Eric Boehlert: "Chaos," "civil war"! -- the press throws a Dems in Disarray party [View all]

[babylonsister]

https://pressrun.media/p/chaos-civil-war-the-press-throws

“Chaos,” "civil war"! — the press throws a Dems in Disarray party
Calm down
Eric Boehlert
1 hr ago


Clutching their pearls with extra force in recent days, the Beltway media have cranked up the drama, announcing that a missed deadline to vote on the massive infrastructure bill now before Congress represented a defining calamity for the Biden White House. It also marks the ongoing obsession with process journalism, which Beltway reporters love, as they focus on the theatrics of lawmaking at the expense of the substance.

The hyperventilating was widespread. “Chaos” had erupted among “feuding” and “warring factions” of the Democratic Party, and the no-vote last week represented a “humiliating blow to Mr. Biden and Democrats,” the New York Times shrieked. A “civil war” has engulfed the party, the New Yorker announced, which was especially lazy and misguided since there are exactly two Democratic senators standing in the way of Biden, and 48 who support him on infrastructure.

snip//

By obsessing over the drama of the negotiations and reporting breathlessly on the jockeying that’s going on, the press all but ignores the contents of the pending legislation; contents which are truly extraordinary, as Biden works to expand what infrastructure means in America. The bill is all about investing in human welfare.

It proposes to spend $350 billion a year for a decade on initiatives like universal pre-K, free community college tuition, extended child tax credit, Medicare expansion, paid leave, and huge investments in reducing carbon emissions.

According to a recent Politico-Harvard poll, when showed a list of provisions that might be included in the infrastructure and social spending packages now before Congress, most voters picked allowing the government to directly negotiate drug prices with manufacturers as being the most important. That was followed by “increased federal spending to prepare for pandemics, more resources for long-term and home-based care and expanding Medicare to include dental, vision and hearing care.”

But most news consumers have no idea those provisions are part of the negotiated legislation, since there’s virtually no coverage of the contents.

And that’s a win for the GOP.