April 3rd 2009
Burying Dissent On The Budget
L
et’s say, just hypothetically, that every single Republican in the House and Senate voted against Obama’s Orwellian [oops; Tweet-corrected by Shoq] newspeak-ian “A New Era of Responsibility” budget – even Specter, Snowe and Collins. That seems like it would be a little bit newsworthy, doesn’t it?
Not to Lori Montgomery, who apparently is a well respected journalist, since WaPo tagged her to write this important story. The significance of the complete GOP rejection of Obama’s budget seems to have passed her by completely, however. I mean, c’mon, Lori, this is journalism 101: Obama promise to be the post-partisan president who would seek consensus and end petty party bickering, but he can’t get a single GOP vote for his budget. Back in the day, they called that “news.”
But we learn from Montgomer’s lead only that the House Dems “overwhelmingly supported” the budget. In paragraph eight, we learn that 20 Dems weren’t overwhelmed with joy about the budget and voted with the GOP, and that two Dem senators voted against it.
But nowhere in the 15-graf story does Montgomery actually say every single GOP representative in both houses of Congress voted against the budget. Every. Single. One. She relies on you to do the math, instead, subtracting the wayward Dems from the “nay” total and remembering that the number you get by that process equals the number of Republicans in the two houses.
(Even the NYT got it right: Budgets Approved, With No G.O.P. Votes said their headline.)
OK, I can do the math, but wouldn’t it be easier to say in the lead that once again the Dems were so blinded by power, so resistant to compromise, so committed to endangering the future of our country that they couldn’t find one – not even one – RINO Republican to go along with their fiscal and policy insanity? Instead, Montgomery and her editors turned their backs on history and tried to pretend it just didn’t happen.
Posted in Economic Policy, Media bias, Obama | No Comments yet » | |
Leave a Reply
[The "Comment Box" is WYSIWYG except that you have to double space between paragraphs!
Type it the way you want it to look -- Just remember to double up those line spaces.]
You must be logged in to post a comment.
