Extending the Payroll Tax Cut and the Media Coverup

The Senate is set to vote today on a two month extension of the payroll tax cut. The bill will also extend the doctors' fix for two months (neither raising nor lowering the amounts paid to the doctors for Medicare services)and continue unemployment benefits for the same time. Everything in the bill is paid for by either spending cuts or increases in certain fees charged by the federal government. The big item, however, is that the bill reduces to 60 days from passage the time that the federal government will have to decide on whether or not to allow construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. This last provision is the one that president Obama said just a week ago would force him to veto any bill that contained it. In other words, in the space of a week, Obama was abandoned by his Democrat allies in Congress and confronted with a bill containing the pipeline provision that the GOP had demanded. These Democrats understand that the GOP provision will create 20,000 jobs in construction and many times more once the pipeline is complete. Obama has now flipped his position and will not veto the bill.

The big news about this bill then is that the GOP backed down Obama and got through the pipeline provision with all the jobs that it will bring. So, you would think that the media would be full of news of this story. Of course, you would be wrong. I listened to CBS radio news which did a 90 second story on the vote expected later today in the Senate. The reporter did not once mention the pipeline. Instead, he talked about how the GOP had blocked tax increases on the wealthy for about a third of the time. In other words, CBS used the talking points of the DNC for its story. While there is nothing wrong with reporting that Obama had backed down on his tax the wealthy scheme again this year (like he did last December), that news is already three days old. The key today is that Obama also backed down on the pipeline and the GOP got a major win with regard to job creation. Apparently, it was too much for CBS to report that the Republicans were creating jobs over the opposition of Obama; it just did not fit into the CBS narrative.

The New York Times, on the other hand, did report the entire story. And the pipeline got its proper place in the first paragraph. Of course, the Times then had to explain why the bill really would not let the pipeline go ahead. According to the Times report, unnamed Administration officials "said they believed that the president could still delay the pipeline".

Let me put it this way: the mainstream media ought to try something new for the next month. It is called reporting the news, not shaping the news or slanting the news, but just reporting the actual news. Don't hold your breath waiting for this to happen, however.