COMMENTS: Forget the Fiscal Crisis--What About the Dozy Controler?
Last week, the federal budget was all the rage, headline fare as a policy dispute could be dramatized with shutdown deadlines and countdown clocks. That quarrel concerned $30bn or so. Now President Barack Obama makes a major speech, unveiling his plan to cut the projected size of the National Debt by $4tr before 2025. The speech was a rebuttal to last week's plan by House Republicans for a similar-sized overall reduction in the deficit with a radically different mixture of taxation and healthcare spending. Such talk of decades and trillions is apparently too abstract for headline fare. All three newscasts, including ABC with substitute anchor George Stephanopoulos, led instead with a sleeping air traffic controler in Reno and a nighttime medevac flight that had to land unsupervised, at its own risk. Everyone was safe and the patient survived. Yet it qualified as Story of the Day. There is just something about airplanes: yesterday no one was hurt in that runway collision at JFK Airport and it, too, was Story of the Day.
President Obama's speech was covered, lower down the rundown, by all three White House correspondents: Savannah Guthrie on NBC, Jake Tapper on ABC, Chip Reid on CBS. Back in February, the same three covered the White House's budget proposal, which offered a different fiscal vision for the next decade. Yet they all appear to have forgotten that document, since these contradictions were not considered worthy of note. Only two of the three Congressional correspondents--ABC's Jonathan Karl and CBS' Nancy Cordes--covered Rep Paul Ryan's speech unveiling the GOP plan last week. So, all in all, the network nightly newscasts do not treat such long-term fiscal pronouncements very seriously.
By contrast: check out this list of minor air-traffic-control mishaps over the years.
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