The MSM is Not Doing Its Job on the Bailout Story
Yes, this sentiment certainly seems appropriate to me (via Instapundit).
If it seems like I’m waffling on the merits of bailing out Wall Street, it’s because the facts keep changing.
And the President certainly didn’t help matters last night. If I had to decide on this bailout, or whatever we’re calling it, based just on what I’ve heard from the MSM for the past few days and the President last night, I’d be dead set against it.
That’s because neither the President nor the MSM has bothered to give us the basic information we need to come to an informed decision.
Here’s a great example of how bad reporting has gotten. The Politico has an article today on “deregulation” and how much lawmakers “regret” their decision to deregulate the banking industry. Awwww…sad face.
The problem is that nowhere in the article is there an explanation about what regulations were lifted, what “Glass-Steagal” actually is or was, and why it was lifted. The entire tenor of the article is that regulations are good and deregulation caused this mess, complete with lots of quotes from people who opposed lifting the regulations and not a real word from anyone else.
Here’s the kicker, though. Even though the headline reads “Lawmakers regret deregulation”, there’s not a single lawmaker quoted in the entire article who regrets a darned thing. There are some lawmakers willing to sermonize about deregulation and throw stones at their fellow lawmakers, but there’s not one ounce of regret.
The Politico published a bad article, loaded with bias, that reads more like an opinion piece than it does an informative news article. It’s fails as a news article because it doesn’t deliver any information. The reporter could have cut one of the preening quotes from some miscellaneous Congressman and spent a couple sentences telling us what the hell Glass-Steagall was and why it was trimmed back. I suspect, though, that he has no better idea than most of the folks interviewed for the article and that he never bothered to find out.
Yet that is what’s passing for MSM reporting on this issue. Congress is kicking around the idea of dumping 700 billion dollars of our money into a rescue plan and we still have not been informed by the self-appointed gatekeepers of information who call themselves journalists about even the basic facts of the situation.
Thank goodness for folks like Arnold Kling and the other very good bloggers who have managed to write the sort of informative pieces that the MSM should have been writing days ago.
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Category: General
