How Can Ryan Get Away With Such Blatant Lies? Easy. The Corporate Media Such As NBC News Lets Him

August 30, 2012





By Joe Rothstein

Editor, EINNEWS.com



We are about to head into the closing weeks of a pivotal national election facing stark choices that could determine the nation’s future for decades to come. Yet the sense you get from TV coverage is that their real goal is to beat opposition networks in the ratings game. From newspapers you get mostly spoon-fed, lightly moderated talking points from writers and editors either too timid to call lies, “lies,” or too shallow to process the importance of the content they’re covering.



Most Americans get their news from just a few corporate media outlets. And when you test what people think they “know” about the news you see how miserably the media are informing the public.



How do voters make reasoned judgments if all they have to go on is distorted and incomplete information? This is a formula ready made for political demagogues who think nothing of lying through their teeth to gain political advantage.



That’s what we’re seeing in Tampa, and Paul Ryan's convention speech was the most egregious so far of a long parade of speakers trying to create a "reality" from imagination.



Case in point:



Campaigning in Jamestown, Wisconsin, in January 2008, then candidate Barack Obama told workers at the town’s General Motors plant, “I believe that if our government is there to support you this plant will be here for another hundred years.” In December, 2008, before Obama took office, the plant closed.



Wednesday night, in his acceptance speech as the GOP’s vice presidential nominee, Paul Ryan framed that episode like this:



“Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: ‘I believe that if our government is there to support you this plant will be here for another hundred years.’ That’s what he said in 2008. Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day.”



Obviously, Ryan’s spin, that the plant’s closing was President Obama’s fault, is simply not true. The facts are clear and known by the workers who were laid off, the people who live in Ryan’s home town, and anyone else who has checked out the charge.



This breathtaking disregard for truth is probably the main story line of the Republican convention. It’s of a piece with entire Republican nominating process that began when Mitt Romney published his campaign kickoff book, “No Apologies,” and then endlessly repeated his baseless charge that President Obama goes around the world apologizing for America.



The sad fact is that in politics, with enough money, enough repetition and a media largely too spineless or clueless to challenge bald face lies, truth becomes a severely disfigured casualty.



Take a public opinion survey and you will find large swaths of the American public believing total falsehoods about death panels, socialized medicine, secret plans to take away people’s guns, and doctored birth certificates.



This nonsense gets currency from those supposedly in the know, and hyped by right wing media. There’s little challenge from the mainstream media, which seems content to report lies as if they were legitimate beliefs in a political debate.



In his speech, Ryan falsely accused President Obama of cutting Medicare by $716 billion. That $716 billion actually cuts waste, fraud and abuse from the Medicare system and extends its life. It’s Ryan himself who has offered a budget that cuts nearly the identical amount, and from benefits themselves.



Ryan accused President Obama of ignoring a presidential commission’s recommendations for cutting the national debt. Ryan slid past the very pertinent fact the he himself had served on that commission and voted against its recommendations.



How many front page accounts of the Ryan speech will point out all of this? These are not just policy points, they are lies and misrepresentations so breathtaking you’re in awe of the chutzpah of Ryan and the GOP brain trust for making them. They have to have made those decisions confident that the media won’t effectively convey the truth.



Convention speaker after convention speaker has railed against President Obama for supposedly making it easier for welfare recipients to get checks without seeking jobs. Every independent fact checking organization that has examined this charge has come to the same conclusion: What the White House has done is cut red tape to make it easier for welfare recipients in many states to get jobs. That has not stopped the Romney campaign from saturating paid media with false charges. Neither has it prompted most journalists to call the Republicans out on this lie each time it’s repeated.



Today's NBC News website carries this headline, "Ryan revs up GOP crowd with conservative call to action." (www.nbcnews.com) The story uncritically reports Ryan's words just as a paid stenographer might.



Dan Balz, in the Wednesday Washington Post, gushed over keynote speaker Chris Christie and his ability to fill a room with his stage presence. In his coverage Balz focused on style points, not content. Balz is the senior political reporter of one of the nation's most influential newspapers.



Meanwhile, here’s what Wednesday’s New York Times editorial said about Christie.



“Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, in the keynote speech, angrily demanded that the American people learn the hard truths about the two parties, but like most of those at the microphones, he failed to supply any. He said his state needed his austere discipline of slashed budgets, canceled public projects and broken public unions, but did not mention that New Jersey now has a higher unemployment rate than when he took over, and never had the revenue boom promised from tax cuts.”



The New York Times editorial began its critique like this: “It was a day late, but the Republicans’ parade of truth-twisting, distortions and plain falsehoods arrived on the podium of their national convention on Tuesday. Following on the footsteps of Mitt Romney’s campaign, rarely have so many convention speeches been based on such shaky foundation.”



I was startled this morning to hear Mara Liasson on NPR actually place Ryan’s lies and misrepresentations in context while reporting on his speech. It’s one of the first instances I’ve experienced this year when a news person gave prominence to distortions. Normally it’s the editorial writers, read by far fewer people, who sometimes call lies what they are.



In Tampa, Republicans unequivocally are writing into their DNA the extreme right wing politics that long ago infiltrated the personhood of their party. As it turns out, that's not the most important story coming out of Tampa.



The most important story is that one of the two major parties has decided to campaign against an Obama, his policies, actions and words that exist only as figments of their own imagination. They have made a calculated choice that a less than critical media will let them get away with it.



They may be right.



(Joe Rothstein can be contacted at joe@einnews.com)

