Media Focus On Weiner Scandal Pre-Empts Pelosi Presser About Jobs
Thanks to Brian Beutler at TPM for mashing this together so quickly. It’s so telling. Watch the video mashup of the three major cable news channel and how they all quickly lost interest in Senate Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s press conference when she made it clear she would not answer questions about the imminent resignation of Rep. Anthony Weiner. Now look at this graph: enlarge Credit: Source: Gallup Do you see Anthony Weiner’s weiner on that list? Of course you don’t. Even his constituents for the most part don’t think it’s an overriding concern . That distraction for which Weiner gamely took responsibility should more rightly be placed squarely on the shoulders of the media, who have relentlessly pursued him and cornered his colleagues in the Democratic Party to find out when (not whether) Weiner would resign. What was Nancy Pelosi discussing that the media en masse decided wasn’t nearly as interesting as Anthony Weiner? Jobs. Funny, that. Just as the media doesn’t care about what the democratic process and what Weiner’s constituents want, the media doesn’t care that most Americans don’t care about Anthony Weiner at all and want to know that Congress is focusing on the concerns they do have. This is what the media didn’t care if Americans heard : It is day 163, 163 days since the Republicans have taken over the majority of the House of Representatives—almost 6 months, and still no jobs bill on the floor. Instead, the Republicans have put forth a budget that ends Medicare, while making seniors pay more to get less or give tax subsidies to Big Oil. They are harming seniors by changing Medicaid, while they give tax breaks to businesses that send jobs overseas. They are reducing our investment in education and making it worse for our children and making it more expensive for nearly 10 million young people to go to college, making it prohibitively expensive for them, while they give tax cuts to the wealthiest people in our country. We want to put people back to work. We want to do so as we put our fiscal house in order. We will not do it on the backs of our children, our seniors, or the great middle class. Democrats are focused on creating jobs, strengthening the middle class, preserving Social Security, and responsibly reducing the debt. We have introduced—you have been here with our Whip, Steny Hoyer with a Make It in America agenda. It is an agenda about stopping the erosion of our industrial manufacturing and technological base. It is an agenda about, again, making it in America by building the infrastructure of our country with Build America Bonds and the rest. We have had this presentation over and over again. We have not been able to get one of these bills brought to the floor under the leadership of the Republican majority, and so we are going another route. We are taking one element of the Make It in America agenda that is a component that addresses the manipulation of currency by the Chinese government. This is unfair to American workers. It is costing us over 1 million jobs. Hm….can’t imagine why the media didn’t think this was newsworthy, can you?
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Media Focus On Weiner Scandal Pre-Empts Pelosi Presser About Jobs
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on June 16, 2011. Filed under