I often watch Washington Week (PBS). This week's show was devoted to the Republican 'debate' at the Reagan Library. The reporters had time to learn that Carly Fiorina had made up a total lie, but chose to ignore it in their enthusiasm for her 'pizazz'. The number of thoughtful news sites is vanishingly small. Read my complaint below.
Tonight was one of the worst Washington week programs in the last 20 years. You should not have given the whole show to the Republican “debate”- the debates make money for Fox and CNN; they are spectacles or celebrity porn and your reporters feed the false impression. Time spent on “who won the debate?” is mostly wasted. The fortunes of individual candidates will bob up and down in the next few weeks, just as stock prices will. You have people like Trump seeking only to monopolize the microphone, Cruz unloading a theology of rage and others who ‘want to seem presidential’ but mostly sound like clerks. Carly Fiorina, whom you laud, gave us a total lie about the Planned Parenthood video and the baby whose brain was about to be cut out, but your reporters gave her a pass. Obviously they are caught up in the circus atmosphere- “be energetic”, “don’t bog down in details”.
1. If PBS were interested in educating the public they wouldn’t have the McLaughlin group at all, Eleanor Clift and a bunch of screamers, never rising above the 7th grade level. Education about politics might start with the ‘rent-a-crowd' business. Trump or any other candidate with money can rent 50 or 100 enthusiastic supporters for town hall meetings, speeches, etc. Check out crowds on demand and sirkus.com. Renting 50-100 enthusiastic supporters is much cheaper than a billboard. Shouldn’t reporters investigate this? Washington Week should also analyze the non TV part of campaigning (how are the social media campaigns organized? How can we separate their effect from the rest of the media circus?) .
2. Investigative reporting should focus on the dozens of business practices that seriously harm average people. While Republicans fulminate about excessive regulation and genial old Ben Carson calls the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau the "ultimate example of regulatory overreach" Carly Fiorina says that it’s dangerous and friendly ole Ted Cruz has introduced legislation to eliminate this and other consumer protections- too bad that the debate questioners never ask about this. The CFPB has forced Encore Capital Group and Portfolio Recovery Associates to refund millions to consumers who were brutally squeezed. The companies bought thousands of consumer-debt accounts "that they knew or should have known were inaccurate or could not legally be enforced" because they lacked required documentation.
However, the companies filed lawsuits against people "knowing that they would win the vast majority of the lawsuits by default when consumers failed to defend themselves." Next consider Volkswagen’s crookedness allowing drivers to bypass regulations and discharge lots of diesel pollutants. Volkswagen top execs should be jailed. Only intrusive regulators can discover such persistent cheating. What about Turing Pharmaceuticals that bought up the rights to sell an old drug for toxoplasmosis and have increased the price 50-fold. There is no way to justify this criminal greed. What about the police stopping and ticketing people for trivial offenses, to fund city operations? This plunges many poor people, many nonwhites, into debt. Is this fair and reasonable? I won't even mention the quick resort to gun violence in dealing with nonwhites.
3. Suppose that a reformer is somehow elected President. He or she will have limited powers (can't change tax laws) and will be tempted to avoid controversy and try to appear reasonable in the first two years in office. We can see evidence of this in Obama’s case. The problem is that what is reasonable in our country is too much defined by Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. They don’t want consumer protection, they won’t admit the extent of fraud in financial markets, they favor predatory capitalism and keep telling us “we’re the greatest country that ever was”. Most Americans lap it up. Can we hope to curb predatory capitalism if so much money in politics comes from predatory capitalists (oil & gas, mining, financial industries, many telecommunications corporations, etc.)? Don't glamorize the presidential election as somehow changing our political system. The president gets to name or propose supreme court justices. That's important, but some justices have turned out to act very differently than expected - think of Brennan and Souter. Why imagine that all such changes will be toward liberal actions? The president commands our armed forces but is he/she willing to anger AIPAC and Wall Street? As Lawrence Lewis points out, WaPo and most of the media are solidly against Sanders and any real change, domestic or foreign.
4.What’s the difference between the debate charades and covering the Kardashians? PBS needs investigative reporting, not cheerleaders for our corrupt media. When will PBS start outlining the systematic crushing of poor Americans by the rich? Not occasional specials but a sustained focus on the emperor's nakedness, the crushing power of the 1%. How much longer can this go on?