I have noticed that the MSM is trying to do the same thing to Obama that they did to Jimmy Carter. This is their model of how to take down a "People's President" with a 70% approval rating.
Failing to provide coverage of important reforms that might interfere with the picture of incompetence that they are trying to paint.
Covering what ever embarrassing bits they can come up with, create strawmen where none exist, a la the guy on CNN talking about bailing out irresponsible homeowners when he obviously had not read even the summary of the bill.
David Sirota over at Open Left makes a similar observation.
David Sirtoa calls Santelli's rant and it's Kudlow ilk 'Market Populism' and compares it to the real grass roots populism of Verg Bernero
The gap, of course, is in the portrayal. If you watch television or read op-ed pages, the Market Populists get most of the attention. Indeed, Market Populism is portrayed as the "centrist" mainstream sentiment in the United States. Just look at David Brooks' New York Times column this morning. He non-sarcastically insists that Santelli's comments were "lustily" representative of mass popular anger at "these injustices" - not the injustices on Wall Street, mind you, but the supposed injustices of (help for) people now losing their homes. Meanwhile, Grassroots Populism - ie. seething populist anger at Corporate America - is depicted as the ideology only of a tiny fringe. It's as if the media is a funhouse mirror on society - a bizzaro world where up is down, black is white, and free market fundamentalism is portrayed as a mass-based movement.
When the macroeconomy was doing well, the disconnect between the media narrative and what's going on in the real world certainly caused regular people to lose confidence in the media, but it didn't incite outrage.
Now, though, with the economy in meltdown, I'm convinced that part of why the public is so angry is because what they see on television and in their newspapers is so fundamentally at odds with how they are feeling and what they are dealing with. As Santelli shows, large swaths of the media and political Establishment actively and publicly denigrate the people who are most hard hit by the downturn. Indeed, in the multimedia presentation I gave during my book tour for The Uprising, I have a whole section on this very phenomenon, using Fred Barnes' literally laughing at the "lower class" as my example.
With Republicans being given media exposure at a rate of 2 to one, http://mediamatters.org/
I believe that the only way to counter this is by making a list of the sponsors of the programs that carry these screes and boycott the products of the sponsers.
We really DO have the real numbers to hurt them, as opposed to the fake numbers they try to portray. They are sponsoring this crap with money they make from US, so we can deprive them of the ammunition.
700 Billion is okay for Wall Street, but 75 Billion for homeowners is too much?
Updated for spelling of Sirota.