At the Time Magazine website, reporter Michael Grunwald (the author of a book mentioned here Friday) laments bad reporting about the current budget negotiations:

It’s really amazing to see political reporters dutifully passing along Republican complaints that President Obama’s opening offer in the fiscal cliff talks is just a recycled version of his old plan, when those same reporters spent the last year dutifully passing along Republican complaints that Obama had no plan. It’s even more amazing to see them pass along Republican outrage that Obama isn’t cutting Medicare enough, in the same matter-of-fact tone they used during the campaign to pass along Republican outrage that Obama was cutting Medicare.

This isn’t just cognitive dissonance. It’s irresponsible reporting. Mainstream media outlets don’t want to look partisan, so they ignore the BS hidden in plain sight, the hypocrisy and dishonesty that defines the modern Republican Party. I’m old enough to remember when Republicans insisted that anyone who said they wanted to cut Medicare was a demagogue, because I’m more than three weeks old.

Grunwald goes on to make a number of interesting points, for example, that the candidate back in 2008 with the biggest stimulus proposal wasn’t Obama but Mitt Romney. He also points out in passing that the deficit is shrinking, and he could have added that the deficit as a fraction of the economy has gone down faster in the last three fiscal years than over any comparable period since the end of World War II, despite the fact that some people seem to have the opposite impression.

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