Confusion over US debt deal down to an overly balanced media

BY THE time you read this, America’s two big political parties may have done a deal on the economy.

Or they may have failed to do such a deal, in which case the next 24 hours will be at least fraught, and at worst — for US citizens — terrifying. One of the immediate consequences would be that the military, one of the big draws on federal as opposed to state funds, would not be paid. Nor would other federal employees.

The last week has been largely about positions, not solutions. The relatively new and hitherto little-known Speaker of the House of Representatives, John A Boehner, became a household name as he refused to play ball with Barack Obama’s administration. Boehner’s proposal took the form of a bill that would raise the nation’s debt ceiling and cut spending. From where the Democrats stood, that would be a dire option. Cutting spending means hitting Medicare and Medicaid, the health systems supporting an aging and increasingly impoverished population, together with diminishing spend on almost every other societal support system, particularly education.

Democrats first of all want Republicans nailed for their responsibility in running up the deficit in the first place by committing America to needless wars and presiding over the collapse of the banking system. Yet, say Democrats, now that push has come to shove, Republicans want to lay the burden squarely on the shoulders of the middle and lower classes. Instead of raising taxes on the rich and on corporations to balance the budget, they claim, Republicans want spending cuts that are the fiscal equivalent of waiting until a drowning man comes up for air and firmly pushing down on the top of his head.

The Republicans — and their far right Tea Party challengers — see this as a golden opportunity to “reduce Government”. Reducing Government is one of those aspirations which appeals at a visceral level to almost everybody. The kind of government Republicans want less of is the kind that puts laws in place about protecting the environment from new oil drillers called “fraggers” and reducing the money going to education and protection of the poor, the old, the sick and the unemployed.

John A Boehner’s bill seemed to fit neatly with Republican values, and the message went forth from the political system that this was a man to be reckoned with. You didn’t know his name up to last week? You better learn it, and fast. That, clearly, was close to Mr Boehner’s own take on the situation. Facing the inevitable bank of microphones, backed by his supporters, he revelled in the fact that he had effectively walked out on the president in the middle of a discussion they were having about the crisis.

Mr Boehner looked grave when he left that meeting with Obama, perhaps because public enjoyment of the president’s dilemma might look like cheap triumphalism. That said, if the gravity was assumed for image purposes mid-week, it took over Mr Boehner’s face for real towards the end of the week, when his own deserted the ship in sufficient numbers to render the bill dead in the water. The Democrats didn’t do much cheering, partly because the situation remains critical, with no solution in the offing, and partly because their own man in the House of Representatives came up with a legislative device almost nobody understood and which went nowhere in particular.

In real terms, what was achieved by the House of Representatives last week was the renaming of a bunch of post offices. I kid you not. When fixing the finances of the nation got beyond them, they went postal. Makes you re-think your prejudices about that guy Nero. Fiddling while Rome burned (as apocrypha claims he did) at least may have had entertainment value for those around him, whereas putting new names on old post offices is not one of those activities which, if televised, would achieve high ratings.

The level of confusion among ordinary voters is high, paralleled by discontent with both Republicans and Democrats, and owes a lot, according to economist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman, to a daft notion of media balance afflicting virtually all TV networks with the possible exception of Fox News, which knows which side its bread is buttered on. (It’s buttered on the far right side.)

Krugman maintains that the confusion is a confected confusion, since the reality is relatively simple to understand: Republicans are using the economic crisis to beat policy changes out of the president by threatening to sink the economy further, but media is not making this understandable to the readers, viewers and listeners.

“Some of us have long complained about the cult of ‘balance’, the insistence on portraying both parties as equally wrong and equally at fault on any issue, never mind the facts,” he wrote this week in the New York Times. “I joked long ago that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read ‘Views Differ on Shape of Planet’.”

Eschewing such “balance”, Krugman talked bluntly, this week, about the Republicans blackmailing the Democrats and the latter negotiating about the size of the ransom. Negotiating the size of the ransom has already seen President Obama indicate willingness to offer concessions which cut through some Democratic core values, including raising the age at which Americans would become eligible for Medicare and reducing spending across the board. Democrats were dismayed, and that’s putting it mildly. Republicans refused to do a deal, despite the breadth of the concessions offered. Yet the headlines the next day talked of the Republicans and the president being “Trapped by Inflexible Rhetoric”.

The truth is that Barack Obama had put the public good and the survival of the American economy above his personally held passionate beliefs and those of his party in order to achieve agreement with the Republicans. The demonstrably abysmal payoff was a Republican intransigence indicative of that party’s determination to avoid any tax increases in order to appeal to its own constituency and fend off the growing threat to its position from emerging and even more conservative parties. Yet the commitment to balance of serious media resulted in an “on the one hand/on the other hand” interpretation which left the impression that each side was equally obdurate.

Media emphasis on spurious balance is not peculiar to America. We have an over-supply of it at home, particularly when it comes to giving “a fair hearing” to climate change deniers, which is a bit like giving a fair hearing to a speaker who believes taking pints of blood out of sick people constitutes good medical care. In this particular instance, however, Krugman warns of longer-term implications for democracy.

“The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster,” he maintains. “For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behaviour if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.”

And if all political parties are the same, what’s left, other than taking to the streets...