Jon Chait observes that McCain and Coburn also seem to have decided that anything relating to animals is necessarily waste. Hence a small grant to fund research on cocaine addiction and relapse is turned into "Monkeys Getting High for Science." Hardy-har-har. There's a case to be made that the government has no role to play in funding scientific research, but it's a mighty bad case. If you think the government should fund research in the health and medical fields, then of course you're going to be funding some experiments that involve monkeys. Even though monkeys are funny.

This animals-are-funny principle was followed by ABC's Jonathan Karl, who cited "among the highlights" of the McCain/Coburn press release not only the monkey study but also "nearly $1 million for the California Academy of Sciences to study exotic ants." That's doubly funny because they're bugs and they're "exotic." But the reason you would want to study exotic insects (meaning non-native) is that they're a threat to agriculture, either current or potential. Agriculture is a $36 billion-a-year industry in California--but this crucial context was ignored by ABC.

But including the context is dangerous, because it has the potential to reveal that what you're reporting is completely pointless. Karl led off his report with this example:

KARL: The Forest Service is spending more than $500,000 to replace the windows at this Mount St. Helens visitors center. It could sure use a facelift, but--

ANSWERING MACHINE: Coal Water Ridge Visitor Center is now closed.

KARL: The visitors center is closed and there's no plans to reopen it.

What an outrageous waste of taxpayer money! But then Karl follows up with this crucial bit of information: "The Forest Service told us, they are fixing it up to sell it." If that had been mentioned in the first place--"The Forest Service is spending half a million dollars to fix up a shuttered visitors center in order to sell it"--that wouldn't have sounded crazy at all; lots of homeowners make similar decisions about their property every day. But if it didn't sound crazy, it wouldn't have been a catchy way to lead off the report.

Of course, the real point of the list is not the individual items, but the general point that the whole stimulus program was a waste of money that failed to boost employment. On this economic question, ABC cites exactly one expert: John McCain, who declares of the projects he listed, "I think none of them really have any meaningful impact on creating jobs." This is the politician who declared during the 2008 campaign (Think Progress, 1/18/08), "The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should."

The Congressional Budget Office (5/25/10), whose understanding of economics is somewhat more advanced, estimated that in the first quarter of this year, the stimulus bill created the equivalent of 1.8 million to 4.1 million full-time jobs. This is context that ABC could have included in its story, but chose not to--perhaps because it would have revealed that the story had no real point.

The first (3/31/09) was a repeat of an experiment with children playing with black and white dolls, showing that now kids don't tend to think that the black doll is mean and the white doll nice, like they did in the '40s--although some black girls still say the black doll is ugly and the white doll pretty. The report cited William Julius Wilson saying "there's still work to be done, especially with girls, even with Barack Obama as president, his family in the White House, to make sure the weight of a prejudice past doesn't secretly make its way into the hopes of a brand-new day."

Number two (4/1/09): another experiment repeated, black men trying to hail cabs in New York City. This time, in their very non-scientific experiment, black men do fine during the day, but have a harder time getting a cab once it's dark out. They also talk to people of color who feel discriminated against at high-end stores.

And number three (4/2/09): GMA anchors Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts went back to their hometowns in the South and talked to groups of white and black children, respectively, about their perceptions of race. Ten years ago, when they did this in Mobile, the kids talked about a racial divide and expressed negative stereotypes of the other race. This time, "the kids don't wanna talk a lot about skin color" and were "expressing one hope that a rainbow of kids can show grown-ups how to learn, have parties, live together." Roberts asks them why they think (old) people still want to talk about race a lot, and one kid says, "Because they're so happy it's not like that anymore."

These are, overall, encouraging stories. But it's only possible to tell such encouraging stories by limiting your focus to one kind of racism--the overt kind that plays out through individually held prejudices. Notice that none of GMA's episodes looked at the racial wealth gap, or the ways that the foreclosure crisis is impacting people of color more severely than white people, or the disproportionate number of people of color locked up in our criminal justice system versus white people (just to name a few examples). Sure, overt prejudice has diminished over the years, and that's a good thing (though there's still plenty of it out there). But ABC only perpetuates the very serious underlying racism by pretending prejudice is the only kind of racism there is.