If you needed any more evidence of the diseased and decaying condition of our national newsmedia, and the infantile arguments it uses to help form our political and policy debates, you could not look any further than this overripe hunk of cheese at Politico this morning:
A year into his presidency, however, Obama’s gift for controlling his image shows signs of faltering. As Washington returns to work from the Thanksgiving holiday, there are several anti-Obama storylines gaining momentum.The Obama White House argues that all of these storylines are inaccurate or unfair. In some cases these anti-Obama narratives are fanned by Republicans, in some cases by reporters and commentators.
But they all are serious threats to Obama, if they gain enough currency to become the dominant frame through which people interpret the president’s actions and motives.
"If they gain enough currency to become the dominant frame" . . . and how does one suppose that this happens at all? Apparently, our Politico correspondent lives in some hermetically sealed bubble, unable in any way to imagine how his and his colleagues' incessant emphasis on spin, image-crafting, and public relations in our political discourse over the more complicated nuts-and-bolts processes of policy analysis could possibly influence this "currency", let alone mint it. They only report, we decide.
This type of reporting---which is really journalism at its laziest and most slothful, a regurgitation of Republican talking points, free from definitive criticism and scrutiny---inevitably breeds lazy and slothful analysis, as the following passage illustrates:
The flight of independents away from Democrats last summer — the trend that recently hammered Democrats in off-year elections in Virginia — coincided with what polls show was alarm among these voters about undisciplined big government and runaway spending. The likely passage of a health care reform package criticized as weak on cost-control will compound the problem.Obama understands the political peril, and his team is signaling that he will use the 2010 State of the Union address to emphasize fiscal discipline. The political challenge, however, is an even bigger substantive challenge—since the most convincing way to project fiscal discipline would be actually to impose spending reductions that would cramp his own agenda and that of congressional Democrats.
There are so many utterly distorted, factually challenged and genuinely erroneous conclusions drawn in these two paragraphs, it is hard to know exactly where to start in critiquing them. The "trend" in Virginia was offset by the "trend" in upstate New York, where a Democrat defeated a right-wing wackjob for a Congressional seat that had been held by Republicans since the Civil War. Polls on healthcare reform are more abundant than Republican lawmakers in public restrooms, and you can find plenty of examples in favor of, and opposed to, a government-funded public option, with the results largely dictated by the framing of the questions and the predelictions of the pollsters. And "fiscal discipline" wouldn't merely "cramp" Obama's agenda---it would also likely plunge the country into an even deeper recession. But this kind of analysis would require some genuine discussion of policy beyond "who's winning the gotcha game over the next network news cycle." This is, in essence, the politics of your typical high-school student body election, an elite-sanctioned popularity contest to fill a series of largely impotent and ceremonial positions in student government, where matters of governance and power are deemed irrelevant in the presence of cliques and personalities. Is it any wonder why the ill-informed blatherings of a ur-student body pol such as Palin should captivate our national newsmedia, month after dumbing-down month?
Even more absurd is the following:
Obama, a legislator and law professor, is fluent in describing the nuances of problems. But his intellectuality has contributed to a growing critique that decisions are detached from rock-bottom principles.Both Maureen Dowd in The New York Times and Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post have likened him to Star Trek’s Mr. Spock.
The Spock imagery has been especially strong during the extended review Obama has undertaken of Afghanistan policy. He’ll announce the results on Tuesday. The speech’s success will be judged not only on the logic of the presentation but on whether Obama communicates in a more visceral way what progress looks like and why it is worth achieving. No soldier wants to take a bullet in the name of nuance.
Doug at Balloon Juice dispenses with this nonsense in one easy sentence:
Are there other first-world countries where the media spends a lot of time worrying that its leaders are too rational?
I don't know, but if there are, they deserve the stupidest fucking leaders they can find. Just like we do, apparently.
Palin 2012: Resistance is futile. Count me in early.
---Vitelius
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