Thanas wrote:Simon_Jester wrote:If your argument is that Obama's failure to run a transparent administration after taking office has somehow caused American election coverage to degenerate, I have to disagree with you. For one, the connection between "administration is not transparent" and "reporters don't even do basic fact-checking on opposition candidates before blindly repeating their words" is rather tenuous. For another, American election coverage was degenerate before Obama took office- before Obama was even on the political radar, to tell the truth.
Very well, I'll take your word for it. Mainly because I only remember the Bush years in detail and not how it was under Clinton.
If election fact-checking was good during the Clinton years, Bush Junior would probably never have taken office. Even the 1994 'Republican Revolution' that ultimately led us on the path to the present disastrous state of affairs would have had to take a different form.
Remember that in 1980, Bush Senior challenged Reagan by calling his "cut taxes and economic growth will make it worth it" strategy 'voodoo economics.' By 1994, very few people were using words like that to describe the Republican congressional candidates who were claiming that they could cut taxes and it would
shrink the national deficit. As a consequence, those Republicans were elected... and our national debt has been skyrocketing almost ever since, except for a couple of years in the late 1990s when we managed to run a surplus. Bush Junior locked things in with the Bush tax cuts, ensuring us a permanent structural deficit, but the problem predates even Bush.
And that problem is, in my honest opinion, caused in large part by the failure of the American media of the '90s to adequately challenge the Republicans on the factual accuracy and validity of the claims they'd made in the Contract
on with America.
So no, this is not a new problem, Bush Junior did not create it, and Obama did not make the problem somehow permanent. He sure hasn't been helping, but in this case, fact-checking in American political journalism was dead well before he arrived on the scene. At most, he just kicked the corpse a few times.
Does that mean that no politician can say "the media really needs to start fact-checking" or "campaign finance needs to be reformed because it amounts to legalized bribery?"
Not without being two-faced liars and massive hypocrites, no.
These politicians were
already liars and hypocrites. That's the entire problem- failure to hold candidates running for office accountable, and failure to police campaign finance, makes American elections a competition to see who can be the greatest liar and the worst hypocrite. The ones who win the race are almost invariably, to some degree, a liar and a hypocrite.
So it is incredibly self-defeating when we wail and rage about how they are liars and hypocrites
when they are actually speaking out against the system that made them what they are.
If the poisonous fruit of a poisonous tree cries out "this tree is poisonous and should be cut down," is it really a good use of our energy to argue that the fruit is poisonous and should not be listened to?
