| The title of this post shouldn't be misunderstood to mean that all traditional media reporters are shirking their responsibilities. Just some, and on critically important issues.
Like this example, found and firmly fisked by Sally Jo at Bluestem Prairie: The last sentence is particularly fascinating, for regardless of where I look online, I cannot find Republicans hitting "back by noting that over his career Walz has racked up $132 million in earmarks -- projects that would benefit his southern Minnesota district."
Lord knows I've tried. I've looked at the RNCC's website. I've looked at the Republican Party of Minnesota's website. I've search Twitter. I've remembered that Google Is My Friend and used the search engine to comb through various categories: Everything, Web, News, Blogs, Video. I've accessed Nexis and searched All News, using any number of combinations of search terms and could not find any media reporting that Republicans responded with this charge to Walz's defense of veterans programs.
I have no idea who those Republicans are, and where they talked about those $132 millions in earmarks in the more than two weeks since the dust-up began about Bachmann's proposed cuts to veterans' health care funding. The Strib article seems to be the first place this retort appeared.
Perhaps Kevin Diaz can source his material a bit more--I hear the standards demanded of the typical unpaid blogger at Huffington post are pretty good. Sally Jo goes on to provide the critical context that would have completely changed Diaz's lede from "Brace for another budget pinch" to "Republicans tie selves in knots trying to explain their own policies and tactics." But telling the truth apparently sells fewer papers than whatever the Star Tribune's editors have determined their current strategy is, so...
There's more too, after the break. |
Like this from Stribber Baird Helgeson "In my world, in the real world, we had a huge downturn," Jensen said. "But here, government just keeps on keeping on."
Minnesota has long been a bastion of robust government payrolls and generous benefits. Powerful unions curried strong favor in the halls of power.
When the economy slipped into free-fall, it exposed a gulf dividing Minnesota public employees' wages, job security and retirement benefits compared with their private sector counterparts.
While the state government employee roster crept up in recent years, 157,000 Minnesotans lost their jobs. Others endured wage and benefit reductions, watched their 401(k)s take a body blow and their retirement date recede toward a fuzzy horizon. What's missing? Only that thousands of teachers and other public sector employees have been laid off or furloughed, reducing their ability to put demand on economic activity. Additionally, the piece is devoid of any discussion of the services provided by those public employees and whether the same folks grousing over those employees' continued employment in a downturn would appreciate losing the services those employees provide (schools, road maintenance, police, firefighters, etc).
Or a slightly less egregious example from MPR which fails mainly in questioning a tenet of modern conservative faith-based economic planning: The problem with that is that no matter what path lawmakers settle on, the solution will hamper Minnesota's economic recovery, said David Wyss, chief economist for Standard and Poor's, a credit-rating and investment research firm.
"Most of government spending is employment, and if state and local governments cut spending that means they're going to be laying off teachers, they're going to be cutting back on Medicaid spending," Wyss said. "All of that means lost jobs. If you raise taxes it means the people in the state cut back on spending which is going to cost jobs too. So either way it is going to hurt."
That's going to hurt so much in Minnesota and the rest of the country that many economists agree fallout from state budget balancing poses the biggest threat to the still ailing economy. The problem? Well, there are actually two. Where's the questioning of whether raising taxes will actually cause those affected to cut back on spending? Where's the distinction between raising taxes on the middle class and the poor (through regressive property tax spikes championed by Republican leaders in St. Paul) or on the rich who already pay less of their income in taxes than the other 90% of us (championed throughout a successful campaign by Gov. Dayton)?
Of course, the second problem is the definition of "many" in the statement "many economists agree" since "many" "scientists" also agree that global anthropogenic climate change is a farce. If you consider 50 individuals to be "many", then yeah, you can use "many," but if the other 1,904,384 individuals in your sample are fairly certain that those 50 are insane, corrupt, or both, then "many" loses its meaning.
Just like the "coverage" of these issues we're getting from an increasingly incapable or unwilling press corps, with fewer and fewer examples of reporters who work on writing what Minnesota needs to know about political discourse instead of what satisfies advertising sales goals.
This is, despite MPR's minor miss above, a great argument in favor of keeping NPR funding in the federal budget despite Republican demands that publicly funded media be destroyed. But that's another discussion altogether. |
