The Political News and Commentariat Industrial Complex is at war with us, and most of us don’t even know it.  Our country is in incredibly poor shape financially and from the point of view of infrastructure, and our news outlets seem to be more interested in ratings and stirring the pot, obscuring the facts rather than providing news and information that can help inform us, and give us better information with respect to pushing our legislators (to the extent we still can).  The manufactured narratives from the media seem now to have more political strength that any grassroots movement, political campaign. And it’s killing us.

This is something of an expansive topic so please allow me to explain:

I must confess, I do not pay much attention to political polling data.  The reason for this is, having done a significant amount of polling and focus group work in my own professional life, I can pretty easily identify questions that:

1. leading to the point of biasing the response,
2. so vaguely or poorly constructed, that any response you get to it will be worthless in terms of its conclusory value
3. do not provide a sufficiently broad expanse of multiple choices responses, or defined too narrowly at the other extreme

When you encounter these in your early drafts, you throw them out and start over again.  As for the political, when I have waded into the details or makeup many of the national political polls I have seen in the last 5 or so years, I have been appalled to see such basic errors, and think “how could anyone possibly conclude anything from those?”  Seeing this time and again in ABC/CNN polls, Gallup Polls, Zogby Polls, etc., I have systematically ignored the results as reported, because of all of the above.

Having said that, the apparent turn in political tide of late makes me want to revisit my assumptions.   For one, as recently as last October, it seemed that people were generally dissatisfied with the details coming out of the Senate with respect to the Health Care bill, but it was widely reported that a 2/3 majority (not sure what source, but leave that aside for the moment) of citizen nevertheless still wanted at least some Health Care reform.

Then, three distinct events transpired.  In November:

1. Chris Christie defeated extremely unpopular Democrat (and ex-Goldman co-CEO) John Corzine in the NJ Governor’s race.
2. Bob McDonnell routed Creigh Deeds, who had run as campaign, well to call it inept would be damning it with feint praise) in Virginia.

In both cases, exit polling (there’s that word again) suggested that neither Barack Obama nor his agenda played any role in determining the outcome.  For whatever reason, news anchors from Fox, to CNN to MSNBC concluded otherwise.  The story over the Holidays was that Obama’s plan (really the Senate plan) was unpopular, and people decided to repudiate the Democrats for it ( regardless of the NY-23 race where internal GOP hijinks de-railed an incumbent’s bid for a seat that had been Republican since the Iron Age, and delivered it to a Democrat).

Then, the final straw, apparently, was when Scott Brown beat Martha Coakley for US Senate, when Martha Coakley had been the 1964 New York Mets of Senate Campaigners.

Now, it was open season, apparently.  Whatever the polling was, it was “unanimous” based on a superficial view of these three data points, that the tide had turned against the Democrats in general and the President specifically.  I have enough of a background in hard science to be utterly confounded by these conclusions.

But, whatever the spin, the news reporting was now fully driving both the poll structures (changing: “do you approve of the President’s job performance?” last year to “how much of the blame for your economic situation do you place on the current administration?” this year).  This no so subtle form of push-polling, tends to have an effect not only on the results, but how the results are interpreted and then to how the general public understands the issues.

Still, the only thing that had changed was two gubernatorial seats and one Senate seat, all of which were seemingly unconnected to this new “narrative”.

My question is this: to what extent does reportage drive public opinion?  On the surface, Fox is obviously a conservative outlet and MSNBC is obviously liberal (I’ve discussed that here before, but just for the sake of argument let’s accept that), but both have an interest in conflict and controversy.  Both use cheap tactics, to push the emotional buttons of their viewers and keep them coming back for more rage-ohol.  It’s good for business.

A narrative of a hard-working President trying to push a reluctant legislature to reform its crooked ways, and pull back the teetering super-power from the abyss.  This was a great story for about a month, but not good for ratings.  So in the interest of hype, we saw little but Tea Party protests, largely unorganized rabble brought together by corporate funding, and promoted 24 hours per day as a “grass roots” movement.  This went on for months.  The next logical turn in the story was that this upsurge in populist activism, was reflective of a larger growing dissatisfaction and disaffection with Washington.

So, in an attempt to understand, we dig in a bit to the Tea Party movement.   Past the oddball rhetoric, that odious nativist messages and such, the common theme is “Government is running amok, deficits are running high and we need to turn the tide back.”  I have heard this time and again, on NPR, on MSNBC, on Fox, in the NY Times, and so on.

But what seems to have been forgotten is the following.  In the summer of 2008:

• The government had to take significant positions in FreddieMac and FannieMae to keep the mortgage giants from failing.
• Countrywide Financial, one of the largest private mortgage lenders in the country had failed.
• Mortgage lenders had been failing at a rate greater than 10 per month, something which dwarfed what happened during the S&L crisis in the 80s, and was up to 1929 standards.
• Huge investment bank Bear Stearns, about to shutter its doors forever on a Monday, was purchased for pennies by JP Morgan, at the critical urging of the Bush Administration Sec’y of the Treasury Hank Paulson and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke.
• Lehman Brothers went out of business.
• Household name / financial giant Merrill Lynch (and my own former employer 1989-1993), about to face the same fate as Lehman, was purchased by the Bank of America in a situation similar to that of Bear Stearns.
• One of the largest financial institutions in the world, AIG, was verging on collapse as well, thanks to estimated 40 trillion (yes, TRILLION) worth of credit default swaps it had to guarantee, when Paulson, Bernanke and NY Fed Chairman Tim Geithner worked out a plan to keep them afloat, and stave off the collapse of the entire global financial system.

If you are wondering what it would be like in the aftermath of a financial system failure, just think about what you would do if  you went to your bank’s ATM and could not withdraw anything.   This would persist for about 2 or 3 weeks, while the FDIC machinery kicked in to avail cash to Jane and Joe Consumer.  When the dust clears, though, you can see that the entire inter-bank transfer system is down.  Shipments stop moving because letters of credit are no longer valid, tractor trailers turned back from their destinations (whether Stop & Shop or your mall), companies having to shut down instantly to conserve cash as lines of credit relied upon for day to day operations are revoked.

And so on.

But this is the situation as it was in 2008.  And but for some timely actions from the Bush Administration’s Treasury Secretary, the Fed, and the current and currently demonized Secretary of the Treasury, we might still be in ruins.  Things are plenty bad now, but you need to imagine how close we came (and still are) to collapse.

It’s by now uniformly agreed (except in some hard-right circles) that what brought this one was that Wall Street could not restrain itself from its own greed, and launched an industry built, not on compensation of value, but on gambling against mortgage defaults, and taking enormous transactions fees in processing these bets. All of this possible because of financial deregulation (the Commodity Futures Modernization Act) passed during the 23rd hour of the Clinton Presidency, and the rest pursued aggressively by the Bush Administration.

Yet, the new populism thinks that LESS GOVERNMENT is somehow now the answer.   And this goes unchallenged by the media?  I don’t understand.  Less government than what?  We don’t really seem to have much of any right now.

I understand people are angry and some of these issues are very difficult to understand and explain, but instead of informing, what we get from the likes of Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly AND Chris Matthews, Arianna Huffington, Keith Olbermann (and to a lesser extent Rachel Maddow) is bloodsport, trifle, bread and circus.  Fanning the flames of righteous indignation, fiddling while it all burns around us.  But no real information.  Fact doesn’t seem to matter any more, just conjecture, vitriol and opinion.

Whether these outlets and personalities are actually driving public opinion may not be true, we don’t have any way of knowing.  But it seems to be having the effect of  changing the agenda, which is even worse.  Our representatives and our president, I do believe, want to listen to us, but instead, the corporate media is driving the agenda. They have created this Tea Party phenomenon, for ratings on the one had, for cover on the other, but this whole thing is insidious and dangerous to the health of our country.

When the media can launch its own activist group in support of a specific agenda, or in support of no agenda at all other than sabotage, we are all well and truly screwed.

I can guarantee you, this is not what the Framers of the Constitution had in mind.