As the St. Louis Metro Chapter of the League of Women Voters once again did its heavy lifting to bring political awareness to the citizens of St. Louis, the local media once again snoozed. This past Saturday evening, June 2, the League hosted a forum for the Democratic candidates for Congress from Missouri’s Second Congressional District.

All five candidates (Bill Haas, Robert Hazel, John Messmer, Mark Osmack and Cort VanOstran) showed up and provided largely direct responses to questions from the audience, filtered through the League staff to ensure a balance in the topics discussed. The audience at the Ethical Society topped one hundred and politely listened as the candidates responded to the thoughtful questions.

In many ways, the forum was a model for democracy. Candidates were present and an engaged audience heard responses to a range of questions. But how did the other 750,000 citizens of the district benefit from the program? Social media might have doubled the outreach of the event and then there is word of mouth. So, to be generous, perhaps five hundred would-be constituents of these candidates have some awareness of what happened in an event that represented democracy at its best.

But nowhere to be seen was the St. Louis media. They are the springboard to public awareness of relevant public issues and who among us is trying to solve our problems. But, apparently, they had more important stories to cover:

1. The Louis Post-Dispatch had room for “Teacher charged for allegedly feeding puppy to snapping turtle,” but not for the forum affecting 750,000 in the media market.
2. KSDK – Channel 5 had “’I just broke down’ – Woman asking for help finding dog stolen during carjacking” but not for the forum affecting 750,000 in the media market.
3. KMOV – Channel 4 covered from Australia, “Hotel valet has lucky escape, but Porsche gets crunched,” but not for the forum affecting 750,000 in the media market.
4. Fox2Now – Channel 2 covered “Dog dies during Delta Air Lines layover in Michigan,” but not for the forum affecting 750,000 in the media market.

St. Louis media has a history of being asleep at the switch as candidates for public office work to communicate their message to the public. It can be argued that their dereliction of duty has had very harmful results.

In 2004, Jeff Smith was running for Congress in Missouri’s Third Congressional District in a field of over a dozen candidates. His grass-roots campaign made him the primary challenger to State Rep. Russ Carnahan of the Carnahan Dynasty in Missouri. Smith had important information that Carnahan ranked near the bottom of Missouri legislators in showing up for votes in Jefferson City. He made the media aware of this information, but they just sat on it. In an act of frustration, Smith took a different path that involved a minor violation of a Federal Elections Commission Regulation. In a complicated story, he wound up going to federal prison for a year. It likely would have never happened with a responsible press in St. Louis – a press that never apologized for its oversight.

Current incumbent in Missouri’s Second District, Ann Wagner, has failed to appear at League of Women Voters forums in 2012, 2014 and 2016. Democrats, Libertarians and Green Party candidates have had lively discussions, but the incumbent would not appear to defend herself. Not a peep from the mainstream media of St. Louis.

The Post-Dispatch has repeatedly deplored the role of big money in politics. But they are collaborators with a system that makes it very difficult for a candidate who does not raise large sums of money to compete on a level playing field. Why? Because, (a) they rarely report anything about candidates who do not raise large sums of money, even if these candidates may have the most viable positions on issues, (b) when they take time to handicap races, it is generally based on money raised rather than anything having to do with issues, and (c) because the MSM does not cover these races, candidates need to raise more money to get their word out. Raising money always means that some voters become more important than others, and that undermines democracy.

We have some very good Democratic candidates in Missouri’s Second Congressional District. It is up to the mainstream media to let voters know about them, and to do so in a way that minimizes the need of the candidates to engage in more money-grubbing.

To our media: please don’t just comment the state of our democracy; be a greater part of the solutions.

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Last night, I attended the forum for Congressional candidates in Missouri’s Second District sponsored by the League of Women Voters. It was terrific, except two vital parts of the democratic puzzle were nowhere to be seen. Republican Ann Wagner is now zero for three when it comes to showing up with other candidates to allow voters to hear competing views on how best to represent the District. And once again, the mainstream media also took a rain check. Too bad, because there were a lot of good ideas to hear, especially from Democrat Bill Otto. Unfortunately, for most voters, the forum didn’t even happen.

St. Louis’ only daily newspaper, the Post-Dispatch, said about Ann Wagner in 2014, “There’s a saying in politics that elections are won by those who show up. Perhaps that’s so for voters, but a key part of U.S. Rep. Ann Wagner’s strategy for re-election in Missouri’s 2^nd Congressional District is not showing up.” Fine words by the Post, but quoting the great philosopher Michael Jackson, they should have also been looking at “the man in the mirror.” They, along with St. Louis Public Radio and all media outlets were pulling their own version of Ann Wagner at the debate.

It’s easier for me to give Wagner a pass than the media. She seems to resist all opportunities to connect with the public in general. Maybe she suffers from social anxiety and that would be a solid reason to pass. Maybe she inwardly knows that in an open forum, lockstep Republican answers sound hollow because they lack the empathy that is fundamental to solutions that actually serve the people. Maybe she is following orders from the “Incumbents Anonymous” group that shuns appearances against their opponents. Whatever it is, she did not show.

But the media is not a single entity. There are more than a dozen mainstream outlets in the St. Louis metropolitan area, and not a one was anywhere to be seen. For the network television stations, maybe they had to cover another crime, or once again be “on your side” so they could flaunt their civic-mindedness while ignoring elections, the pillar of civic engagement.

It is not as if nothing happened at the debate. The lead for the story might have been that incumbent Ann Wagner did not show and there is mystery as to why, but then there were three distinct points of view presented by representatives of three of America’s four major political parties.

Bill Otto is not an ordinary Democrat, particularly for Missouri. The empathy that so defines progressives was present in his answers to the Westlake Landfill, Social Security, labor unions, education, health care, gun control and a host of other issues. His answers were concise and direct. His four years in the Missouri General Assembly has taught him that not all Republicans stonewall every issue and that there are ways to create compromise. His personal story is a compelling one and “pay it forward” is a fundamental tenet of his views on public policy.

Libertarian Jim Higgins was also present and pretty much stuck to the Libertarian party line, even to the point of reading his answers from prepared talking points. He may not have been a “pure libertarian” because he acknowledged that the government had roles to play in veterans’ health care and even background checks tor potential gun buyers.

By being AWOL, the media may have missed one of the more interesting Green Party candidates in the country. David Arnold only spoke about the environment when forced to, specifically questions about the Westlake Landfill and climate change. His major point was that artificial intelligence is about to make most of our jobs obsolete, so we need to move away from and employment-based economy to an income-based economy. He may have been a very good prophet, but did not quite seem to be ready for prime time as the representative of the Second District.

The League billed the event as a forum and it was because virtually all of the questions came from the audience. Maybe the media would have had some good ones, but we’ll never know. One local television station was busy reporting that “Twisted Ranch now offers 27 different ranch dressings.” Now that’s deplorable.

The post Hello Fourth Estate – Democracy in Missouri Needs You appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Hillary Clinton gets far less air time and far fewer column inches in  mainstream media coverage than does Donald Trump.  And while that’s a huge problem, it’s not the only evidence of lopsided coverage: The tone is out of balance, as well. Trump’s outrageous pronouncements, outright lies, and non-policies are frequently quoted as the “truth-telling” statements of a political outsider; while Clinton’s in-depth policy ideas and long record of public service are ignored, as right-wing manufactured non-scandals are highlighted, and she is portrayed as the dishonest politician.

That inequality of coverage—especially in the way the media characterizes each candidate– is the subject of Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times today. Krugman draws a parallel between this year’ media coverage and that of George W. Bush vs. Al Gore in 2000. And we all know how that ended.

You see, one candidate, George W. Bush, was dishonest in a way that was unprecedented in U.S. politics. Most notably, he proposed big tax cuts for the rich while insisting, in raw denial of arithmetic, that they were targeted for the middle class. These campaign lies presaged what would happen during his administration — an administration that, let us not forget, took America to war on false pretenses.

Yet throughout the campaign most media coverage gave the impression that Mr. Bush was a bluff, straightforward guy, while portraying Al Gore — whose policy proposals added up, and whose critiques of the Bush plan were completely accurate — as slippery and dishonest. Mr. Gore’s mendacity was supposedly demonstrated by trivial anecdotes, none significant, some of them simply false. No, he never claimed to have invented the internet. But the image stuck.

And right now I and many others have the sick, sinking feeling that it’s happening again.

True, there aren’t many efforts to pretend that Donald Trump is a paragon of honesty. But it’s hard to escape the impression that he’s being graded on a curve. If he manages to read from a TelePrompter without going off script, he’s being presidential. If he seems to suggest that he wouldn’t round up all 11 million undocumented immigrants right away, he’s moving into the mainstream. And many of his multiple scandals, like what appear to be clear payoffs to state attorneys general to back off investigating Trump University, get remarkably little attention.

Meanwhile, we have the presumption that anything Hillary Clinton does must be corrupt, most spectacularly illustrated by the increasingly bizarre coverage of the Clinton Foundation.

Krugman accuses the media of using many misleading, loaded words in its reporting about Clinton, but fewer of these same terms regarding Trump. .

 If reports about a candidate talk about how something “raises questions,” creates “shadows,” or anything similar, be aware that these are all too often weasel words used to create the impression of wrongdoing out of thin air.

And he offers sound advice on how to evaluate candidates:

…the best ways to judge a candidate’s character are to look at what he or she has actually done, and what policies he or she is proposing. Mr. Trump’s record of bilking students, stiffing contractors and more is a good indicator of how he’d act as president; Mrs. Clinton’s speaking style and body language aren’t. George W. Bush’s policy lies gave me a much better handle on who he was than all the up-close-and-personal reporting of 2000, and the contrast between Mr. Trump’s policy incoherence and Mrs. Clinton’s carefulness speaks volumes today.

In other words, focus on the facts. America and the world can’t afford another election tipped by innuendo

The post Hillary gets the short end of media coverage, in more ways than one appeared first on Occasional Planet.

From Truth and Satire:

Every single mainstream media has the following narrative for the economic crisis in Greece: the government spent too much money and went broke; the generous banks gave them money, but Greece still can’t pay the bills because it mismanaged the money that was given. It sounds quite reasonable, right?

Except that it is a big fat lie … not only about Greece, but about other European countries such as Spain, Portugal, Italy and Ireland who are all experiencing various degrees of austerity. It was also the same big, fat lie that was used by banks and corporations to exploit many Latin American, Asian and African countries for many decades.

Greece did not fail on its own. It was made to fail.

Consider a recent article in the New York Times by Neil Irwin. The title says it all: “Now Europe Must Decide Whether to Make an Example of Greece.” Those lazy Greeks,” Irwin’s title suggests, “need to be taught a lesson. “

Here’s an excerpt, my emphasis:

The choice for leaders of Germany, France and the rest of Europe will look something like this:

If they tolerate the Greek government’s demands, they will be setting a bad example for every other country that might wish to challenge the strictures of the European Union, telling voters in Portugal and Spain and Italy that if they make enough fuss, and elect extremist parties they too will get a much sweeter deal. It would send the signal that a country can borrow all it likes, walk away from those debts and make the rest of Europe pay the bill, as long as it is intransigent enough. 

Notice Irwin’s use of the word, “tolerate,” as if the Greek government is a bratty, demanding child. He says a challenge to power cannot be allowed—have to nip that in the bud before it spreads to other “lazy” countries. Irwin calls anti-establishment, left political parties, like Greece’s Syriza, extremist. Syriza is “extreme, ” I guess, because it chooses the needs of ordinary people over making banks and hedge funds whole. Finally, he characterizes the Greek people as insufferable deadbeats.

Irwin’s “good vs. bad, white hat/black hat” narrative satisfies the embarrassingly uninformed and gullible American public, and protects the people, banks and institutions that caused the biggest global wealth heist in history.

“Bad Greeks!” Irwin is saying, “They’re getting what they deserve for spending way beyond their means.“ Being an unrepentant bank groupie, I’m sure he believes that. In 2013, Irwin wrote The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire, a book on how three central bankers dealt with the 2008 financial meltdown. One Amazon reviewer described it as “Pathetic drooling over something that is essentially an anti-democratic institution. The book is littered with fawning details of how some central banker was travelling in a limousine when he received a call about markets being on fire. Or how Draghi was eating smoked goat cheese (or whatever is it that elites eat) when the Greece crisis erupted and then he had to do something on his mahogany table.”

The book earned the endorsement of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, an organization whose sole mission is to cut Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare, and lower taxes on the wealthy. If you didn’t get it from reading Irwin’s article, his book tells you where he stands psychologically and politically. He is typical of the sycophants who populate mainstream media.

My point in critiquing Irwin’s article is to encourage readers, especially those who call themselves “progressive,” to pay attention to the underlying perspective of those who speak or write in mainstream news outlets. What are their values? With whose interests do they identify?

Given the serial mendacity of the NYT, it’s important to look elsewhere to understand world events, and, in this case, what caused the crisis in Greece. Look for writers and journalists who identify with the struggles of the majority population, and who have a clear-eyed view of the rampant corruption in government, banks, and the private sector around the world. Look for writers who, at minimum, are not in awe of the wealthy and the powerful.

For starters, you might try Conn Hallinan’s “Europe’s Debt: Lies & Myths. Hallinan does a great job of countering Irwin’s myths by placing Greece’s plight in historical context. Here’s an excerpt, my emphasis:

Myths are dangerous precisely because they rely more on cultural memory and prejudice than facts, and behind the current crisis between Greece and the European Union (EU) lays a fable that bears little relationship to why Athens and a number of other countries in the 28-member organization find themselves in deep distress.

The tale is a variation of Aesop’s allegory of the industrious ant and the lazy, fun-loving grasshopper, with the “northern countries”—Germany, the Netherlands, Britain, Finland—playing the role of the ant, and Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland the part of the grasshopper.

The ants are sober and virtuous—lead by the frugal Swanbian house frau, German Chancellor Angela Merkel—the grasshoppers are spendthrift, corrupt lay-abouts who have spent themselves into trouble and now must pay the piper.

The problem is that this myth bears almost no relationship to the actual roots of the crisis or what the solutions might be. And it perpetuates a fable that the debt is the fault of individual countries rather than a serious crisis at the very heart of the EU.
<snip>
In Greece’s case corruption was at the heart of the crisis, but not the popular version about armies of public workers and tax dodging oligarchs. There are rich tax dodgers aplenty in Greece, but Germany, Sweden, and many other European countries spend more of their GDP on services than does Athens. Greece spends 44.6 percent of its GDP on its citizens, less than the EU average and below Germany’s 46 percent and Sweden’s 55 percent.

And as for lazy: Greeks work 600 hours more a year than Germans. According to economist Mark Blyth, author of Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, Greek public spending through the 2000s is “really on track and quite average in comparison to everyone else’s,” and the so-called flood of “public sector jobs” consisted of “ 14,000 over two years.” All the talk of the profligate Greek government is “a lot of nonsense” and just “political cover for the fact that what we’ve done is bail out some of the richest people in European society and put the cost on some of the poorest.”

There was a “score” in Greece. However, it had nothing to do with free spending; it was a scheme dreamed up by Greek politicians, bankers, and the American finance corporation, Goldman Sachs.

Greece’s application for EU membership in 1999 was rejected because its budget deficit in relation to its GDP was over 3 percent, the cutoff line for joining. That’s where Goldman Sachs came in. For a fee rumored to be $200 million (some say three times that), the multinational giant essentially cooked the books to make Greece look like it cleared the bar. Then Greece’s political and economic establishment hid the scheme until the 2008 crash shattered the illusion.

It was the busy little ants, not the fiddling grasshoppers that brought on the European debt crisis.

American, German, French, and Dutch banks had to know that they were creating an unstable real estate bubble—a 500 percent jump in housing prices is the very definition of the beast—but kept right on lending because they were making out like bandits.

When the bubble popped and Europe went into recession, Greece was forced to apply for a “bailout” from the Troika [The European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund]. In exchange for 172 billon Euros, the Greek government instituted an austerity program that saw economic activity decline 25 percent, unemployment rise to 27 Percent (and over 50 percent for young Greeks). The cutbacks slashed pensions, wages, and social services, and drove 44 percent of the population into poverty.

Virtually all of the “bailout”—89 percent—went to the banks that gambled in the 1999 to 2007 real estate casino. What the Greek—as well as Spaniards, Portuguese, and Irish—got was misery.

The post Myths and lies about Greece appeared first on Occasional Planet.

When the Congressional Budget Office released its report on the Affordable Care Act on Feb. 4, 2014, the headline in the next morning’s St. Louis Post-Dispatch was, “Health law is called a big jolt to jobs.” The New York Times said, “Health Care Law Projected to Cut the Labor Force.” The Washington Post said, “Health-care law will prompt over 2 million to quit jobs or cut hours, a CBO report says.”  CNN’s Chuck Todd tweeted, “CBO essentially reaffirms GOP talking points on healthcare. Says it will cost jobs, feel as if it raises taxes and contributes to deficit.” The ultra-conservative National Review gloated with this headline: “CBO report nukes Obamacare.”

They got it wrong.

How did they manage to do that? At best, it was lazy journalism. At worst, it was a corporate news media echo chamber for Republican spin. Mostly, it was an epidemic of latching on to whatever seemed the most dramatic, headline-making, doom-saying aspect of the story. After all, two+ million is a big, juicy number.

People who call themselves “news reporters” and “journalists” appear to have taken the easy way out by not actually reading the report itself but, instead, glomming onto whatever talking points hit their desks first. Republicans are way better at flooding the internet with their spin, so that’s the spin that was passed along as “news” to the general public.

When I first saw the headlines, my heart sank. I don’t think that the Affordable Care Act is the ultimate answer to healthcare reform in America, but it’s a giant leap in the right direction–and it’s something that no other President has been able to accomplish. The headlines made it sound as though “Obamacare” was, indeed, the “job-killer” that Republicans have railed against. It was an early-morning bummer for everyone who has supported and defended the Affordable Care Act.

But then, I did what the official news media should have done: I looked further. And I found, as they should have, that the CBO report actually did not say that ACA would kill jobs. If media people had bothered to ask around just a little bit, they would have learned the following [summarized today in a post by Women’s Voices Raised for Social Justice:

The CBO is not predicting any increase in unemployment or underemployment. The CBO report states, “The estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a new drop in businesses’ demand for labor.”  This is not about jobs offered by employers, It’s about workers and the choices they will be able to make.   2.5 million people will no longer be tethered to a job in order to have health benefits. They will be able to change jobs, work fewer hours, and retire when they want. This is due to the increase in insurance coverage and the subsidies to help pay premiums made possible by the Affordable Care Act. Workers with pre-existing conditions will also be freer to change or leave jobs because the ACA requires insurers to accept all applicants regardless of their health status.

I must say here that some of the blame for this media debacle goes to the author[s] of the CBO report. Reading the key passages, it’s a challenge to figure out what they’re saying [which leaves it wide open to interpretation–and spin.]

For example, in explaining its “job loss” conclusion, the CBO report says:

The estimated reduction stems almost entirely from a net decline in the amount of labor that workers choose to supply, rather than from a net drop in businesses’ demand for labor, so it will appear almost entirely as a reduction in labor force participation and in hours worked relative to what would have occurred otherwise rather than as an increase in unemployment (that is, more workers seeking but not finding jobs) or underemployment (such as part-time workers who would prefer to work more hours per week).”

Some follow-up reports have said that this passage essentially “screams that it’s not about actual job losses.” But to me, the phrasing is reminiscent of Greenspan-speak–the kind of convoluted, vague language favored by Alan Greenspan when he was chairman of the Federal Reserve. Words matter–and the CBO authors did a poor job of expressing their message in plain English.

That said, it still doesn’t excuse media people for getting it wrong. If you don’t understand it–ask. Don’t just copy and paste the talking points spewed out by Republican spinmeisters, who–always looking for ways to dis Obamacare–pounced on the CBO’s unclear explanation and spun it into the job-killing meme they so dearly love.

I’m also assigning some blame to President Obama and his staff. Did they not understand that this report would be a hot potato? Why wasn’t President Obama right out there, touting the good news that the Affordable Care Act was freeing people from the need for second and third crappy jobs as a way of paying for their health care pre-ACA? The White House–or its spokespeople, or members of the Democratic caucus, or Democratic governors–should be repeating the phrase “job lock” over and over. Breaking the chains of “job lock”–the situation in which workers are stuck in their jobs because that’s the only way they can get health insurance–was one of the primary goals of the Affordable Care Act. And here’s the CBO report telling us that the strategy is working!  That should be the headline. But once again, the Obama Administration is behind the news curve–letting the Republican spin machine define the terms and dominate the coverage.

This morning, things are looking a bit better. People are catching on to what happened yesterday and getting the message straight. The New York Times editorial page did a good job of righting the wrong in a morning-after editorial. The Washington Post’s Fact Checker took the time to clear up a lot of misconceptions. But I haven’t seen a lot of evidence of outright retractions in the media. And I doubt that there will be very many. The right-wing world will, of course, continue to push the “job-killer” meme and use the erroneous headlines–from mainstream media– as justification. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if some of the headlines are featured in campaign advertising. And that’s especially sad, because, just as the “repeal-Obamacare” mantra was beginning to lose its mojo–as more people start reaping ACA benefits–the false characterization of the CBO report offers new fake fodder for Republican candidates to use in their 2014 election campaigns.

The post How the media went wrong on the CBO “Obamacare” report appeared first on Occasional Planet.

By its very definition, the term “news” means something that is happening now. What qualifies as news in the mainstream media is largely events that are occurring in the here or now. In many ways it doesn’t matter whether it’s a crime, a fire, an accident, a scandal, or a “dog bites man” type of story; it just has to meet a very broad definition of “breaking.”

What gets lost in the mainstream media is those issues that extend over an extended period of time; the ones that involve perspective and concentration. No issue could represent the overlooked story to the mainstream media better than efforts of Democrats in the United States Senate to reform the rules regarding the filibuster.

Filibustering is a stalling tactic and thus it is a perfect way to push today’s news into the far reaches of “yesteryear.”  This means that it’s highly unlikely that the issue will find its way into day-to-day reporting by the mainstream.

The fact that the filibuster is not on our daily radar screens does not mean that it is a minor issue. The Republicans have used it like an anesthesia to deaden our concern about what is happening – or more accurately what is not happening – in the US Senate. Their use of the filibuster has left numerous federal agencies rudderless because no one has been confirmed to direct the agency. Some commissions like the National Labor Relations Board have been thoroughly hamstrung from operating because so many seats are vacant that a quorum cannot be achieved. Our judicial system has been crippled as dozens of nominees for federal judgeships have not been confirmed, thus further grinding the wheels of already-delayed justice.

In many ways the public receives news about the filibuster debate in the Senate in a way that is similar to the way in which the proverbial frog responds to being in a pot of water that is doing a slow boil. The public snoozes through a slow-moving issue that is of exceptional importance. Amnesia and more sets in while the Senate sleeps on an important issue until it is nearly forgotten. This impacts virtually every component of our lives.

The mainstream media does not bother to keep us informed about the fact that nothing is happening in the Senate to break the gridlock. They would rather alert us about the latest word on the “royal baby.” With local news, it may be something as earth-shattering as a family picnic.

MSNBC is capable of giving us valuable information from both the current time and the recent past. However, the cable station becomes increasingly snarky which devalues whatever else it might report.

We are largely left to ourselves to guard against slumbering while the pot is beginning to boil. The mainstream press keeps most people in a haze as vital news issues pass us by. We and the media had better wake up quickly before the nation crumbles because not enough people were awake to warn the others of the impending danger.

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