PHOTOS, PAGE 1

       Editor and prime reporter is Doug Terry, a veteran television and radio reporter in   Washington, DC, (details below)

NATIONAL MEDIA LAG IN UNDERSTANDING POLITICAL DYNAMICS OF THE “DEBT CRISIS” STORY

Just about everyone has a complaint at one time or another about the news media. The right wing, in fact, has been complaining for about 40 years about bias, so much so that it has become like a mantra and a core part of their belief system. In today’s (7.29.11) New York Times economist Paul Krugman complains that the national media are not giving the full story of the debt debate. He claims, rightly I think, that the media play the story as two sides banging back at each other when, in fact, the basic problem is the new Republicans in the House, the radicals, won’t, or haven’t, accepted anything, including massive concessions by Obama toward their positions.

It is completely clear to me that the news media have failed to grasp the situation in the House. Only now is the picture hitting them between the eyes. The new members, supported by the tea party groups and massive outside spending on their behalf, are modeling themselves on insurgents in a revolution. Insurgents don’t compromise, they get what they want or they die. That’s the basic problem: they are true believers in the thought that they, and they alone, have the complete, true answer for America and they don’t care if they go down in flames, and the nation with them, pursuing the purity and beauty of that truth.

If you’d like to get an idea of how close to brain dead American media are about what is happening, go to the link below for today’s NY Times story on the radical Republicans. I don’t like to criticize the work of daily reporters who are out there trying to get the story and I especially don’t like to attack the NY Times, because, to a certain extent, this website operates in its shadow and draws a great deal of information from the Times. But...this is a special case. Clearly, the national media have not caught up with the facts in this debt story. Sad.

Doug Terry, 7.29.11

Here’s the link to the NY Times story: http://tinyurl.com/3wazef9

Why is the national media underplaying the obstructionists role of the new Republicans in the House?

More importantly, why have they generally failed to understand and report what is going on? Intimidation as “biased” observers is certainly one factor, but another is the simple fact that they are placing these events inside an older narrative, that of the ol’Congressional back and forth, and not seeing the correct, larger picture: a small group of radicals has taken over, by force of will and determination to face possible disaster, the Republican party in the House of Representatives. All of this will be made clear in time, either by a debt default or by “follow-up” news items in the weeks ahead, when most people have stopped paying attention.

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