Obama Budget
Posted By Guy Smith on January 31, 2012
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Worsening economic news can only mean a worsening level of propaganda.
This is where MSNBC enters the picture.
The Congressional budget Office (CBO) today announced that the U.S. economy will go from tragic to worse, echoing sentiments of a double-dip depression. Barring miracles that would make the Second Coming look second rate, America’s jobless rate will rise to 8.9% before this year is over, and slide upward to 9.2% in unlucky ‘13. Were these glum tiding were not bad enough, the last four years of $1 trillion deficits are just the beginning.
Tim Robbins is likely wondering where his “smart president” wandered off to.
Senate Budget Committee Chairman and perpetual partisan Kent Conrad immediately located a microphone to toss out The Lie of Balance (avoiding exposure of the opposite assumption in order to avoid providing balanced perspective) and The Lie of Unexamined Alternatives (examining only half of an obviously two-sided discussion to keep people from obtaining a full perspective). In apparent jest Conrad conned “Republicans must be willing to put revenue on the table.”
Propaganda relies in large part in obfuscating alternatives. If your scheme stands alone, then busy voters have no option other than to hope you are right, then turn their attention back to kids soccer games, grocery shopping, jobs … that time consuming stuff called life. Conrad hijacked airtime to put only one half of a possible solution before dinner time news watchers, ignoring the non-GOP elephant in the room, namely a Federal spending spree rivaled only by my ex-wife’s credit card habit. Indeed, Democrat reluctance to discuss Uncle Sam’s spending problem is a case of The Lie of Limited Perspective (avoidance of exposing the big picture or long-range trends) and The Lie of Historical Obfuscation (obscuring or marginalizing historical trends in order to lure people toward the same end).
Not that anyone at MSNCB would expose it.
Let’s be blunt. Most networks have news desks with propagandist tendencies. MSNBC is a propaganda desk with news tendencies. In today’s example, MSNBC culled from, and misreported, an element of the CBO study that indirectly blames George Bush for the CBO’s forward projections. In a short laundry list of congressional (in)actions that keep future deficits higher than a Haight Ashbury inhabitant, one was retaining Bush-era tax cuts. MSNBC elevates this tidbit to the top of their story and misrepresents by stating that the CBO report “… says that annual deficits will remain in the $1 trillion range for the next several years if Bush-era tax cuts slated to expire in December are extended.” In this they ignored that the CBO also listed Alternative Minimum tax changes, continual Medicare overpayments to doctors, and Congress’s utter failure to let super committee automatic cuts to kick-in.
MSNBC enjoys using The Lie of Slices (using a small slice of data to simultaneously obscure the reality presented by all the available data, and creating a false sense of blame). Later on the claim that the federal deficit “would largely be solved” by rescinding tax cuts, but never shows the separate effects of all the CBO’s observations, and studiously ignores dire CBO predictions about continued increases in spending as the decade grinds on.
Political propaganda never ends, and oozes up the drain pipe during election years. With an incumbent president exacerbating a horrid economy, his party and propaganda wing will be in full damage control. Those standing in unemployment lines with not be swayed.


