How Media Poisons the Well of Politics

Dean Baker has a post in his Beat the Press blog that is funny and very pointed. It makes clear that media has a role in the sour, divisional, partisan politics in the US because media doesn't bother to convey the necessary facts to allow the electorate to make sound political judgements:

The NYT somehow thinks that it's good journalism not to point out that people who say that the earth is flat are wrong. How else can one explain the fact that it reports on Representative Paul Ryan's presidential ambitions (or lack thereof) and notes in passing that he has different views on how to constrain health care costs and promote growth than President Obama.

Representative Ryan's views on both topics have been tested and shown to be wrong. The government run Medicare program is far more effective in constraining costs than the private sector. This is why the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that adopting Representative Ryan's plan would add $30 trillion to the cost of buying Medicare equivalent plans over Medicare's 75-year planning horizon.

This is not the sum transferred from the government to beneficiaries. It is the increase in total costs -- waste to the government, income to insurers and health care providers. This $30 trillion figure is approximately 6 times the size of the projected Social Security shortfall. It comes to almost $100,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country.

We also have had ample opportunity to test Representative Ryan's other main theme, that lower taxes are necessary to boost growth. President Reagan had large tax cuts in the 80s. This was the worst decade for growth in the post-war period until the last decade when President Bush had another big round of tax cuts. This is why CBO projects that tax cuts do not pay for themselves and will lead to deficits that will be a drag on growth.

Given the overwhelming weight of the evidence, the NYT is misleading readers when it reports that:

"And Mr. Ryan is making a counter case — tax cuts are needed to stir economic growth, and Medicare is on an unsustainable path — as he travels through towns like North Prairie, Delavan and Clinton, population 2,162."

The reporter should know that Mr. Ryan's case does not make sense and should not imply to readers that it does.

Go read the original to get the embedded links.

In the future, people will back at the Tea Party and be amazed that such strange views took root as a populist movement. But sadly they won't have access to the "environment" that the media creates by selectively filtering fact out and passing fiction on as if it were fact. They will have no idea how media has poisoned politics in America.