Politico's love letter to a flawed book
April 21, 2009 12:29 pm ET by Jamison Foser
Under the header "Why Republicans are devouring one book," Politico hypes Amity Shlaes' The Forgotten Man, in which she "takes issue with the value of government intervention in a major economic crisis," so enthusiastically, you'd think they're getting a cut of the sales.
A quick word count of the quotes in the Politico article gives a pretty good indication of how one-sided it is:
211 words quote people (other than Shlaes) praising the book's content
12 words quote people (other than Shlaes) praising the book's sales
271 words quote Shlaes herself.
1 word ("revisionist") quotes a critic of the book
And Politico is hyping its article about Shlaes' book nearly as much as it is hyping the book itself: most of above-the-fold portion of the web site's front page is currently devoted to pushing the story.
Thank you Jamison for picking up on this!
Politico's site today is essentially a book promotion to drive sales for Shlaes' revisionist right-wing propaganda book.
It is shameful. It has a picture of the cover a nice write-up of it. I thought I was looking at Amazon.com for a moment at first.
Funny thing is, all Politico had to do was to talk to any number of historians and economists to blow huge holes in this Republican feel-good tale. It uses the stock market as a leading indicator and changes the way in which the gov't counted employment #s.
But that would be balanced journalism, which Politico is no fan of.
Let us also not forget that Shlaes was at the head of the SEC and led the way on DEREGULATION for years. So now you know where she is coming from here.
I don't know, they're probably just wasting a lot of paper, trying to advance their screed against Government, by way of a book... you have to market your message according to your audience, and their crowd is more into snappy phrases and other stuff that fits easily on a bumper sticker or a placard at a rally... a whole book would have to have a multitude of ideas in it (or else be a really short book, like Dr. Suess), and there's not a lot of ideas to their screed against Government...
Their screed is really just a single easy-to-say concept:
"We're against Government, unless we're the ones administering it... otherwise, we're against it."