Hey Arizona Republic, Paul Krugman was talking about you

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

I almost spit out my coffee this morning when I read this inane editorial opinion in the Arizona Republic (unsigned of course). No more time for posturing.

It adopts the media villagers' group think "both sides are too blame" framing of the federal debt ceiling "crisis," which anyone who follows politics knows is a manufactured crisis concocted by an insane Tea-Publican Party that is holding America hostage and is willing to wreck the American economy for the sole purpose of harming the Obama presidency.

(The editorial opinion also borrows liberally from a George Will opinion from last week without proper citation, but that's for another day).

It also comes after a Paul Krugman opinion the other day that addressed the very media villager group think that leads to inane editorial opinions like the one in the Republic today. John Amato at crooksandliars.com adds some additional perspective at Is the Cult of the "Beltway Media" Destroying America's Political System?:

[T]he media should be able to explain to the American people that the problem isn't between both parties, but only one: the Republican party. Why do the media refuse to cover this story honestly?

Paul Krugman has a few thoughts on the matter:

Watching our system deal with the debt ceiling crisis — a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences — it’s increasingly obvious that what we’re looking at is the destructive influence of a cult that has really poisoned our political system.

And no, I don’t mean the fanaticism of the right. Well, OK, that too. But my feeling about those people is that they are what they are; you might as well denounce wolves for being carnivores. Crazy is what they do and what they are.

No, the cult that I see as reflecting a true moral failure is the cult of balance, of centrism.

Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

"Washington is broken" is the refrain we hear constantly from the Beltway media, a long-held talking point pushed by conservatives in the MSM. When one branch controlled by Republicans does break down, then the government does stop working. The debt-ceiling debate is exposing the GOP as truly being broken because House Speaker Boehner can't even get his own members to back his own "spending cuts" plan, even after President Obama has offered up the store in negotiations. But this story also strikes at the heart of the Villagers as much as the GOP.

What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on.

You have to ask, what would it take for these news organizations and pundits to actually break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault? This is the clearest, starkest situation one can imagine short of civil war. If this won’t do it, nothing will.

And yes, I think this is a moral issue. The “both sides are at fault” people have to know better; if they refuse to say it, it’s out of some combination of fear and ego, of being unwilling to sacrifice their treasured pose of being above the fray.

It’s a terrible thing to watch, and our nation will pay the price.

Our nation has been paying the price of their news cowardice for decades (Clinton's impeachment, Al Gore's loss, and the Iraq War, to name a few) and now as this usually unremarkable procedural vote called the debt ceiling winds down and which has never been subjected to this type of political grand-standing closes in, our credit rating may fall and throw the US into a much deeper economic hole than we already are in—the beltway media stands by refusing to report what is actually going on. As Krugman says, this is a moral issue facing journalism as a whole, but it's the American population that suffers.

UPDATE: Must read follow-up opinion from Paul Krugman. The Centrist Cop-Out – NYTimes.com. "The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse."