The fact that Time magazine named "The Protester" its Person of the Year was maybe a little surprising. Totally unsurprising, though, was the choice of a runners-up: Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, a hero to many in the corporate media for his bold calls to slash government spending on the poor.

It's hard to know where to start with reporter David Von Drehle's tribute. But let's try here:

Through a combination of hard work, good timing and possibly suicidal guts, the Wisconsin Republican managed to harness his party to a dramatic plan for dealing with America's rapidly rising public debt.

Dealing with the rising debt. Remember that idea.

He goes on:

The supply-sider from Janesville, Wis., tapped into a deep well of anxiety over trillion-dollar deficits at home and the threat of debt-fueled calamity in Europe. Did he deliver a perfect plan? Not even he claims that. But Ryan, 41, offered a budget that began to convey the scale of change necessary to defuse the American debt bomb: Sweeping tax reform. Unprecedented spending freezes. Most important, a thorough reinvention of federal entitlements.

Ryan's plan isn't perfect? And he admitted this?  What a guy! Ryan's heroic stance, readers learn, caused fury in both parties. Republicans were forced to make  difficult choices, while "Democrats howled at the sacrilege and Ryan's refusal to raise income tax rates on the wealthy."

Ryan's is a "tough budget"  that "brought President Obama down from his cloud of happy talk about windmills and high-speed trains to acknowledge that America has a plateful of peas to choke down after its binge at the dessert bar." That's right--massive cuts in social spending are good for you, just like eating your veggies.

The crux of the whole piece comes down to this:

Ryan's dramatic proposal would not have gained any traction if it did not address a widely acknowledged problem: Over the next two generations, the U.S. government is on track to spend many tens of trillions of dollars more than it plans to raise. Unless changes are made, that will force so much borrowing that interest payments alone will sink the federal budget.

Thankfully, Time tells us, Paul Ryan has "the courage to look the future in the eye. It is a seer's work to glimpse around the corner and sound an alarm."

The piece closes by noting that this brave bold plan "wouldn't balance the federal budget until 2040. The prophet of 2011 will be 70 years old."

Wait a second. I thought this was a bold deficit-reducing roadmap to deal with the debt?

The secret to the Ryan plan--the thing media don't talk about much--is that it doesn't do the thing they say they like about it-- namely, reduce the deficit. As Paul Krugman explained in the New York Times, the projected deficit in 2020 under the Ryan plan would be

about the same as the budget office's estimate of the 2020 deficit under the Obama administration's plans. That is, Mr. Ryan may speak about the deficit in apocalyptic terms, but even if you believe that his proposed spending cuts are feasible--which you shouldn't--the Roadmap wouldn't reduce the deficit. All it would do is cut benefits for the middle class while slashing taxes on the rich.

Or as James Horney of the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities wrote of Ryan (4/8/11):

Despite proposing $4.3 trillion in what would be the most severe and wrenching budget cuts in U.S. history--two-thirds of which would come from programs for people of low or moderate incomes--the plan barely reduces deficits at all over the next decade. That's because his budget cuts are offset by $4.2 trillion in tax cuts that would go disproportionately to those at the top. In essence, at least for the next decade, this plan is far less a blueprint for addressing deficits and far more a proposal to redistribute large amounts of resources from those at the bottom to those at the top.

Dean Baker writes that "Representative Ryan's program would imply a massive upward redistribution to the one percent." Maybe that explains why he's a Time runner-up. If "The Protester" is the Person of the Year, journalistic "balance" requires saying nice things about the One Percent.

Guess who's booked to appear on the CBS Sunday morning chat show Face the Nation this weekend? None other than Wisconsin Republican Paul Ryan.

It has, after all, been an eternity since Sunday TV viewers had a chance to listen to Ryan talk about his Medicare-slashing budget plan.

May 22 on Meet the Press, to be exact.

FAIR's new petition to the television networks asks why Ryan's far-right plan has been getting so much more coverage than the People's Budget of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Add your voice today!

The roundtable panel on ABC's This Week (5/29/11) spent some time talking about the politics of Medicare, specifically the idea that the recent Democratic victory in a special Congressional election in New York could mean that Paul Ryan's Medicare plan might be a tremendous liability for the GOP.

One of the most prevalent talking points from the Republican side is to complain that while Ryan's plan might have its flaws, at least they have something--unlike the Democrats. It was a point that ABC reporter Jonathan Karl passed along as fact:

[Bill Clinton] said that I hope Democrats don't use this as an excuse to do nothing. And that is exactly what Democrats are doing right now. There is no Democratic plan on reforming Medicare; we're waiting for the president to come out with a plan. The president's old budget lost 97-0 in a vote in the Senate, so, you know, I mean--Republicans are scared. They are definitely scared. But there is nothing coming from the other side.

Most people remember a big national debate over healthcare happened not too long ago. The law that passed--the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare" to its GOP critics--included several provisions intended to control the cost of healthcare, including Medicare. This was part of the reason Republicans were screaming about "death panels."

The parts of the Affordable Care Act that pertain to shrinking the cost of Medicare have been pretty well-explained for a while now. A recent piece from the Kaiser Health News explains how the Independent Payment Advisory Board created by the law would work:

Q: What will IPAB do?

A: Beginning with fiscal 2015, if Medicare is projected to grow too quickly, the IPAB will make binding recommendations to reduce spending. Those recommendations will be sent to Capitol Hill at the beginning of each year, and if Congress doesn’t like them, it must pass alternative cuts--of the same size--by August. A supermajority of the Senate can also vote to amend the IPAB recommendations. If Congress fails to act, the secretary of Health and Human Services is required to implement the cuts by default.

This (and more) was explained in a Washington Post column by Ezra Klein in April. Igor Volsky at Think Progress wrote a post last year showing how Medicare cost containment will work. There's no shortage of information explaining how this will work now that it is law. One could argue that none of it will work, of course, but that's not the same as saying there is no plan but the Paul Ryan plan. That's what Republicans want people to believe--and reporters like Jonathan Karl are doing their best to help.

Elite media’s selective disdain for public activism is well known. Still, you’d think some things would garner a word or two. Like 300 disability rights activists, a couple hundred in wheelchairs, occupying the rotunda of the Cannon House Office Building in Washington, D.C. The May 2 demonstration was organized by the rights group ADAPT to protest Republican budget plans for Medicaid. Ninety-one people were arrested and carted off by Capitol police.

Yet days after the rotunda protest, and another action the next day in which 300 demonstrators gathered outside the Longworth House Office Building, many getting inside to Rep. Paul Ryan's second floor office where 10 were arrested, the country's big media have taken no notice. Accounts in Politico (5/2/11) and the Hill (5/3/11) were all a search turned up.

ADAPT organizer Mike Ervin explained that it’s not just the roughly 35 percent funding cuts to Medicaid in the GOP’s budget proposal that concern the disability community, but the plan to convert states' federal shares into block grants. Many people with disabilities rely on Medicaid “for the assistance we get every day to live in our communities," rather than institutions.

As for the claim, from Ryan's Roadmap Plan, that block granting "allows states maximum flexibility to tailor their Medicaid programs to the specific needs of their populations," Ervin says, "That's like saying Jim Crow laws give states more flexibility to decide who gets to drink at their water fountains. Flexibility is basically a code word for abandonment."

People with disabilities (one community that anyone can join at any moment) and their advocates are right to worry their concerns won't be heard by lawmakers, to the extent that that involves dealing with a press corps that, evidently, can't even see them.

At his Beat the Press blog (4/23/11), Dean Baker caught this in the L.A. Times (4/23/11):

Congress is on its first recess since Republican leaders unveiled a plan to end the federal deficit by dramatically changing Medicare, cutting other government programs and reducing taxes.

As Baker points out, what the paper is referring to--the Paul Ryan budget proposal--does not "end the federal deficit." As he put it:

This is like saying they had a plan to fly to moon because they said they would build a rocket. The whole point is the specifics. How would they build a rocket? How would they raise taxes to meet their revenue targets?

But someone at the L.A. Times seems to like Paul Ryan's budget--at least judging by the unusually flattering (and misleading) descriptions of it that have appeared in the paper recently.

On April 11, the Times reported:

Ryan's 2012 budget proposed major changes to the longstanding federal programs.

For Medicare, seniors would receive a stipend to buy insurance on the private market. Analysts expect it would raise individual out-of-pocket health costs while making federal costs more stable and predictable.

Stabilizing costs--well, that's one way to put it. Making poor seniors pay much more for their healthcare in order to give tax breaks to the wealthy--that's another way.

About a week earlier (4/5/11), the L.A. Times debuted the Ryan budget this way:

The budget resolution unveiled Tuesday by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) would dramatically improve the nation's overall fiscal picture, reducing deficits projected in President Obama's budget and moving the federal government into surplus by 2040, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

As FAIR noted, one should be wary of claims about what the Congressional Budget Office is saying about the Ryan plan--Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post explained why:

The Post's Kessler, however, reports that this claim "seriously overstates the case," since the CBO analysis "reflects the scenarios that Ryan has concocted. There are, for instance, no real revenue estimates, just an assumption that federal revenues will remain at about 19 percent of GDP." The spending cuts imagined by Ryan are equally implausible--a "bare-bones government...not experienced since before the Great Depression."

Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan (R.-Wisc.) is used to being celebrated by pundits for his "courageous," "bold," "serious" budget proposals (even though his numbers don't add up). Indeed, Ryan has become a genuine media darling.

So it must have been a little surprising to find himself being booed earlier this week, at a town hall meeting he hosted in his congressional district.

It happened after one attendee at the event, a constituent describing himself as a "life-long conservative" challenged GOP views on income disparity, taxes on the wealthy, and raising the income cap on Social Security taxes:

The middle class is disappearing right now. During this time of prosperity, the top 1 percent was taking about 10 percent of the total annual income, but yet today we are fighting to not let the tax breaks for the wealthy expire? And we're fighting to not raise the Social Security cap from $87,000? I think we're wrong.

The boos came a moment later when Ryan responded insisting, "We do tax that top."

The contrast between the easy ride Ryan's had from professional journalists and the way he was challenged by his constituents demonstrates (once again) the disconnect between pundits and the people they often claim to speak for. (As Think Progress reports, a recent Washington Post/ABC News poll "found that 72 percent of Americans wanted Congress to raise taxes on wealthy Americans making more than $250,000 per year.")

In the summer of 2009, the corporate media frequently covered town hall meetings where Democratic politicians were challenged, sometimes even shouted down, by opponents of the party's healthcare initiatives. So far Ryan's awkward town hall moment has created an online buzz, but besides a few mentions on MSNBC (e.g., 4/20/11, 4/22/11) and 0ne Chicago Tribune report, it's received scant corporate media attention.

The uncritical coverage of Paul Ryan's budget plan continues. In the new issue of Time magazine, Michael Crowley and Jay Newton-Small tell us that Ryan is "the new face of federal frugality":

Just 41 years old, with jet black hair and a touch of Eagle Scout to him, the House Budget Committee chairman unveiled an ambitious package of huge budget cuts designed to dig the country out of its crippling debt crisis.  For Ryan, reining in spending is nothing less than an act of patriotic valor.

Valor. Eagle Scout. Great hair!

Ryan's critics have noted that his plan actually does very little about the "crippling debt crisis." Brian Beutler at Talking Points Memo reports that the Congressional Budget Office's score of the plan "finds that by the end of the 10-year budget window, public debt will actually be higher than it would be if the GOP just did nothing."

The Time reporters add:

He may be a modern political star, but there's still something a little old-fashioned about Ryan, right down to his crow's-beak nose. Maybe it's the premature seriousness that comes from finding your father dead of a heart attack when you were 16 and then helping to care for a grandmother with Alzheimer's disease.

Now a married father of three, Ryan is a PowerPoint fanatic with an almost unsettling fluency in the fine print of massive budget documents. "I love the field of economics," Ryan says. "I have a knack for numbers. And I've just delved into this issue for my adult life, basically."

Deep into the piece, after these tributes to Ryan's wonkery, comes this parenthetical:

(He's also been criticized for peddling fuzzy math and rosy projections. A Washington Post factcheck deemed his budget full of "dubious assertions, questionable assumptions and fishy figures.")

Huh. I thought he had "an almost unsettling fluency in the fine print of massive budget documents"?

By placing the factcheck so deep into the piece, and in parentheses, Time is all but saying that it doesn't matter what the facts are about Paul Ryan's plan. What's more important is that he's a patriotic number-cruncher.

With great hair!

Dean Baker's Beat the Press is the best Early Warning Media Mythbuster. It's simple: You read it every morning before you read the papers (he is up before you are, trust me) and you're well prepared to deal with the economic nonsense you'll be subjected to.

Today (4/6/11) he proposes this headline for stories about Rep. Paul Ryan's budget blueprint:

Representative Ryan Proposes Medicare Plan Under Which Seniors Would Pay Most of Their Income for Healthcare

Baker writes: "That is what headlines would look like if the United States had an independent press." He explains that the central idea in Ryan's plan--voucher-like "premium support" instead of Medicare--will leave people paying a lot for healthcare. It's a simple idea, but not one that is expressed so simply in many press accounts.

Take one Washington Post article today (4/6/11) by David A. Fahrenthold. It leads with this:

This is the essential question for Rep. Paul Ryan: Can this man really manage the hardest sales job in U.S. politics?

That might be "essential" for him, but it's of little importance to us. We need to know what the plan actually wants to do. But papers too often find space to run these kinds of man-in-the-news profiles at the expense of telling readers, as often as they should,  how policy ideas will affect them.

In the piece we learn that Ryan "is the lanky, wonky chairman of the House Budget Committee" and "an unlikely revolutionary." The Post tells us that "Ryan studied economics in college, and in Congress he has embraced the weedy issues of the federal budget." One source seems to think that "sticking to his wonky reputation would be a good idea."

Back to the sales job:

So far, the sales pitch appears to be classic Ryan. He will make his case with earnestness and a hope that a quiet explanation of budget math can swing the country in a way that previous politicians could not.

He's just trying to explain math! That's nice, since the Post article doesn't:

The vision also includes a change in the Medicare program, in which the federal government acts as a health insurer for seniors. In coming years--Ryan's plan does not apply to people who are already 55--he would shift the program so that seniors would choose a private health plan. The federal government would then provide "premium support" to help them pay for coverage.

The main math question is how much "support" seniors will get. The answer is not much, and certainly not enough to cover the skyrocketing cost of healthcare. Pointing this out should be part of every story--even ones that tell us that Paul Ryan's a "wonk."

Few pieces better illustrate the uselessness of so much corporate media political journalism than Kathleen Hennessey's piece in the L.A. Times (4/4/11) on Republican Rep. Paul Ryan's deficit reduction plan.

The piece is headlined "House Republican Budget Plan Would Revamp Medicare," and the lead explains that the GOP budget proposal outlined by Ryan "includes an overhaul of Medicare and Medicaid and would aim to chop at least $4 trillion from the federal deficit over the next decade.""Revamp," an "overhaul"--well, that sounds good, doesn't it? How does Ryan plan to do that, exactly?

Despite reporting that Ryan's "broad overview" offered "the clearest picture yet" of Republican deficit-reduction plans, the piece is far from clear: Hennessey reports that Ryan is suggesting "changes to entitlement programs"--"dramatic changes"--and is "addressing the rising costs of the program." Then, in the seventh paragraph, we get this:

Under the proposed rework of the Medicare program, seniors would chose from several federally subsidized health plans. The changes would take effect in 2021 and would not affect people who are 55 or older now, Ryan said.

Oh, OK--so how's that going to save $4 trillion? The piece doesn't say--that's the full description.

Then in the 26th paragraph, we get a quote from a partisan critic of Ryan's plan, Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D.-Md.), who says that the plan cuts "health security for seniors." He's not allowed to get any more specific than that, but Ryan gets four paragraphs of rebuttal to Van Hollen's one paragraph of vague criticism, starting with:

Ryan described the Medicare plan as a version of a "premium support" system he crafted along with former Clinton administration budget director Alice Rivlin. He acknowledged the proposal would shift more of the burden for healthcare costs to seniors, saying the wealthiest seniors would bear the largest portion.

"More for the poor, more for people who are sick, and we don't give as much to the people who are wealthy," Ryan said. "This saves Medicare."

Whoa, whoa, wait a second--"shift more of the burden for healthcare costs to seniors"? Why is this the first we're hearing about this, in the 27th paragraph of a 31-paragraph article?

Ryan's plan is not very hard to explain: He wants to replace Medicare with a system where seniors would receive vouchers to buy health insurance. As the cost of health insurance rises every year, the value of the vouchers would rise by not as much. Eventually the difference between the value of the vouchers and the cost of buying health insurance, along with a similar scheme for cutting Medicaid reimbursements, would amount to $4 trillion--which would be the amount that would come out of the pockets of seniors and the poor, plus the amount of healthcare they would do without.

That's what the L.A. Times means by "revamping." But if the paper explained that to its readers, they would mostly think Ryan's idea was a terrible one. And that would be biased--so it's better to leave the readers not knowing any more than they did before they read the article.

It's normal for the opposition party to deliver a rebuttal address to the State of the Union. Last night Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin was given that responsibility. But further-to-the-right Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota delivered the "Tea Party" response to the State of the Union, which was initially scheduled to air on the Tea Party Express website.

That is, until CNN decided it would air it on television. Which meant, as Washington Monthly's Steve Benen put it, CNN broadcast "the president's address, followed by a speech by a far-right Republican, and then followed by another speech by a different far-right Republican."

In response to CNN's justification--that the Tea Party is a "major political force"--he wonders:

Would CNN be inclined to air a SOTU response from the AFL-CIO? Labor unions are a major political force.

I think we know the answer to that one.

The Washington Post, meanwhile, voiced an odd concern about all this in a news article today, wondering whether the GOP message would get lost in the shuffle:

This year, the dueling responses probably made it even harder for either Republican to be heard.

Would viewers remember Ryan, using only his expressive face to convey worry about the debt? Or would they remember Bachmann's screen, which showed bar graphs and patriotic images behind her? At one point, she showed the iconic photo of Marines raising an American flag over Iwo Jima in World War II.

I don't think many people would worry about their own political point of view getting too much uninterrupted TV time.

In his New York Times column on Monday (8/9/10), headlined "The Flimflam Man," Paul Krugman took aim at Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, who has emerged as the GOP's big thinker on budgets:

One depressing aspect of American politics is the susceptibility of the political and media establishment to charlatans. You might have thought, given past experience, that D.C. insiders would be on their guard against conservatives with grandiose plans. But no: As long as someone on the right claims to have bold new proposals, he’s hailed as an innovative thinker. And nobody checks his arithmetic.

Krugman explains that Ryan's plan--big tax cuts, big cuts in spending--would actually not slash the deficit at all; it would make it bigger. And his tax "cuts" would really be tax hikes for everyone but the most well-off.

Krugman slammed "self-styled centrists" who "want to pretend, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence, that there are still people in the G.O.P. making sense.... The Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future."

Now turn to today's Times, and a piece from Matt Bai. The subject is the very same Paul Ryan, whom Bai calls the "Republican star of the moment" thanks to his budget blueprint, which is termed "unusually austere."

Bai references Krugman's criticism, but then tells readers:

Let's leave aside for now the debate over the viability of the road map, which, as a practical matter, doesn't stand a chance of being enacted as is, anyway. The more pertinent question is whether Mr. Ryan is the kind of guy who just wants to make a point--or whether his road map represents the starting point in what could be a serious negotiation about entitlements and spending.

Well, why is that the pertinent question? The roadmap is presented as Ryan's ideas about what the government should do. Why would you ignore what it says and pretend that it represents a possible "starting point" for doing something different?

Because apparently Obama needs a " useful nemesis on the right," Ryan's not "blindly partisan," he's friendly with some Democrats--and, perhaps most importantly:

Mr. Ryan appears to be the rare kind of guy who actually dreams of making Social Security solvent, rather than of using the issue to bludgeon opponents or get himself on television. While his own proposal for private investment accounts might be a deal-breaker for the White House, he identifies Social Security as an area where there is "clearly room for compromise" and says of his road map generally, "I'm trying to get the discussion to an adult level."

As Tim Fernholz pointed out at Tapped (8/12/10), though, Ryan's plan would do nothing to improve Social Security's financial outlook:

This Center for Budget and Policy Priorities analysis notes that "because the plan would divert large sums from Social Security to private accounts, it would leave the program facing insolvency in about 30 years, just as under current law." A warning, then, to Bai: Appearances can be deceiving.

Krugman took to his Times blog to critique this Times piece, which is worth a read.