Conservative> Brent Bozell> Spare The Hype Of Budget Armageddon

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Spare the Hype of 'Budget Armageddon'

Barack Obama's strategy going into the scheduled sequestration was to hit the panic button, over and over again, putting the very Obama-friendly media into a heavy rotation of disaster metaphors.

"Hours, now, until massive government cuts go into effect that could impact every American. Jobs vaporizing, flights delayed, even criminals walking free," warned ABC morning anchor Josh Elliott. On screen were the words "BUDGET ARMAGEDDON."

The only people being released from jails were about 2,000 illegal immigrants who were facing deportation. The Department of Homeland Security released them, citing "looming budget cuts." That's just more gamesmanship. Put another quarter in the panic jukebox.

"Like the asteroid headed to earth, they're coming! Eighty-six billion in automatic budget cuts. And don't bother trying to duck," hyped CNN anchor Carol Costello. "So we let these draconian budget cuts take place. You know who's going to suffer the most? It's not going to be Congress. It's not going to be the president. It's going to be us."

"Kids without vaccines, schools without teachers and massive airport delays — we'll show you the worst-case scenario for government spending cuts," CBS morning host Charlie Rose read off the Panic Prompter.

It sounded a little like Bill Murray in "Ghostbusters" when he was whimsically warning: "Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together ... mass hysteria!"

Media Research Center analysts reviewed all of the 88 sequestration stories on ABC, CBS and NBC from Feb. 14 through March 1 when the "cuts" took effect and found 58 (66 percent) were dominated by panic nonsense, without a second of rebuttal of common sense. Another 10 stories offered the same hyperbole but at least included a few seconds of the skeptical view that the sequestration reductions weren't huge and their effects were being overhyped.

But for people who read newspapers, there was another worst-case scenario coming.

"The good news is the world doesn't end March 2. The bad news is, the world doesn't end March 2," liberal lobbyist Emily Holubowich told the Washington Post. "The worst-case scenario for us is the sequester hits and nothing bad really happens. And Republicans say: 'See, that wasn't so bad.'"

There is no daylight between the views of liberal lobbyists and the national news media.

This was the same game Bill Clinton played against the conservatives in Congress in the mid-1990s. The liberals are always presumed to have the upper hand in the blame game because the liberals have a very large Blame Machine known as the media.

ABC's Jack Smith unloaded this dire warning at the end of 1995: "Monuments and national parks are shut. So are museums. A long-awaited rare exhibit of the Dutch painter Vermeer at the National Gallery, eight years in the making, is closed. And the shutdown now has a human face. Joe Skattleberry and his wife Lisa both work for the government. Both have been furloughed. They can't afford a Christmas tree."

Please suspend all reason and try to avoid wondering how two federal workers couldn't spare $50 for a Christmas tree. Smith reported this a week into the shutdown and before paychecks were even delayed.

On Jan. 2, 1996, future "CBS Evening News" anchor Scott Pelley compared budget negotiators to bombers: "In April, terrorists tried to kill them. Today, politicians stopped their paychecks. In Oklahoma City's Social Security office, they're being ordered to work for nothing. ... The bomb broke Beverly Rankin's ankle. Politics is breaking her bank."

They called this a "newscast." It sounded more like CBS started a super PAC to run negative ads against Newt Gingrich. They wonder why a strong majority now tells pollsters that the media is guilty of favoring one side. The favoritism isn't just obvious it's completely shameless.

We've lived through four years of Obama, and as the federal government overspent us into trillion-dollar deficits every year, no reporter hit a panic button. The Federal Reserve is printing money like it's making Monopoly games, and no journalist is reporting with their hair on fire. The tax burden on most Americans went up this year, and no one took a camera and a microphone to interview someone who'll get by on a few less thousand dollars this year.

Our journalists talk like they're not only willing marionettes for the Obama panic message but like they're addicts for ever-growing government. Every potential spending limitation is portrayed as a dire and cruel assault on the suffering. In the statist mindset of the media elites, an American can never suffer from more government, only from less.

Americans won't feel these GOP-made disasters because they won't happen. They will, however, remember the hype. Perhaps the press will understand why only 6 percent of the public finds them "very trustworthy."

L. Brent Bozell III is the president of the Media Research Center. To find out more about Brent Bozell III, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Comments

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Sir;... Just because otherwise intelligent people in the media are enemies of stupidity does not mean they are friends of Mr. Obama... Sure; Mr. Obama stands against stupidity too; but the congress is not a dagger or swift poison... In this act of political insurrection as this will be seen as in the future, today the congress is simply a blunt object, the most convenient article at hand the people can grab to dispatch the government that has long been their enemy...
Santayana said in the 1890s that "Free government works well in the proportion it is superfluous. That most parelementary measures should be trivial or technical, and really devised and debated only in government offices, and that government in America should so long have been carried on in the shade, by persons of no name or dignity, is no anomaly. On the contrary, like the good fortune of those who never hear of the police, it is all a sign that cooperative liberty is working well, and rendering overt government unnecessary."
Sir;... The time when overt government was unnecessary is long past; and not because most people are immoral, but because the immorality ensconced by government in the constitution has gobbled up the commonwealth and robbed from the people their common support, has turned one against the other in the effort to keep power away from the people...
Those people who desparately need government to function for them in an overt fashion are face to face, and toe to toe with the part of the population who have had in the last century to bear the weight of all government... This is not the government we were to have... Santayana's government was different from our own...The thought that property would bear the weight of taxation made property work as hard as people, and kept the commonwealth in the hands of common people, and the pressure of taxation worked to return all that was unprofitable back into the hands of people who might make it so...Now, wages are taxed, and that lowers their price, and makes working people bear the weight of profit and of government...The profit is gone out of our society...
The commonwealth in the hands of the rich no longers supports the government or the people..The more our capital is exported, the more we must defend it with and on the less wealth at home... The more people are laid off, or who see their wages lowered, the more people find themselves in need of overt government action...And the tax structure originally approved to soak the rich is now a burden to working people, who for the moment blame government, and blame those in need of government help as well...
Sir; today the people with any wealth or power with feeble efforts turn the blunt object of congress against the whole of the govenment...It is not more effective than pitchforks or axes, but it is simply more civilized...People have had enough of lousy, and overt government when it does not and constitutionally cannot resolve our issues because it is the problem, because it has put so much of wealth and enterprise beyond its control and refuses the ability it has- to tax and to regulate commerce...
We are going to have to recall our capital and our industry if we will not be forced into empire which always means domestic tyranny...When and if we can get it back, we are going to have to use it to benefit and support the population... It does not mean anyone, including the rich should be sitting on their butts without hitting a lick...If you are not dangerously stupid, you should be working, and while many in congress and the media and among the rich may qualify as useless, they could at least support themselves instead of feeding off fewer and fewer people...There will never be profit in some labor, or in some laborers, but profit will throw even good and profitable people onto the sidelines, and onto the support of their fellows for greater profit and a tax burden they refuse through control of government...
Thanks...Sweeney
The government once worked simply because the commonwealth in all hands made government superfluous... Now that the rich have it all and we must fight to survive on the fraction left to us, government needs to work, or get out of our way..

Comment: #1
Posted by: James A, Sweeney
Wed Mar 6, 2013 5:02 PM