Polls Show Clearly How the Corporate Media Screws Democrats

Time for change

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Sat Oct-28-06 09:25 PM
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Polls Show Clearly How the Corporate Media Screws Democrats

Edited on Sat Oct-28-06 09:30 PM by Time for change

With elections that could well determine the fate of our country for a long time to come just a few days away, nothing could give a clearer picture of how Democrats are screwed by our corporate media than considering the answers to poll questions that look at some of the most critical issues on which these elections will be decided. As an example, let’s look at the two issues that work most strongly against Democrats and compare them with the issue that works most strongly in the Democrats’ favor, from a Gallup poll released on October 26th entitled “What Democrats Would Do If They Win Control of Congress”.

Raising taxes

Gallup’s recent poll shows that 63% of American adults believe that Democrats will “increase federal income taxes” if they win control of Congress, and only 23% of Americans approve of that (74% disapprove). That means that this will be a losing issue for Democrats with a huge percentage of American voters on November 7th.

I suppose that I shouldn’t blame Gallup for asking such an idiotic question, since it merely mirrors the way that our corporate media has framed this issue for as long as I can remember. The Gallup poll question and the framing of the issue by our corporate media are both idiotic because they presume that taxes are necessarily an all or none, across the board issue – that they must be raised on everyone equally or not at all.

To consider this issue in perspective, let’s consider two rather distinct groups of people in our country. One group of people, whom I’ll refer to as “the rich”, is those who make over a million dollars per year – in other words, multi-millionaires and billionaires. The other group of people, whom I’ll refer to as the middle class and the poor, are those single adults who make less than $200,000 per year and families of two adults who make less than $400,000 per year. This group includes the vast majority of people and the vast majority of voters in our country.

When people answer a poll by saying that they believe that Democrats will increase federal income taxes, I assume that those people are thinking of tax raises that apply to people in general or to themselves. So we should ask why so many people believe that Democrats will raise taxes on the middle class or the poor. Has a single Democratic politician said that he or she would do that in the past decade? Has a single Democratic politician provided any reason in the past decade for anyone to believe that he or she would do that? I doubt it. So why would anyone believe that? Obviously, people believe that nonsense because it is endlessly repeated by Republicans, and our corporate news media echoes those accusations and never bothers to point out the total lack of evidence for their veracity. And if anyone tries to point out that there is a difference between taxing the rich and taxing the middle class, they are immediately accused of “class warfare” by Republicans and their corporate media shills.

But the sad truth is that since the inauguration of George W. Bush our Republican Congress has passed a series “tax decreases” which have provided benefits exclusively for the rich, despite the fact that neither they nor our corporate media (with rare exceptions) ever phrases it that way. For example, a study by “Citizens for Tax Justice” showed that of the 2.4 trillion dollars (That’s $2,400,000,000,000) in tax breaks enacted by our Republican Congress this century, extending through 2010, 51% of the cuts will go to the top 1% of wealthiest Americans. Another way of looking at this is that these tax breaks amount to $483,000 per person ($48,300 per year) for the wealthiest Americans, compared to an average of $659 per year for middle income Americans over the same period, and $77 per year for poor Americans. However, it is much worse than those statistics would indicate. As Thom Hartmann points out in his new book, “Screwed – The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class”, those who made less than $218,000 in 2005 actually lost money from the Bush “tax cuts”. The explanation for this can be found in studies such as those conducted by “United for a Fair Economy”, which showed that between 2002 and 2004 the Bush tax cuts amounted to a shortfall of approximately $200 billion going from the federal government to states, resulting in a combination of service cuts and tax increases by the states that equaled about that amount, and which was paid for disproportionately by the middle class and the poor.

So the honest thing to say about Democrats’ stand on taxes would be that some (I hope most) of them would like to reverse the Bush (and Republican Congress) tax cuts on the rich, in order to begin to pay down our national debt and to restore government services that benefit the good majority of American citizens, thereby enabling millions of people to climb from poverty back into the middle class. But to simply say that Democrats want to “raise taxes” is the height of hypocrisy.

Terrorism

Another issue which Gallup’s poll shows to be hurting the Democrats for this election is terrorism. 49% of poll respondents said that they believe the Democrats would “cut back on efforts to fight terrorism”, while only 21% of respondents approve of “cutting back on efforts to fight terrorism”.

Yet how many Americans are aware that the 9/11 Commission gave the Bush administration five Fs, 12 Ds, and two incompletes on their 2005 year-end “report card”, which dealt with measures taken to prevent future terrorist attacks, and that Democrats have repeatedly urged that the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations be implemented? Why should that not be considered a major scandal, or at least substantially more important than Bill Clinton’s brief consensual affair with an adult woman? Why should it not be covered extensively by our national news media? And if it was covered by our national news media, can anyone believe that 49% of Americans would say that the Democrats are likely to “cut back on efforts to fight terrorism”?

Increase in the federal minimum wage

Since a close examination of Gallup’s poll results has shown that distortion of the news by our corporate media is largely responsible for why Democrats are believed to be on the wrong side of a couple of major issues, let’s take a look at an issue that appears to be helping Democrats in the upcoming elections. Maybe we’ll find that issue being distorted in the Democrats’ favor.

The issue that appears most likely to help Democrats in this election is public perception of their stand on the minimum wage. 74% of poll respondents said that they believe it is likely that a Democratic Congress would increase the minimum wage, and a whopping 86% of respondents said that they approve of that stance.

So let’s consider why almost three quarters of Americans believe that a Democratic Congress would raise the federal minimum raise. Could this be due to news media distortion, as in the case of issues that benefit the Republicans?

Actually, the answer to that question is yes. The fact that the Gallup poll showed less than three quarters of poll respondents believing that the Democrats would increase the minimum wage if they had the power to do so means that more than a quarter of those respondents are totally ignorant of this issue. Democrats have repeatedly voiced approval and voted for increases in the federal minimum wage. For example, 100% of Senate Democrats voted for the Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2005], and yet it didn’t pass because 92% of Republicans voted against it. There is no question that a Democratic Congress would attempt to raise the federal minimum wage, and the fact that less than three quarters of Americans are aware of that is just one more example of how our corporate news media fails to inform the American public on issues that are critical to their well being.

Perspective on the role of our corporate news media in recent U.S. elections

In 2000 our corporate news media played a major role in Al Gore’s defeat. In addition to refusing to explain the effect of the proposed Bush tax cuts to the American people, they repeatedly echoed the bogus story that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet, and theybelittled him for supposedly wanting the Presidency too badly. When the presidential debates showed George W. Bush to be the idiot that he is, the media came to Bush’s rescue by making a great big deal out of Gore sighing too much during the debates, even claiming that that constituted a win for Bush. And when, following Gore’s narrow “loss” in Florida he asked for a hand recount of the vote and the Bush team repeatedly claimed that several recounts had already been done, the media failed to point out that there never was a full recount of the Florida vote. Nor did they point out the scandal of the tens of thousands of illegally purged voters in Florida.

Same thing in 2004. The media failed to follow up on Bush’s failure to fulfill his national guard obligations, while giving wide coverage to completely bogus claims by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth against John Kerry’s heroic war service. They failed to adequately point out that Bush’s rationalization for his Iraq war was based on nothing but a pack of lies. And they failed to note that Bush was wired to his handlers during the presidential debates with John Kerry, even though they knew about it. And then, following another highly questionable Bush “win”, they utterly failed to follow-up with coverage of the likely election fraud that sealed that win, despite well documented evidence for it.

The list goes on and on. A few weeks prior to this November’s election, one major TV station even aired a phony “docudrama” which revised history to claim that it was Bill Clinton who was responsible for the 9-11 attacks on our country rather than George Bush, even though Bush had been in office for eight full months by that time, and he had refused to follow up on the Clinton administration’s warnings to take seriously the possibility of an attack by al Qaeda.

Now, the recent Gallup poll on the eve of the 2006 mid-term elections paints a clear picture of how corporate media distortions have gravely hurt the Democrats’ chances once again, by showing how voter perceptions of Democrats’ actions and intentions differ greatly from reality. The Democrats may very well win this election anyhow, since the agenda of our Republican Congress over the past several years has deviated so greatly from the public interest. But win or lose, corporate media distortion of the news will without a doubt once again cost the Democrats millions of votes.