I’ve been watching CNN headlines over the last couple of weeks, and, up until a couple of days ago – basically, the passing of the bi-partisan infrastructure bill – they pronounced doom and gloom about the state of the Biden agenda, the Democratic Party, and a future of terrible inflation.
And then that all stopped.
When I stopped to think about it at all, it seemed to me that this was just politics as usual for the Democrats: a robust discussion of various views of governance, goals, and funding.
But not for CNN.
Jennifer Rubin has been beating on the mainstream media for its poor coverage of politics, and had another blast at it today:
The constant refrain from Republicans and much of the political media that Biden has been focused on the wrong things simply does not hold up to scrutiny. One can question whether presidents get too much credit for economic numbers, but if you’re going to hold Biden responsible for the outcome, he has every reason to boast about the 5.6 million jobs created since the start of his term, an unemployment rate down to 4.6 percent, an average gain of 600,000 jobs per month and a rise in hourly wages of nearly 5 percent this year.
Moreover, in the agonizing struggle to pass two giant pieces of legislation, Biden could finally declare victory. The House on Friday voted to adopt the $1.2 trillion infrastructure plan. The final Build Back Better vote will take place by the week of Nov. 15.
Consider the narrative incessantly pushed by virtually every media outlet until Friday: Biden has not delivered on the economy. His agenda is too far left, threatening to expand the debt and fuel inflation. He has lost the confidence of the public on covid. Biden cannot corral the left (and/or the centrists).
None of that was borne out by subsequent events (or polling on his agenda). By week’s end, the economy looked on much firmer footing — and, unlike his predecessor, the president had achieved a historic infrastructure investment.
Inflation and deficit fears also subsided. The Joint Committee on Taxation declared the Build Back Better agenda would raise about $1.47 trillion over 10 years and in all likelihood would not add to the deficit. A pack of Nobel Prize-winning economists confirmed that the agenda would reduce long-term inflationary pressure. As one told The Post, “This is sound and uncontroversial economics — increasing supply and capacity reduces the bottlenecks that fuel inflationary surges.” Separately, Moody’s Analytics reported that Biden’s legislation “will strengthen long-term economic growth, the benefits of which would mostly accrue to lower- and middle-income Americans,” and it dismissed inflation concerns as “overdone.”
I see these alarmist headlines as being a symptom of using the wrong metric for the media, that metric being money. Look, I understand that the world runs on money, at least for the majority of us, but when that motivation is applied improperly, we get what is commonly called corruption.
In a nutshell, the media has a metric – called the Pulitzer Prize – but it doesn’t use it to effectively measure the various outlets, meaning it doesn’t tie their revenue to the Pulitzer Prizes. I’m not a historian, so I don’t know that it ever has effectively done so, although winners certainly tout their victories – go Storm Lake Times! – but I think that doing so would produce far better media than we are often saddled with.
The trick is to figure out how to make that measure both effective to the revenue of a media outlet, and incorruptible. Anyone care to bell the cat?
And for newer readers, this sort of reasoning is a result of my Sectors of Society meditations, which are very informal thoughts on, initially, the consistent failure of the leadership of businesspeople in government, and why the optimized methods of one sector of society are inappropriate to other sectors.
