Unhappy with the news coverage provided to Republicans and Tea Partiers during the debt-ceiling fight, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said on today’s Morning Joe that media has a “responsibility” not to “give equal time or equal balance to an absolutely absurd notion.” He was referring specifically to some Republican positions during the debt-ceiling debate.
After repeating the meme about how “the country was taken hostage” by House Republicans, Kerry complained that Democrats had to “save America from a default . . . and what we had was a group of people . . . who were actually arguing for a default.”
Kerry’s characterization of the Republican position isn’t really true. It has its basis in Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, telling conservative talk show host Laura Ingraham that “a lot” of the Republicans who were hesitant to sign on to his deal believed that a default would allow Republicans to get a Balanced Budget Amendment through the Senate and passed into law. But, and Kerry overlooked this point in his comments, Boehner repudiated that idea as a bad one in the same interview. “I don’t think that strategy works,” he said.
So, Kerry broad-brushed the Republican caucus en route to this nugget, which scolds the media for giving his Republican colleagues too much airtime.
Real Clear Politics pulled out the transcript:
“It doesn’t deserve the same credit as a legitimate idea about what you do. And the problem is everything is put into this tit-for-tat equal battle and America is losing any sense of what’s real, of who’s accountable, of who is not accountable, of who’s real, who isn’t, who’s serious, who isn’t?”
It’s not a bad point, taken on its own. The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney criticized the media for providing “false balance” just last week, explaining how reporters will quote two “sides” in order to appear objective.
But in Kerry’s mouth, in the context of the debt-ceiling fight, a legitimate critique of media turns into one Senator suggesting that the media do a better job of ignoring Members of Congress with whom he disagrees. What Kerry really wants is not for the media to exercise objective judgment, but to check with his office before publishing.
