Two from the New York Times

So Wednesday, the NYT’s Gail Collins offers her deep thoughts on the Democrats’ surprise victory in an upstate New York race, a victory most analysts take as displeasure with Republican support for Paul Ryan’s turn-medicare-to-vouchers plan.
Collins’ response? Oh, noes, now Medicare is an issue! “There is no escaping our fate. We are going to spend the next 17 months hearing about how the Republicans want to kill off Medicare … How are we going to fix the hugely expensive, deeply flawed fee-for-service health care system with all this demagoguery?”
Likewise David Brooks asserts in the times that Repubs will “spend 2012 accusing the Democrats of sponsoring death panels. The Democrats will spend 2012 accusing Republicans of ending Medicare. Whichever party demagogues best wins.”
Lost in either column is the merits of the Ryan voucher proposal, which would (as the
Daily Howler noted today) indeed end Medicare as it’s currently constituted and probably leave seniors with far less coverage at a point in life where people need it most.
Nor is their any suggestion that the attacks on both sides might not be equivalent. Repubs accused Obama of planning death panels to deny care to seniors, which was a lie. Democrats accuse Repubs of proposing a program to slash Medicare spending and leave seniors with less coverage: Accurate.
For Collins, who once devoted a column to joking about how she hates reporting on campaigns which aren’t centered on exciting sex scandals, perhaps the thought of having campaigns dominated by a policy debate really does seem dismal. Certainly it’s much easier to discuss it in terms of “demagoguery” and Congressional maneuvering than policy.
Or possibly she really does believe—as much of the Washington press corps does—that slashing Medicare and Social Security is the only sane solution to balancing the budget (I mean, what are the alternatives? Stop fighting billion-dollar wars? Raise taxes on the rich? Impossible!). It’s a given, even in news stories, that this is the sensible, non-ideological, pragmatic response and that people objecting to it are in denial of reality.
Which is a good segue (okay, an average segue) to another David Brooks’ column in which he explains the reason the UK’s government works better than ours is because instead of demagoguery, it’s dominated by a small group that knows each other well and achieves bipartisan consenus on all issues, instead of (not that he says it) all this nasty disagreement over Medicare when all sensible people know what has to be done.
Glenn Greenwald points out Brooks has previously waxed nostalgic for the days when “rich men in private clubs” ran the economy and the government and for giving “unlimited authority to a small coterie of policy makers” who are neither liberal nor conservative. Which as Greenwald notes, presumably means they think like Brooks (Greenwald also pokes holes in Brooks’ argument at the link)
This kind of argument reflects a tendency in the press others have noticed, to assume that in contrast to “ideologues,” a pundit/reporter is a pragmatist who sees through the bullshit and identifies pragmatically, what needs to be done. Those who adopt the same position are serious thinkers acting out of principle or sense; those who disagree are just posturing demagogues.
During the Bush years, the press corps decided the invasion of Iraq was good and only a radical fringe wanted to withdraw (even when polls showed that was the majority position). Some pundits literally asserted that even though they’d been wrong about Saddam’s WMDs and the risk of sectarian violence, the people who’d been right were actually more wrong, because opposing the war was not a serious stance.
Likewise, Collins, Brooks and other are now insisting that anyone who doesn’t believe in cutting Social Security or Medicare isn’t simply wrong or considering alternatives, they’re not taking the problem seriously. Never mind the Ryan plan’s flaws, pointing them out is demagoguery, non-bipartisan and nonserious!
If Brooks and Collins are serious punditry, no wonder people get their news from John Stewart.