NPR and "Balanced Opinions"

The other day on NPR, they presented a story which left me wondering what possibly qualified it as newsworthy. It appears to be the direct result of the active Republicanization of NPR.

Basically, it was about an informational roadshow going around the country since 2005 attempting to sustain the misunderstanding of the crises facing Medicare and Medicaid, and conflate those with the modest potential problems facing Social Security.

Dean Baker commented on it that day, and did his usual fine job of analyzing the core message of the Road Show.

However, he raised a point that's been bothering me about NPR's reporting lately. During this particular segment, they attempted to illustrate the road show's bipartisan creds, by explaining that its participants include a member from "the conservative Heritage Foundation" and one from the "left-leaning Brookings Institution". They've been doing this a lot lately, pairing up Heritage and Brookings to present "both sides of the story".

The reason this portrayal is complete bullshit: Brookings, despite whichever way their particular policy recommendations may lean, is an "Independent" institution. The Heritage Foundation, by contrast, has a core mission of promoting conservative public policies.

Thus, typical of modern media procedures, the pairing of an active partisan advocate with a representative of an independent think tank becomes "balance". Our "Liberal Media" - nay, the ultimate bastion of Our Liberal Media - still can't manage to get an actual liberal partisan involved in the dialogue.

Unsurprisingly, the conclusions drawn by the participants seem to suggest that we must make "tough political choices". In case you haven't been following the debate, the "tough choice" is not "raise taxes", it's "reduce benefits".

Less surprisingly, it appears that our representative from the left-leaning Brookings Institution, Douglas Elmendorf, has been beating the "Social Security is in Crisis" war drums for some time now.

So, let's just recap...thanks to the magic of our modern political climate, "Both Sides of the Story" is comprised of the conservative side, and the right of center side. Thank you, Our Liberal Media.

Update: Just before I posted this, I decided to google "left-leaning brookings institution". Clearly, I'm not the first person to make this observation. However, I took way too much time writing this post, so it's going up anyway, dammit!

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