The facts of the House Republican bill slashing food stamp funding are dire, but you might not know that if you relied on the traditional media to tell you what's going on. Dan Froomkin takes a look at a morning of coverage of the proposal to kick millions out of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program:
... because such a blatantly absurd and cruel move struck me as a good test of whether the Washington press corps could ever bring itself to call things as they so obviously are -- or whether they would check their very good brains at the door and just write triangulating mush that leaves readers to fend for themselves. It was no contest. [...]
Yesterday's vote was not only an undeniable act of heartlessness, it was also perhaps the ultimate example of how today's increasingly radical and unhinged GOP leadership picks on the poor, coddles the rich, makes thinly veiled appeals to racism, and plays time-wasting political games instead of governing.
In short, the important thing about this vote to anyone paying any attention at all was the subtext -- what it really meant. But the coverage was stenographic and context-deficient.
In the
New York Times, Froomkin finds "shockingly dishonest" and "fabulously disingenuous" quotes from House Republicans presented without the reporter offering any information on their relationship to reality. In the
Washington Post, he finds reporters offering up Republican claims on what they're trying to do by slashing nutrition assistance as the
reality, rather than as claims to be questioned. All in all,
it's a Chuck Todd sort of media, with reporters acting as if it's their job to simply interweave quotes from Republicans and Democrats without any effort at separating facts from lies.
Some realities: 170,000 veterans would lose food stamps if the Republican bill became law, and 210,000 children would not only lose food stamps but free meals at school as well. Those veterans and children are just a small fraction of the 3.8 million people who would be kicked out of the program. Republicans claim this would push people to work, but many adults on food stamps already work, and unemployed people are looking for work in an economy where there are three jobseekers for every job. All this to cut projected federal spending over the next decade by 0.086 percent.
Please join Daily Kos and Ultraviolet in denouncing House Republicans for passing deep cuts to food stamps, and tell Congress to oppose all cuts.