I was watching the local news this morning, and saw the following piece about the sunsetting of the Bush tax giveaways by CNN Senior Correspondent Allan Chernoff:
http://www.king5.com/...
On face value, this piece stinks - my definition of "middle class" doesn't include multi-million dollar houses in suburban New Jersey. Fortunately my local NBC affiliate (KCRA) was kind enough to add the chyron tags that the original producer left off.
The man featured in the story, Christoper Chudyk, is presented as a "middle class" working professional, but a quick Google search reveals that he is actually a partner with Traphagen and Traphagen CPA, an affiliate of the Traphagen Financial Group. I'm not sure what his income is, but I'm pretty sure of two things:
- He is most definitely over the $250,000/year income level that the story claims is being impacted by the changes (especially if you include his wife's income), and
- $350 a month in additional income tax isn't going to hurt him that much.
How exactly did the "reporter" find this Everyman to tell his heartbreaking story of having to pay slightly more of his share of taxes each year? He didn't have to look far. One of the "experts" in the story isRobert J. Traphagen, Managing Partner of the Traphagen Financial Group. That page may look familiar. Traphagen's mission statement is "Building Wealth through Sound Advice and Investments." They have to be very concerned about the sunset of the tax cuts, because it will mean that their clients will have less after-tax income for their firm to manage.
The other expert they bring in is Scott Hodge, President of the Tax Foundation. They claim to be nonpartisan, and this is technically true - they seem to support anyone who thinks taxes are bad. Scott is formerly of the Heritage Foundation, and according to his bio he helped pass the $500 child credit that he now claims is too low in this piece.
I know that the corporate media producing misleading, biased, canned news pieces is not exactly news itself, but I also know that if we don't keep calling them out on it, they'll keep doing it. This one in particular upset me because of how transparent and lazy it was - did they really think that panning over the guy's pool and enormous yard would help reinforce the "middle class" angle? And could they at least look outside the board room when they're looking for a Regular Joe to shill for them?
When you see this kind of crap, let your local affiliates know that you don't appreciate it. Also, let them know that you don't appreciate that you can do more investigative reporting in 5 minutes on Google than they apparently have done in a whole newscast.