However, in a climate where even Pres. Obama’s budget director warned that our debt is “serious and ultimately unsustainable,†perhaps more should be expected of the establishment media.
Indeed, our unsustainable financial situation led to the creation of a Tea Party movement — one of the biggest political developments in America over the past two years. It would seem to be the perfect news peg for ongoing media coverage of our government’s fiscal irresponsibility. Of course, it didn’t work out quite that way, did it? Instead, the establishment media ignored, then attacked the Tea Party movement — first as astroturf, then as racist, as Birthers, as hypocritical (for not having formed when the problem was less dire, and for gullibly expecting the government to make good on current entitlement promises or reform them before adding new ones), etc. The establishment media’s coverage of the Tea Party often seems devoted to discussing anything other than the issues at the heart of the movement.
Thus, the establishment media reveals itself, not as the people’s watchdog against irresponsible government, but as the irresponsible government’s guard dog against the people. It is ground zero for manufacturing center-left consent. After all, how could the establishment have seriously discussed passing the trillion-dollar ObamaCare behemoth, when so much of the funding comes from “reductions†in Medicare and Medicaid spending that is unsustainable in the first instance? How could the media have gone along with the laughable CBO estimate that ObamaCare will reduce the deficit (based on assumptions the CBO admits are unrealistic), if they had to take our ginormous public debt seriously? How could they float an economy-crushing cap-and-tax scheme to combat global warming, or climate change, or climate disruption, or whatever it’s being called today, if everyone was forced to acknowledge how far government has already promised beyond its means?
Emphasis added, and the full thing is here.