You may have heard…

You may have heard that Barack Obama will raise your taxes, and that Joe Biden thinks it’s patriotic for the wealthy to pay taxes.  If you earn over a quarter million in a year you have something to think about – and I envy you.  For the rest of us, the reality is plain: Obama will lower the tax bite on people earning less than $250,000 per year.  It’s that simple.  It’s a fact.

Why don’t you hear this fact echoing from every mouth of every newscast?  You’ll have to ask them, but I have my theory: Even if the reporter is doing an honest job, the company he or she works for is all about earning a profit. Not only do they have a vested interest in limiting their corporate tax burden, but also have a very real interest in how much they earn in gross dollars, too.  Which means they want you tuning in to keep their ratings high,  and they thrive on selling ads.  There are some exceptions, but right now that focus on gross income has two obvious ramifications for the way commercial “mainstream” media overall tends to decide what stories to produce and present.

First, it’s a given that ratings go up if it’s a close contest.  So the pundits on both sides are prone to speaking in dramatic tones and emphasizing the uncertainty of any particular outcome – they’ve been doing that since before Super-Tuesday, when they presented polling data to suggest that Senator Clinton and Senator Obama were in a statistical “deat heat” in Minnesota, for instance.  (Yet it turned out that the stories – and polls – were frankly entirely wrong: Obama garnered twice the support in Minnesota that Senator Clinton did that day.)  I’m all for telling people they should pay attention, get involved, stay active, and participate in Democracy. I firmly believe we are all best served by greater turnouts for primaries and elections (yes, even if your vote doesn’t align with mine.)  A well-informed population is one of the keys, and this is an age when information is readily available to most of us.  But let’s make it the truth.

Second, these media outlets all realize that their advertising dollars will dry up if they act in ways their sponsors don’t approve.  That’s the nature of sponsorship, clearly.  By reporting that both candidates are in a close race without examining who donates to the campaign(s) or questioning the motives of those who donate the commercial media manage to avoid provoking those large donors, (say for example a large oil company,) while at the same time encouraging them to pour more money into the campaigns.  Ultimately they are likely to get a slice of that donation in the form of advertising revenue, after all.  So in deciding which stories to cover, and how much time to give to the raw, unedited facts and statements of any candidate versus presenting research on their record and/or where each candidate has made commitments (on taxes, health care, earmarks, lobbying in DC,  ethics reform, energy and the environment, the economy, etc.) commercially-funded media are under pressure because they’re in business to make money.

In other words, they’d rather cover McCain’s provocative statements –  that Obama wants to put health care decisions in the hands of bureaucrats, for example — than report on the facts. (To pursue the example, the fact is that insurance companies – and non-medical administrative staff working for them – already make our health care decisions based on their profit rather than best medical practice.)  Their behaviors make sense, unfortunately.  After all, those insurance companies do buy lots of ads, don’t they?  So much easier to just report on what a candidate says without doing any research.  They have lots of practice at reporting, why bother asking questions or digging for the facts?  Any campaign will provide lots of talking points, just as the current administration has done, and by presenting conflicting claims they build interest without all that risk of going after truth, and confronting those who misrepresent their records, or slander their opponents. Very few “reporters” and pundits have exhibited the courage to disagree with any major candidate for office, lately.

Yet despite all that, despite the fact that many pundits spend more time echoing smears and lies under the guise of “reporting what’s happening” rather than focusing on debunking and verifiable facts, that many organizations are dedicated to sound bites rather than reporting, exceptions do exist. Former journalist Barbara Walters, for instance, showed all those current “news people” how to ask that one more question that reveals when a candidate is, in fact, just replying by repeating a talking point instead of a providing a real answer.  Huntley and Brinkley would have been proud:

We have a right to expect journalistic integrity, to expect to be treated respectfully. We have a right to expect them to do their jobs, and hold themselves to a high standard of objective, energetic research and reporting while treating us like adults.  We just don’t have a right to assume that will happen, let alone that there’s no profit motive.