Great Unravelling: Awful Truth

The good opinion of his colleagues does not seem to concern Krugman. His indifference toward journalism's conventional etiquette may even contribute to his success. By speaking rudely about the President and his policies he gave loud voice to what many of his readers had been wishing somebody important would say ever since Bush was created president by Supreme Court fiat. In some measure Krugman helped satisfy a hunger for political opposition, a longing which, not surprisingly, became acute after the election of 2000 turned out to be a nonelection.

Among the privileges enjoyed by rich, fat, superpower America is the power to invent public reality. Politicians and the mass media do much of the inventing for us by telling us stories which purport to unfold a relatively simple reality. As our tribal storytellers, they shape our knowledge and ignorance of the world, not only producing ideas and emotions which influence the way we lead our lives, but also leaving us dangerously unaware of the difference between stories and reality. Walter Cronkite used to sign off his nightly CBS television news show by saying, "And that's the way it is...." I once heard Senator Eugene McCarthy say he always wanted to reply, "No, Walter, that's not the way it is at all."

I had trouble believing what was happening. Was the presidential candidate of a major political party really lying, blatantly, about the content of his own program? Were the media really letting him get away with it? He was, and they were.

The Bush plan for Social Security reform "was a fraud from the start," he writes. "The mendacity in the administration's Medicare plans was subtler, but equally stark." Few in the media seemed to notice.

In the higher levels of journalism there is a curious uneasiness about dealing candidly with the quite natural relationship between various money interests and government. All politics is to a great extent about who gets the lion's share of the money at a government's disposal, and a public that realized this might be less insouciant about elections than today's American nonvoter.
Journalism is reluctant, however, to make much of an effort to find out who will benefit if a given candidate wins, and who will lose out. Instead of providing this valuable information, the media tend to explain politics in terms of high-sounding ideological piffle about a "conservatism" and a "liberalism" which have very little pertinence to anything of consequence to the voter. The result is to deaden public interest in politics by diverting the mind from the fact that there is real money at stake.
It seems slightly scandalous that Krugman has persisted in noting that the present administration has been moving the lion's share of the money to an array of corporate interests distinguished by the greed of their CEOs, an indifference toward their workers, and boardroom conviction that it is the welfare state that is ruining the country. Krugman has been strident. He has been shrill. He has lowered the dignity of the commentariat. How refreshing.