Why You Can't Read Media Without Questioning Everything

When I read news "reports" or watch TV "news", I'm constantly surprised by how the prevailing prejudices colour the presentation. A simple example: in Canada the media presents the default assumption in reporting all the news from Afghanistan using the "normal" view that Canada has a "commitment" to Afghanistan. It doesn't. It never had. It was arm-twisted into "contributing" to the idiotic on-going war in Afghanistan. The latest manifestation is the unilateral declaration by the Prime Minister that the 2011 "withdrawal" from Afghanistan "needs" to be enhanced by a commitment to a sizeable force that stays behind as "trainers" and not fighters. The media let this alteration of policy as if it were natural and requires no questioning.

Here's a similar example from the US. Brad DeLong posts on his blog an example of how President Obama's "Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform" has created a plan that rapes the poor and favours the rich, but is presented in the media as the height of fiscal responsibility and serious political "honesty". DeLong points out that the key fact of fundamental unfairness and the continued policy of penalizing the poor while favouring the rich goes unremarked:

Isn't it worth saying that it looks as though Simpson-Bowles is an average $7000/year tax cut for the top 1% and an average $600/year tax increase for the working and middle classes? "Progressives who are concerned about the gap between rich and poor should be eager to scale back tax expenditures" just does not cut it, does it?

What I find mind-numbingly insane is that thirty years of policy of favouring the rich has created a hugely serious problem of homelessness, poverty, family disintegration, hopelessness is never questioned by "mainstream" media. Instead, despite thirty years as a failed policy, this is still presented as the promising way forward. And, even more outrageous, this is presented as "the cure" for the mythologized social ills of the 1960s engendered by the ferment of that decade.