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Saturday, April 30, 2011

The Media Blitz about the Budget

In the last few days, there were a few news reports that managed to sneak through the 24/7 coverage of some wedding in London that dealt with the Town Hall meetings being held by members of Congress during the current recess. The coverage talked repeatedly about how Republican congressmen were being faced with irate constituents who were angry about the plans to destroy Medicare. I even saw one segment on MSNBC in which a woman who had asked a question at one of these town halls was interviewed about the response from her congressman. The coverage was almost uniformly slanted towards the citizens who were angrily questioning their representatives.

The coverage here was particularly interesting because it is so easy to compare it to how the same media covered the town hall meeting in 2009 and 2010 when the subject was Obamacare. At that time, the main stream media first tried to ignore the meetings and then they switched to coverage that implied that the angry citizens were racist, uninformed or just plain crazy. In other words, the coverage was the complete opposite this time when the target was Republican rather than Democrat cocngressmen. Also interesting, however, is that in neither case do these segments ever mention the relevant national polling data. for Obamacare, the polls showed that a majority of Americans did not want that passed into law; the media ignored it. On the budget, the polls show that a majority of Americans support major budget cuts like the Ryan budget and they think that the Republicans can do a better job controling the budget than the Democrats can. The bias is clear once again.

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