American prosperity and the "race to the bottom:" why won't the media ask the right questions?

Journal of Economic Issues, March, 2008 by Dell P. Champlin, Janet T. Knoedler

Thus, the "master narrative" constructed by the government or corporate sources is rarely challenged by competing views. It is important to note in passing that, over the past seven years, this official narrative has been framed by the Bush administration, which includes some of the most accomplished spinners and rhetoricians seen in modern politics. (11) The assumption by reporters that official press releases require less research and investigation than other sources is certainly not valid. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson offer a glaring example in their recent book, Off-Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy, where they describe how George W. Bush's press team sold the 2003 tax cut by bringing in business lobbyists to don "hard hats--i.e., to impersonate what one leaked congressional leadership report memo called "REAL WORKER types" (Hacker and Pierson 2005, 58). Distinctions between economic news, official information and political advertising were completely eliminated when the Bush administration actually developed and issued fake news reports on Social Security and the Medicare prescription drug plans to be broadcast on local news stations (Klinenberg 2007). (12)

The fourth explanation of these trends centers on the growth of politically conservative media. Several authors and watchdog groups assert that the lack of media attention to the problems of the middle class is the direct outcome of an expanding presence of overtly right wing media such as talk radio and Fox News. Trudy Lieberman has recently argued that conservative think tanks have used "aggressive strategies" (2000, 3) to push their ideological premises and policy stances into mainstream media outlets. As a result, the right wing has put such ideas as the flat tax, medical savings accounts, and Social Security privatization into mainstream discourse, despite these theories all having once been seen as eccentric policy schemes of the extreme right (see also Cohen 2000, 3-4). In Lieberman's view, "conservative groups have learned to boil down their messages to fit the new model of sound bite journalism, leaving the details for the weighty studies and policy analyses disseminated in more elite venues" (Lieberman 2000, 9). To quote Lieberman on this point, "Through sheer perseverance and an unrelenting commitment to ideology, right-wing organizations have successfully used the press to further their agenda of laissez-faire economics, deregulation, lower taxes, redistributing resources from poor to rich, privatizing everything from schools to street cleaning, and--above all--delegitimizing government" (Lieberman 2000, 14). Similarly, in Peddling Prosperity, Paul Krugman (1994) tried to decipher the lessons of the Reagan-Bush years for economists. He argued that "policy entrepreneurs" who promise simple solutions, as opposed to the "professors" who prefer to qualify their cautious explanations, will be used by most mainstream media outlets to explain the state of the economy. Krugman went on to argue that in the late 70s and 80s, most of these "policy entrepreneurs" were intent on promoting conservative economic ideas by asserting that free market, supply-side policies would "get the magic back" (Krugman 1994, 9, 12). Arguably, the right wing has figured out how to "play" the media.