So President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law today. No matter your opinion of the details of the $789 billion stimulus package, I think we can all agree that the corporate media’s coverage of it was downright shameful.
Just as they did during the presidential campaign, corporate media got too caught up in conservative Republican criticisms of Obama.
The recovery package is “pork,” it won’t work, only businesses create jobs, it’s socialism, it’s “anti-religious” “generational theft” that rewards illegal immigrants.
How one-sided was the media coverage of the stimulus debate? According to Think Progress, for each Democratic lawmaker interviewed on a cable show about the stimulus package, two Republicans got airtime.
This shows that not only did Republican talking points dominate the airwaves, but that the political tug-of-war, not the practical policy issues, dominated the discussion. How political was it? Media Matters found that economists were only featured in 5% of all cable coverage of the stimulus package.
Shockingly, the American public did not swallow these talking points whole. Obama and his stimulus package have high approval ratings, while the Republicans who led the opposition to it, Rep. John Boehner and Sen. Mitch McConnell, have toxic unpopularity ratings.
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Obama has cautioned that his high-minded notions of bipartisanship will take time, especially after the hyper-partisanship of the Gingrich-Bush-Cheney-Sensenbrenner era. Let’s hope that corporate media find more independent, reality-acknowledging experts to fill the airwaves before the next big policy debate.
