Yesterday the Bush administration dispatched Rep. Dan Burton to sell his constituents on the need to overhaul Social Security, particularly, of course, the virtues of private accounts. Only a few hundred people attended the event in Noblesville, Indiana, but it generated enough interest to make a local newscast — and exactly the kind of buzz the Bush administration was hoping for.
This morning WISH, the CBS affiliate in Indianapolis, delivered a report on Burton’s event without a single word of critical analysis. It’s short, so we’ll give you the full transcript.
WISH first hyped the coming segment around 6:27 a.m. as it cut to a commercial: “Indiana congressman Dan Burton is sounding the warning about the Social Security system as he talks to Hoosiers about the need for change.”
A few minutes later, “Daybreak” news anchor Dave Barras delivered the full report:
Congressman Dan Burton is carrying the president’s warning about Social Security back home to Indiana. He said the system cannot survive the way it is going right now. Last night Burton led a town hall meeting in Noblesville and addressed what Burton calls misinformation about what the president wants to do. Burton’s message is young people need a retirement system they can rely on and right now they don’t have one because in about 12 years, he says, the demands for benefits will be greater than the taxes collected to pay for them.
The camera then switched to Burton who told us, “[muffled audio] … Social Security now. Every day that we wait, every month, every month that we wait, the problem becomes worse. And the solution becomes more difficult to obtain.”
But that’s not all. Barras’ voice reminded us that, “Another Hoosier joined Burton on the panel. Alan Hubbard is an economic policy advisor for the president. Hubbard says the president feels very good about the progress he’s making, explaining the problem to the American people since launching his campaign in the State of the Union Address.”
WISH topped off the report with close-ups of a “Fix Social Security Now” button on one of the attendees and of a giant Social Security card stage prop layered with a graph that shows the projected cash deficit of Social Security beginning around 2020.
Quickly, let’s recap what the WISH morning news consumers took away from this report as they got ready for the day:
1. I should be alarmed.
2. Social Security faces a cash imbalance, any decade now.
3. We need to fix this imbalance now, or else.
4. Critics are trying to blur the president’s message with “misinformation,” but he is feeling “very good” about the progress he is making “explaining the problem.”
If you ask us, that reads awfully close to a GOP-issued list of talking points on Social Security — although WISH apparently missed the one that describes private accounts as the government just granting citizens control of their own money.
We don’t mean to suggest that WISH is on the White House payroll. We do mean to suggest that while most comment you see about coverage of the Social Security debate focuses on the New York Times, CNN or Fox News, there are hundreds of local news stations out there that grapple every day with the same sophisticated political propaganda machines that often bowl over the big boys — and, more often than not, they lose.
–Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.