You're kidding me, right?
The lesson here is that
misinforming voters works.
A Bloomberg Politics poll shows that on two controversial issues, the budget deficit and deporting illegal immigrants, the public believes Obama's critics–even though reality favors the president.
By 73 percent to 21 percent, the public says the federal budget deficit has gotten bigger during the Obama presidency.
What's that? It's not true? It's not even a little bit true? You would think the great big super-important dispenser of all wisdom, the news shows, would feel a little embarrassed that the public cannot accurately describe the facts surrounding one of the most obsessed-over issues in all of politics. I suppose it
would put a kink in the Reasonable Person plan to shred everyone's Social Security and give the money to Wall Street for (cough) safekeeping.
By 53 percent to 29 percent, Americans believe that Obama has sent fewer undocumented immigrants home than were deported a decade earlier. That's a constant refrain of Obama's immigration critics.
It also isn't true.
No, I'm pretty sure we're being overwhelmed by twenty foot tall waves of brown people crashing against our southern border and Obama isn't doing anything about it because he hates America. If the immigration "crisis" was in fact not actually a damn crisis at all and if the current administration was actually deporting more undocumented immigrants than the last Republican administration did, that puts nearly half of all things said during the midterm elections into question.
So there you go. On some of the most hotly debated, most supposedly existentially crisis-ish, most campaigned-on, pundited-on and reported-on "issues" of American politics, the American public has been widely convinced that reality is the opposite of what it actually is. And if American pundits haven't been able—or willing—to impart the basic facts to the public that listens to him, perhaps those pundits are, objectively, failures.
So what should we do? What should we have, instead of a national press? My own vote would be that we replace all the major news shows with or a series of fact-dispensing ads on the sides of public buses. You stick a nice big picture of a cute puppy up there, with a word balloon to the effect of "Arf! The federal deficit has shrunk by two thirds during the current administration!"
Americans would read that. They'd still fight about it, of course—which puppies were cuter, or whether the kitten on the side of that bus over there had a more cogent argument—but they'd at least read it.