republican want to trade nearly $300 billion in new revenue for "permanently extending the George W. Bush-era tax cuts past their 2012 expiration date, a move that would increase deficits by about $4 trillion over the next decade."

That's the kind of detail that more or less debunks the article’s headline and lede. Think about it: as part of a debt-reduction deal, Republicans want to increase tax revenue by less than $300 billion and cut tax revenue by roughly $4 trillion.

This bit of trickery is still being misreported--in today's Post, for instance:

Some conservatives in the Republican House majority said they could not support the latest GOP offer to raise taxes by as much as $300 billion over the next decade as part of a broader deal to cut spending. The offer marked the first time Republicans other than Boehner have proposed raising taxes above current levels.

Readers had to keep reading several paragraphs to learn that this tax increase is actually part of a massive tax cut--bringing the top rate down to 28 percent.

Perhaps the most bizarre exchange on this topic came on Sunday's Meet the Press, where NBC host David Gregory insisted that his own reporting should be trusted over the word of Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida:

GREGORY: They did agree for tax increases that Democrats have not accepted this week. But I want to ask you about, specifically, about the debt.

SCHULTZ: Well, no, no, no.... Come on, David, that was not a serious proposal. What they proposed was, you know, reducing the number of itemized deductions in exchange for a passage, an extension of all the Bush tax cuts, which actually would've resulted in less revenue and brought the overall top tax rate down to 28 percent. So that was not a serious proposal. We need a serious proposal that balances the revenue the super committee generates and the cuts.

GREGORY: All right. Well, there was new revenue that was proposed, but I realize that's still a subject of debate. But let me, let me focus...

SCHULTZ: That would result in less revenue overall.

GREGORY: Let me--well, again, that's in dispute, according to my reporting on that.

It would be of great value to the country--and to the GOP--if Gregory could explain what his investigation turned up.

On the Meet the Press roundtable on Sunday (10/30/11), talk turned to Steve Jobs. And, as one might expect from the avalanche of hero worship that accompanied news of his death, the chatter concerned how we might all one day live up to Jobs' legacy.

Here's host David Gregory, speaking to Tom Brokaw:

Tom, it's interesting, author and journalist Jeff Greenfield tweeted recently about Steve Jobs the following: "Imagine a Steve Jobs in the auto industry, in healthcare, in energy, even in government. We'd have a different country."

We know from Walter Isaacson's biography that Jobs had some pretty strong views about how the government should work--specifically, he wanted to "break" teachers' unions, and praised the light regulatory burden on corporations doing business in China.

That certainly makes Apple more profitable. But consider this passage from the New York Times' review of Mike Daisey's monologue, "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs," about one Chinese facility:

While the official Chinese workday is 8 hours, the norm at Foxconn is more like 12 and even longer when the introduction of a product is at hand. One worker died after a 34-hour shift. Some of the workers he meets are as young as 13, and because of the repetitive nature of the labor, their hands often become deformed and useless within a decade, rendering them unemployable.

Back to the NBC panel, where Isaacson was using Jobs' legacy to underline a point in Tom Brokaw's new book:

ISAACSON: I think that painting a vision for the future, saying "Here's where the country really ought to go," we all know the broad outline, Steve Jobs knew the broad outlines, which is better jobs, skills for those jobs, and a chance for everybody to move up. (CROSSTALK) Well, I think that we all agree that there should be a fairer, flatter taxes...

GREGORY: Mm-hmm.

ISAACSON: ...but there should also be a reduction in the inequality in this country.

GREGORY: Right.

We all agree that there should flatter taxes? I don't think so.

And Apple, for the record, seemed to think it should pay no taxes:

Apple has made money so quickly and so prodigiously that it holds an outrageous $76 billion in cash and investments--an awesome sum thought to be parked in an obscure subsidiary, Braeburn Capital, located across the California border in Reno because the state of Nevada doesn't have corporate or capital-gains taxes.

If only such a company could dominate every facet of our lives, commercial and political.

NBC Meet the Press host David Gregory, interviewing Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Sunday (10/10/11):

GREGORY: What's going on in the streets of Occupy Wall Street?

EMANUEL: Yeah.

GREGORY: Complaining about the unfairness, railing against Wall Street. The president has sympathized with those protesters in the street.  Is demonizing Wall Street the way to create an environment...

EMANUEL: Well...

GREGORY: ...to get the banks to hire?

EMANUEL: The--it's not...

GREGORY: Is this not a reverse tea party tactic?

At the top of Meet the Press yesterday (9/25/11), NBC anchor David Gregory announced one of the topics to come:

Is the president's plan basic fairness or class warfare?

As with too many other media debates, an absurd proposition--that returning tax rates for certain wealthy people to levels seen in the 1980s and 1990s is a declaration of war--is treated as one of the two possible answers to a question. Gregory manages to make things worse by getting the only answer on the show from billionaire New York mayor (and media tycoon) Michael Bloomberg:

GREGORY: Does that trouble you?

BLOOMBERG: It does trouble me. You can't define what's middle class, what is wealthy, what is poor. Every time you have a jump, people play games to get on one side or another. And I think it's not fair to say that wealthy people don't pay their fair share. They pay a much higher percentage of their income. They have a higher rate than people who make less. The Buffett thing is just theatrics. If Warren Buffett made his money from ordinary income rather than capital gains, his tax rate would be a lot higher than his secretary's. And, in fact, a very small percentage of people in this country pay a big chunk on their taxes.

Bloomberg's response is incoherent. Of course definitions of what makes someone  "wealthy" or "poor" differ, but there's no reason people can't make such distinctions.

And Buffett's tax burden has nothing to do with "theatrics." Bloomberg says, "If Warren Buffett made his money from ordinary income rather than capital gains, his tax rate would be a lot higher."

Well, yeah. THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT of Buffett's argument.

If Meet the Press is going to actually engage this discussion, it might make sense to invite some guests who know something about the issue--perhaps even a non-billionaire.

August 6, 2011, when 38 soldiers, including 30 U.S. troops, were killed when their helicopter was shot down, was the "deadliest day" of the Afghan War, several media outlets told us:

• David Muir (ABC World News Saturday, 8/6/11): "It was the deadliest day of the war in Afghanistan, 30 Americans, 22 Navy SEALs lost."

• David Gregory (NBC Meet the Press, 8/7/11): "This was the single deadliest day of the war."

• Chicago Tribune headline (8/7/11): "Taliban Says It Downed Copter in Deadliest Day of War in Afghanistan"

• ABC This Week graphic (8/7/11): "DEADLIEST DAY IN AFGHANISTAN"

• Terrell Brown, CBS Morning News (8/8/11): "America mourns the loss of 30 warriors killed in Afghanistan on the war's deadliest day."

• AP (8/9/11): "Troops killed in the deadliest day of the Afghan War are coming home today."

But, of course, it wasn't the war's deadliest day--that unhappy distinction goes to May 4, 2009, when the U.S. military attacked the village of Granai, killing 140 people, 93 of them children, according to an Afghan government investigation (Reuters, 5/16/09). (The U.S. government says it does not know how many people it killed that day.)

Other deadlier days in Afghanistan include July 6, 2008, when U.S. bombing killed 47 civilians, including 39 women and children, attending a wedding in Nangarhar province (Guardian, 7/11/08); August 22, 2008, when a U.S. airstrike killed at least 90 civilians, including 60 children, in the village of Azizabad (UN News Centre, 8/26/08); and July 23, 2010, when the U.S. killed 39 civilians in the village of Sangin (RTTNews, 8/5/10).

To be sure, many U.S. news reports, unlike those cited above, remembered to add "for Americans" to their descriptions of August 6 as the "deadliest day." But there's little evidence that anyone in U.S. media remembers the village of Granai.

Amid tough competition from his corporate media colleagues, Meet the Press host David Gregory has stood out as a journalist who has consistently misinformed the public about the impact of Social Security and other entitlement programs on the deficit. To find out how he's been wrong and to tell him to correct his errors, see FAIR latest Action Alert.

Please use the comments thread of this blog post to leave copies of your messages, or to discuss the alert.

Labor journalist Mike Elk (In These Times, 5/16/11) made an excellent point after watching NBC host David Gregory interview Newt Gingrich on Sunday's Meet the Press (5/15/11). Elk wrote:

Speaking yesterday on Meet the Press, Republican presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said that "the Obama system of the National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] is basically breaking the law to try to punish Boeing and to threaten every right-to-work state."

While Meet the Press host David Gregory vigorously challenged Newt Gingrich on details of his personal life, he failed to challenge Gingrich on his false assertion that the NLRB was breaking the law by finding that Boeing punished workers for striking in Washington state by moving a planned new production line there to nonunion South Carolina. Despite the NLRB complaint against Boeing being one of the most high-profile NLRB cases in decades and entirely consistent with past legal precedent, Gregory failed to say anything.

His decision not to challenge Gingrich on the Boeing case is especially troubling since the main sponsor of Meet the Press is none other than Boeing. The top of Meet the Press' website proudly boasts that the show is "sponsored by Boeing."  No other corporation is listed so prominently as a sponsor on the website. In addition, Boeing is the exclusive sponsor of Meet the Press'  iPhone app.

This reminded me of Gregory's response last year when ABC's This Week started posting factchecks (courtesy of Politifact) of their guests on their website:

An "interesting idea," Gregory allows, but not one the NBC show will be emulating. "People can factcheck Meet the Press every week on their own terms."

I guess that's especially true when the subject is a sponsor.

NBC anchor David Gregory on NBC Nightly News (4/9/11) explaining how sees Obama's 2012 strategy:

And I thought what was striking about what the president said, if you listen to his comments made Friday night, he sounded very much like a Republican talking about the need to cut spending. That's the re-election play here. He wants the American people to know, particularly those independent voters, that he is in line with what a lot of Americans want, which is less government, trimming down the size and the scope of government. He wants to be able to say, "Look, I brought the sides together, I averted the shutdown, and I'm on board with cutting government spending." That's the message he wants to drive next year.

You could have a good argument about whether Obama is really behaving like a Republican. But to me the more revealing part is that Gregory seems to believes this is a wise political strategy, based on his notion that this is what voters want.

As we've pointed out before, public opinion polls indicate that voters mostly want someone to do something about jobs. The media believe that the public wants spending cuts--an idea, generally speaking, that is more in line with conservative or Republican ideology.  Thus, a Democrat who embraces budget cuts will be portrayed as one doing what the public wants--no matter what the public actually wants.

This is, of course, the very same media that will be covering the 2012 election.

From Meet the Press (3/27/11):

GREGORY: I'll start with you, Ted Koppel. You spent time, in your early days as a correspondent, with Henry Kissinger.

KOPPEL: I did.

GREGORY: Who knew something about the big ideas for the world.  Is this administration getting the big ideas right in the--in the tumult of the Middle East?

Who knows what those "big ideas" might be. But if you want to make Ted Koppel feel comfortable, it's good to praise Henry Kissinger-- as we noted recently:

Koppel once boasted of Kissinger: "Henry Kissinger is, plain and simply, the best secretary of state we have had in 20, maybe 30 years.... I'm proud to be a friend of Henry Kissinger. He is an extraordinary man. This country has lost a lot by not having him in a position of influence and authority."

For another view of the value of Kissinger and his "big ideas," see my article from Extra! Update: "Questions for Kissinger Go Unasked: Journalists Show 'Sensitivity' to War-Crime Suspect's Feelings" (8/01).

As we noted here, there weren't many labor voices booked on the Sunday morning chat shows. One, actually--Richard Trumka from the AFL-CIO.

ABC's This Week featured four governors (two Democrats, two Republicans) talking about their fiscal problems. CBS's Face the Nation had a soft interview with New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie. Host Bob Schieffer asked him one question that began, "You have a reputation as a straight talker, I think...." Schieffer went on to play a clip of Christie bravely calling for Social Security cuts. Instead of questioning Christie's totally inaccurate premise--that you "have to raise the retirement age"--Schieffer asked him, "Should other people be saying that?"

Over at NBC, Wisconsin Republican Gov. Scott Walker could at least be challenged by another guest  on the same show. They weren't on at the same time, but NBC viewers could hear Trumka say this:

Well, first of all, this isn't about the budget crisis. Let's look at how this--his arguments migrated.  First he said it was--the budget crisis was caused because workers were paid too much in Wisconsin.  We now have studies that show they're not overpaid, they're underpaid.  In fact, people with a degree in Wisconsin get 25 percent less than their private sector things. 

Then he said it was about the pension.  Now we find out that his pension plan, unlike a lot in the country, is almost fully funded.  The assets match the liabilities. 

And then the employees said, or the members out there said, his workers said, "We'll accept your cuts." And he said: "No.  We won't accept your accepting our cuts." And the most outrageous thing that he did, and he talked about this, was he's now saying to them, "You either have to accept a loss of your rights or I'm going to lay you off." Now, no person should have to face the right of their loss of their job or the loss of their rights.  I know Governor Barbour would never say to his employees, his people down there, "You either have to give up your rights or you have to give up your job."

So there isn't much of a pension crisis in Wisconsin. State workers  aren't overpaid. And those same workers have agreed to many of the concessions Walker is demanding. If this were part of every discussion about Wisconsin, we'd be having a far more sensible discussion.

NBC host David Gregory followed with a popular right-wing argument about public workers' unions--that their political campaign contributions mean that elected officials owe them favors:

You raise a lot of money from public employees.  That goes, goes to finance campaigns to try to get somebody in office that you can do business with.  And ultimately you're supporting someone, in some cases, that you're ultimately negotiating with.  They also know that political employees, rather, public employees are politically active because they're organized by the unions.  And so they make concessions on things like pensions, on healthcare, knowing that the promises don't come due to well down the road.  Isn't this the cycle that we've gotten into that public unions have to take some responsibility for?

In other words, aren't politicians doing favors for you because you help them get elected? How often have CEOs and corporate trade associations--who have far more money than labor to give to politicians--been asked that kind of question?

From his Meet the Press interview with House Speaker John Boehner (2/13/11):

 On entitlements, like Social Security, you said the retirement age should be raised, but you said you don't want to get into negotiating how that happens just now until the problem is better defined.  Again, when it comes to leadership, when it comes to the need to, you know, have no limit on cutting, don't you think Americans understand what the problem with Social Security is?  What will it take for you to join with the White House to make real reform to deal with this piece of the budget?

When interviewers like Gregory demand more "leadership" on a given issue, it's not hard to figure out what they mean.  A question like this implies that Social Security is a big, big problem in need of a big, big solution--and that raising the retirement age (which is, remember, a benefit cut) isn't enough to deal with the problem.

Just a few months ago (FAIR Blog, 11/15/10), Gregory's NBC program featured a discussion of the White House's right-leaning deficit commission involving right-wingers Alan Greenspan and Newt Gingrich, with right-wing Democrat Harold Ford in the mix too. Gregory's point then was much the same:

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?

As we noted back in that November post, the retirement age is already rising, which amounts to a benefit cut for the poor, and raising the cap on taxable income--which would be a tax hike on the wealthy--would take care of all the supposed long-term problems with Social Security's finances. But something tells me that you're not likely to see David Gregory demanding that any political leaders declare their support for this simple fix.

Joe Biden on Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak (PBS NewsHour, 1/27/11):

 I would not refer to him as a dictator.

 On WikiLeaks' Julian Assange (NBC's Meet the Press, 12/19/10)

 DAVID GREGORY: Mitch McConnell says he's a high-tech terrorist, others say this is akin to the Pentagon Papers. Where do you come down?

 JOE BIDEN: I would argue that it's closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers.

For the record, neither journalist pushed Biden to explain his opinions.

Today in the New York Times Paul Krugman (1/10/11) suggests that we not pretend that "both sides" are responsible for toxic political rhetoric:

Where's that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let's not make a false pretense of balance: It's coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It's hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be "armed and dangerous" without being ostracized; but Rep. Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the GOP.

...Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you'll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won't hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at the Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly, and you will.

Unfortunately, that false balance is not just coming from the right, but appears all across the media. On Meet the Press (1/9/11), NBC's David Gregory rounded up examples of demonizing rhetoric:

Let's be honest, there is a demonization.  It happens amongst all of you, it happens in the public, it happens in the polarized aspects of the press, a demonization of the other side.  Whether it's a congressman saying, "You lie," from the House floor, whether it's a Democrat who literally shoots the cap-and-trade bill in a campaign advertisement.  Or your former colleague, Alan Grayson from Florida, compared Republicans to the Taliban.  I mean, this kind of vitriol on both sides does contribute to that, that demonization.

Dan Balz of the Washington Post (1/10/11):

Politicians in both parties have said this is not a time for one side to try to score political points against the other over who bears responsibility for these conditions, though there is plenty of finger-pointing in the blogosphere and on Twitter. The reality is everyone bears some responsibility, from politicians to political operatives to the media to ordinary Americans.

New York Times (1/10/11):

Not since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 has an event generated as much attention as to whether extremism, antigovernment sentiment and even simple political passion at both ends of the ideological spectrum have created a climate promoting violence.

New York Times' Matt Bai leads off with examples from "both sides," and in so doing equates one of the most prominent national figures in the Republican Party (and a regular contributor to the GOP house organ Fox News Channel) with some unnamed diarist from Arizona who didn't support a recent Gifford vote:

Within minutes of the first reports Saturday that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, and a score of people with her had been shot in Tucson, pages began disappearing from the Web. One was Sarah Palin's infamous "cross hairs" map from last year, which showed a series of contested Congressional districts, including Ms. Giffords', with gun targets trained on them. Another was from Daily Kos, the liberal blog, where one of the congresswoman's apparently liberal constituents declared her "dead to me" after Ms. Giffords voted against Nancy Pelosi in House leadership elections last week.

To his credit, Bai spends significant time recounting violent rhetoric from Republican and conservative leaders--likely because there is just a lot more of that to write about. But he offers an excuse for their behavior:

It’s not that such leaders are necessarily trying to incite violence or hysteria; in fact, they're not. It’s more that they are so caught up in a culture of hyperbole, so amused with their own verbal flourishes and the ensuing applause, that--like the bloggers and TV hosts to which they cater--they seem to lose their hold on the power of words.

Bai adds:

None of this began last year, or even with Mr. Obama or with the Tea Party; there were constant intimations during George W. Bush's presidency that he was a modern Hitler or the devious designer of an attack on the World Trade Center, a man whose very existence threatened the most cherished American ideals.

Yes, there are people who called Bush a "modern Hitler," or believed he had some role in the 9/11 attacks. Those people are generally not given talkshows, and cannot be found in positions of power in the Democratic Party.