Trump calls It ‘Fake News’ But It’s not news.
Sometimes I get the feeling, and I really mean this, that when it comes to political news, the media is nothing more than a handmaiden to whichever party or political narrative it wants to promote.
In the olden days, the papers I read (WaPo, New York Times) were both ‘democratic’ papers, i.e., they tended to endorse Democat(ic) candidates around election time. The endorsements appeared on something called the ‘editorial page,’ which also contained op-eds by two or three writers, the same two or three writers who leaned in the liberal direction every day.
And that was it. The word ‘politics’ meant who had been elected, who had died in office or gotten caught with his pants down, and there would also be a hard news story about an important piece of legislation from time to time.
When Ronald Reagan got together with House Majority leader Tip O’Neill in 1983 and backed the largest, single income tax increase of all time – the rise in payroll tax rates – it made the front page for a couple of days.
How many political op-eds are now stuck on the front page or first screen of the Fake News? I don’t remember the last time that the WaPo or The New York Times ran a political story which wasn’t some pundit or political ‘influencer’ blowing his/her verbal nose.
Want an example of the drivel we get served up every day? Try yesterday’s WaPo column by one of the paper’s featured verbal nose-blowers named Philip Bump, with a headline which goes like this: “Republicans’ plotting to black a Democratic President goes public.”
Bump then goes on to talk at length about how the GOP is putting together a legislative strategy which consists of blocking everything that Joe and the Democrats want to do, and he laments the complete and total lack of compromise or what is known as ‘bipartisanship’ in Washington, D.C.
Is this guy kidding? Does he or the newspaper he works for want us to take him or them seriously? Has the editorializing which has replaced real news now so extensive that one of its vaunted practitioners could write an entire op-ed which contains not even a smidgen of reality at all?
That’s not fake news. That’s not even no news. That’s pure, unadulterated bullshit which the WaPo hopes I will read. Because maybe while I’m reading it my eye will stray towards the ad at the top of the page which says that I can move into a lovely, quiet, and restful senior housing compound for less than six hundred dollars a week.
Gee isn’t it funny how the internet seems to know that I’m 79 years old and the money I have in my pocket isn’t just some loose change. I guess that’s what they mean when they talk about AI, right?
Anyway, back to Phil Bump.
The last time that I remember the two sides getting together over an important piece of legislation was back in 1982 when Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill made a deal to keep social security afloat. And that so-called bi-partisan move was nothing more than an acknowledgement that seniors vote and that their social security payments are sacrosanct.
The only other times that the Dems and Repubs get together is when the debt ceiling has to be increased because otherwise all the Federal employees belonging to both parties wouldn’t get paid. And since the United States happens to be the OECD country with the highest percentage of its national workforce getting paychecks issued by a government agency, closing that waterfall down to a trickle would create a real mess.
Know what’s the biggest, single job category in California? If you said ‘school bus driver’ you’d be correct. Think those folks aren’t paid with pass-through monies from the feds? You can thank a Republic(an) President named Richard Nixon who invented a budgetary gimmick called revenue-sharing to hide how much money was going from D.C. to the states.
The bottom line is that when a so-called ‘expert’ like Philip Bump tells us that the GOP is going to block every legislative program proposed by Joe, he’s ignoring the fact that the Democrats do the same thing when the other side is in charge.
Because we don’t have a parliamentary system, you don’t need to create and build a coalition of a bunch of small political parties in order to get something done. The problem we have right now in this federalist system is that the two parties which control all the votes in both legislative chambers are barely able to squeeze out even a simple majority, never mind enough votes to shut down a filibuster or override a veto from the office located at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
But you wouldn’t know this from reading what Philip Bump has to say about current political affairs because he’s paid to tell his readers why the Democrats are the good guys and the Republicans are bad.
Trump is right! It’s really Fake News.
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