eleanor clift – Moe Lane

Eleanor Clift is very upset that nobody is covering state-level politics: “On a good day, state news is under-covered, especially compared to its importance. While multitudes of reporters in Washington chronicle the gridlocked Congress, the number of full-time reporters covering 50 statehouses has fallen to roughly 300, down from 500 in 2003, according to the Pew Research Center.” But is the situation that there is no coverage, or simply that the coverage is not by the right sort?

The decline in reporters working for mainstream or legacy media outlets has been filled in part by journalists hired by specialty news outlets like the Alaska Budget Report, which charges $2,397 for a year’s subscription, and the pro-free market Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. Mark Jurkowitz, one of the authors of the Pew study, says the ideologically driven reporting tends to be on the right. Pew found only one organization in North Carolina identifying as progressive. “With resources stretched as thin as they are and reporters caught up in the day to day ping-pong, enterprise reporting or looking for scandal goes by the wayside.”

Continue reading Who’s covering state-level politics, anyway? Are they… suitable?

Eleanor Clift, in the process of depserately trying to encourage some strange alternate-world version of the President – one who actually believes in compromise and bipartisanship, and who might be willing to do some actual, unglamorous work – makes this howler:

Republicans stood together against Social Security and Medicare, and when those programs proved popular, opposing them left a residue of distrust for the GOP.

Don Surber snickers at that:

Not so. Jonah Goldberg reported: “The Social Security Act was passed in the House on April 19, 1935 by a vote of 372 yeas, 33 nays, 2 present, and 25 not voting. Eighty-one Republicans voted for it, fifteen against. Fifteen Democrats also voted against it. That’s over 80% Republican support.”

Also, Republicans backed Medicare in 1965, which was co-written by Republican Congressman John Byrnes. It passed 70-24 in the Senate and 307-116 in the House.

Goldberg link here, which was incidentally a correction of yet another liberal columnist getting the details wrong. Doesn’t anybody on the Left punditocracy do basic research anymore?

Moe Lane

PS: I’d discuss the central thesis of Ms. Clift’s article itself, except that I generally try to avoid theological disputes in religions that I don’t follow.

Crossposted to RedState.