The largest tax hikes in history are imminent and it is still unclear whether Congress and President Obama will come to an agreement before January 1. The networks should have seen those tax hikes coming a mile away, but the Business & Media Institute found the primary theme of their tax cut stories was Obama as the hero, cutting taxes for the middle-class, not as a tax increaser.
This is the subject of BMI's brand new Special Report: Obama the Tax Cutter: A Network Fairy Tale.
Like the fabled town of Hamelin that hired the Pied Piper to conquer its rat problem, America needed a hero to overcome a faltering economy. According to the news media, that hero was Sen. Barack Obama who made extravagant promises about tax cuts for 95 percent of “working families” and getting the economy back on track.
Promises, promises. Obama also signed a $65-billion tax hike into law. Up to $4.2 trillion more in tax increases will hit taxpayers starting January 1. Yet, when the networks talked about tax cuts, ABC, CBS and NBC have portrayed Obama as a tax cutter more than four times as often as they talked about him raising taxes. Those potential tax increases are almost 20 times the size of the $214 billion temporary tax cuts Obama included in the stimulus bill. Tax cutter? Hardly.
The tax increases will hurt the middle-class, not just the wealthy. They also violated Obama’s “firm pledge” not to increase taxes on any family making less than $250,000 per year and the networks failed to hold him accountable.
You can read the executive summary or the full report on BMI's new website.
