Watching the press conference. So far, the President has fielded no questions from any frame other than the Republican campaign frame (referendum on the "agenda" or "policies", does Boehner or Obama "speak for the American people", etc). What's the over/under on questions from any other frame? So far 0. My guess is 0. Whoops - 1: Job creation via government spending now impossible? What are the options? And so it ended - rightwing Republican framing throughout, bar one question. Interesting media we have to filter through, the next few years.
I was fascinated to watch the news announcers react to the election results exactly as if they hadn't been telling us the same thing over and over again for the last three months and thus engineered the outcome themselves. I'll be fascinated, in a few years, to watch the beaver-toothed young women on the screen gush: "The world is ending. More after the break." Not one of them will ask any questions to which the answer is worth knowing.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2010/11/03/press-conference-president http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec10/obama_11-03.html Two transcripts, the second one from PBS - showing what a more conscientious news program took away in the way of usable stuff: the human interest angle, setback and rueing.
Media bias is a funny thing. It exists from every angle. Could it be that the biggest government turnover in 60 years sparked a few questions about the opposition?
The government doesn't need to "create" jobs, it needs to let small business thrive that America needs to keep America moving. That means more help from banks to those small businesses and less spending from government sources.
Then the absence of all angles but one, in a press conference like that, is kind of interesting. You would think so, wouldn't you? Nope. One, maybe two (I think I should count another, sort of) from any frame except the standard rightwing propaganda one that has increasingly dominated the mainstream media for thirty years. Read the transcript. No op-ed involved, nothing but direct and unedited (within the selection) quotation.
This is actually something of a canard. It's a common counterpoint made against trying to get jobs stimulus by catering to big business, based on the statistic that most job growth is concentrated in small businesses. And in terms of criticism of pro-big-business jobs stimulus, it's basically correct. Where it goes wrong is in conflating small businesses as a whole with job creation. It turns out that what really drives job creation is not small businesses per se, but start-ups. Established small businesses don't tend to create jobs any faster than big businesses do (which makes sense - if they did, they'd turn into big businesses). Rather, there's tons of jobs created in start-ups, since they have to hire entire staffs from scratch. And, being start-ups, they tend to be small, and so get counted in the "small business" statistics. So what you want to do to create jobs is not cater to small business as such, but encourage start-ups. The downside, of course, is that most start-ups fail, so a lot of that "job creation" represents workforce churn rather than permanent new employment. Still, the start-ups that succeed and grow end up creating a bunch of jobs, and it's better for everyone to keep people working in the meantime (temporarily or otherwise), so this remains the best target for jobs stimulus.
I'll be completely honest here: I see some journalists asking good questions. Probably there exists bias in a lot of places, but I think the whole right/left bias in the media is kind of bullshit, perpetrated by people who want to blame someone else for misleading the public. Obama's election was a rejection of George Bush and Republican's in general, a great expression of America's voice, but the subsequent shellacking of the Democrats in the midterms came about because people were mislead, not (of course!) because they disagreed with what was going on.
The fact is that Government can't create jobs, it can make the business environment for job creation friendlyer, or toxic, everything the grovenment does requires that it taking money from the economy, taxpayers, to pay for what ever program they institute.
? There is no left bias in the major US media. Hasn't been for many years. There was not a single left-oriented question asked at that major press conference, for example. Re the frame problem, so well illustrated in that press conference - you chose a decent example, avoiding the obvious campaign style attack questions that led off and taking on one of the more reasonable in tone - neatly sidestepping the absence of obvious campaign style questions from the "other side", but hey - and it will do: Can we just go with the obvious, and leave the implications to reflection? - The President did not lose an election this year. He's still the guy who won, in 2008, when the referendum was actually on him and his policies. Or do we need to fill in some blanks, provide hints for the hypnotized? Probably. Here's a few: This President, center right to begin with, has compromised, with the wingnut right both Rep and Dem - people who think preventing insurance fraud and abuse is government takeover of health care, that the surge saved the day and won the war in Iraq, that the unions killed the American economy - in every single area of political endeavor over his entire term in office so far. Compromise is this guy's middle name, the defining characteristic of his leadership to date. Or this: the coalition of Repubicans and Blue Dogs, which replaces the coalition of Republicans and Blue Dogs Obama has been battling for a year and a half, is almost unchanged: an eight seat difference of 435 in the House IIRC the graphic. Most of the Dems who lost this year were enemies of Obama's policies, people he had been compromising with. Replacing them with enemies in the other Party is a loss, but not a change in the tides of his fortunes. Or this: the Reps after 2008 did not in fact keep their end of any bargains, make any compromises, or cooperate in any way with the governing of the country. Obama offered, in 2008, and was rejected. He compromised, throughout 2009 and 2010, and gained nothing. So we learn again what the game is - calls for further Obama compromise are moves in that game, not legitimate political stances. Or this: Obama in 2008 had an agenda, a set of policies and programs articulated and proposed. The Reps in 2010 do not. Nobody has even attempted to claim that this election was a referendum on a Republican agenda. So even if you ignore the reality of the various campaigns and try to claim Obama's actual policies and programs were sort of rejected in proxy by the voters, you still have no basis for drawing the parallel Baker assumes in his framing: there is no actual Republican agenda for Obama to compromise with. Should he compromise with the tax cuts or the deficit reduction? The stronger military and Homeland Security or the smaller government? The further deregulation of the financial industry or the holding of banks to account? So you see the frame, of that question? Do you see the void, where other frames should be?
