Thursday, August 13, 2009

Speaking of media abdication...

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman writes today:
From the Times, January 2008:

First, those who don’t want to nominate Hillary Clinton because they don’t want to return to the nastiness of the 1990s — a sizable group, at least in the punditocracy — are deluding themselves. Any Democrat who makes it to the White House can expect the same treatment: an unending procession of wild charges and fake scandals, dutifully given credence by major media organizations that somehow can’t bring themselves to declare the accusations unequivocally false (at least not on Page 1).
For prime evidence see my last post.

Update: Wow! I'm stunned that the New York Times had a front webpage headline, no less, calling a Republican lie false, "False ‘Death Panel’ Rumor Has Some Familiar Roots". I get so disappointed with the press, that when they stand up and explain important information in an accurate non-misleading way – by stating clearly verifiable Republican lies as false – it stuns me. I like to think my blog post had something to do with it (Ha), but anyway this is great to see.

The article even assigns blame to top mainstream Republicans, like "the party’s last vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, and Charles E. Grassley, the veteran Iowa senator", as well as "many of the same pundits and conservative media outlets that were central in defeating President Bill Clinton’s health care proposals 16 years ago, including the editorial board of The Washington Times, the American Spectator magazine and Betsy McCaughey, whose 1994 health care critique made her a star of the conservative movement (and ultimately, New York’s lieutenant governor)." The blame is truthfully due, but it's great to see this after the press so often not being willing to tell the public when Republican politicians and organizations are responsible for spreading lies, due to caring more about what they think looks "even-handed" than conveying important information to the public in an accurate non-misleading way.

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