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Romney/Ryan and the Lullaby of Lying
Mitt Romney and deep pockets like the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson have flooded the airwaves with ads claiming that Barack Obama has eliminated the work requirement for welfare and stolen benefits from Medicare recipients to fund a government takeover of health care. These are lies, and there are lots more like them out there. In the democracy of our dreams, the press relentlessly exposes their falsehood, and media-literate citizens, proficient at critical thinking, are immune from manipulation. But the press is not relentless, and people seem to have given up on demanding a junkyard-dog standard from democracy's guardians.
For the news industry, it's an easy call. How often can a station or a paper run the same story? After crying foul a few times about the Romney campaign's effort to convince white working class voters that Obama is handing out food stamps to lazy blacks, there's no news left in the narrative. Networks fear that audiences will get bored, so they move on. And yes, there may be some truth to their understanding of their customers. We're hooked on novelty, suckers for speed, addled by ADD. But billionaires don't get bored. They keep paying to pound those ads into our heads, whether we like it or not. Repetition is the demagogue's best friend.
No member of Congress is farther to the right than Paul Ryan. He's an acolyte of the ideologue Ayn Rand, but the media, having done its obligatory story on her noxious philosophy, is perfectly content to use Ryan's recent brushoff of her influence on him as an excuse to drop the story. The vaunted Ryan budget is actually a roadmap for eliminating the safety net that has defined the American social contract since the 1930s, but explaining this takes time, which risks audience share, and in the face of a barrage of ads portraying him as the savior of seniors, it takes the kind of persistence that news executives fear hurts ratings. He is a hypocrite of the first order, a deficit hawk who voted to increase the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars and whose tax plan is demonstrably fraudulent, but hey, how 'bout the six-pack on that dreamboat?
If the media were doing its job in this election, the story it would be telling over and over is that Mitt Romney's qualification for the presidency consists of a career at Bain Capital about which we know essentially nothing; that his economic plan is the most massive transfer of wealth to the rich from the rest in the history of the country; that he arrogantly, petulantly and suspiciously refuses to play by the same financial disclosure rules that have applied to presidential candidates since his father ran; that his foreign policy team is a reunion of the neocon club that gave us Iraq; that the health care reform he championed in Massachusetts is virtually identical to the Affordable Care Act he promises to repeal; that he has changed sides on climate change, gun control, a woman's right to choose and so many other issues that the only consistent theme in his record is the urgency of pandering to the right, a spinelessness he is unlikely to abjure as president; and that Republican efforts to suppress voter turnout may well send him to the White House.
For the news industry, it's an easy call. How often can a station or a paper run the same story? After crying foul a few times about the Romney campaign's effort to convince white working class voters that Obama is handing out food stamps to lazy blacks, there's no news left in the narrative. Networks fear that audiences will get bored, so they move on. And yes, there may be some truth to their understanding of their customers. We're hooked on novelty, suckers for speed, addled by ADD. But billionaires don't get bored. They keep paying to pound those ads into our heads, whether we like it or not. Repetition is the demagogue's best friend.
No member of Congress is farther to the right than Paul Ryan. He's an acolyte of the ideologue Ayn Rand, but the media, having done its obligatory story on her noxious philosophy, is perfectly content to use Ryan's recent brushoff of her influence on him as an excuse to drop the story. The vaunted Ryan budget is actually a roadmap for eliminating the safety net that has defined the American social contract since the 1930s, but explaining this takes time, which risks audience share, and in the face of a barrage of ads portraying him as the savior of seniors, it takes the kind of persistence that news executives fear hurts ratings. He is a hypocrite of the first order, a deficit hawk who voted to increase the deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars and whose tax plan is demonstrably fraudulent, but hey, how 'bout the six-pack on that dreamboat?
If the media were doing its job in this election, the story it would be telling over and over is that Mitt Romney's qualification for the presidency consists of a career at Bain Capital about which we know essentially nothing; that his economic plan is the most massive transfer of wealth to the rich from the rest in the history of the country; that he arrogantly, petulantly and suspiciously refuses to play by the same financial disclosure rules that have applied to presidential candidates since his father ran; that his foreign policy team is a reunion of the neocon club that gave us Iraq; that the health care reform he championed in Massachusetts is virtually identical to the Affordable Care Act he promises to repeal; that he has changed sides on climate change, gun control, a woman's right to choose and so many other issues that the only consistent theme in his record is the urgency of pandering to the right, a spinelessness he is unlikely to abjure as president; and that Republican efforts to suppress voter turnout may well send him to the White House.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/mitt-romney-lies_b_1831881.html
