from Media Matters
From the way the media have covered this week's stimulus package vote, you would think the goal of the legislation was to get Democrats and Republicans to sit together for lunch in the House cafeteria, rather than to turn around an economy in free fall.
After the House passed the stimulus package by a comfortable margin, much of the media reacted not by examining the bill's contents and the likelihood that it would provide a much-needed boost to the economy, but by focusing on the fact that it passed without a single Republican vote.
Why the GOP's unanimity in opposing the stimulus package should be surprising is anybody's guess; the last time we had a newly elected Democratic president, in 1993, congressional Republicans were unanimous in opposing his economic package, too. Then-Rep. John Kasich went so far as to promise that if Bill Clinton's plan worked, Kasich would switch parties. (It did; he didn't.) Point being: Congressional Republicans do not have a strong track record of working with Democratic presidents in recent memory. Perhaps because they were too busy trying to subpoena the White House cat.
Nonetheless, the Democrats' purported failure to get Republican support for the bill was, according to many reporters, the story.
... more of the story on Media Matters after the click.
Hint: The folks who bear the greatest responsibility for finding out what's actually going on and reporting back to us with the facts ... journalists ... when confronted by doing actual research, on one hand, and puffing up some small, sensational aspect of an issue, tend to kick back and take the easy way out. Politicians, aware of this, can spin the news, sure in the fact that no one is really paying attention to the important stuff. That's why we hear so much about the 1% chaff in the $800bn stimulus package while the other 99% goes unnoticed, unanalyzed and unreported.
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