Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer made a point about today's media that should make everyone think twice about the state of American journalism.
In a discussion about the Ryan budget proposal on PBS's Inside Washington Friday, Krauthammer observed, "Obama will win the argument if the electorate is as gullible as Nina [Totenberg] and Mark [Shields] and Evan [Thomas] in accepting what the Administration is saying about the cuts" (video follows with transcript and commentary):
GORDON PETERSON, HOST: Why does he attack Paul Ryan’s budget?
MARK SHIELDS, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Because the Republicans in Congress are less popular than the Democrats in Congress than the President in the White House. So if you put Mitt Romney, and you want to make this campaign about budget and budget cuts and tax cuts for the best off, the angry affluent if you would. I mean, that’s where Obama wants to fight the campaign, not on the economy itself or unemployment or five million missing jobs. Fight it on the budget and turning Medicaid over to the states and privatizing Medicare.
NINA TOTENBERG, NPR: Fight it on student loans. He wants to fight it on, you know, an end to student loans…
PETERSON: The safety net.
TOTENBERG: …the safety net, an end to research which has made, scientific research which has made this country great. Those are the things that, you know, you can sound the alarm bells on. And conversely, the Republicans want to make it about the end of the country by fiscal default.
What Obama speaks about when he talks about a cut is he wants to keep inflating the amount of spending the government is doing. Today the government spends 25 percent of the economy which is the highest since the Second World War. The average is 20 percent. He’s now at 25 percent. So what he calls a cut means the not increasing of a budget he’s already inflated radically. There are no cuts in student loans.
Indeed there aren't. Yet folks like Nina, Mark and Evan disgracefully tell their readers otherwise.
Which means the only hope for this nation is that the overwhelming majority of Americans doesn't exclusively rely on what people like this are saying and instead reads things like Ryan's actual budget to find out the truth.
Sadly, what's the likelihood of that?
