Right-Wing Framing: Some Instances Thereof

The control exhibited by powerful conservative groups and individuals over most of our media is so pervasive, and of such long duration, that even people who should know better — such as Democratic politicians — have unwittingly been infected by it. Several recent examples have reminded me forcibly of this.

In the letters section attached to Joe Conason’s Salon article on Bill Clinton’s appearance at Davos on behalf of the Obama administration, there is a battle going on between Clinton/Conason critics and persons who remember the CoupGate period (aka The Hunting of the President) all too well. One letter writer left the following missive:

The anti-myth of Clinton

The letters section on this article shows why the right wing has so much power. On the front page of Salon is an article about how the right wing built up positive myths about Reagan. Most Americans, even liberals, believe many of those myths and see Reagan as a positive (or at least benign) political leader. In the same way, the right built up myths about Bill Clinton, by attacking him from the day he decided to run until … well, now. And most Americans, even liberals, have come to believe those myths. Everything Clinton did, or does, is filtered through the lens of those myths, until everything he does is wrong. Even his foundation, which has helped millions of people, is spun as a bad thing.

Until left wingers become more willing to accept people’s flaws and recognize greatness they are going to continue to lose. Obama will suffer the slings and arrows of the right, eventually, and will become as mythologically flawed a figure as Clinton or Carter or every other prominent liberal. Unless people are willing to stand up to the right.
— jebldmm

The same people who imbued our media and culture with right-wing frames of the Clintons (for instance, painting them as Communists when they would be right at home in the very Republican Cabinet of the very Republican Eisenhower) were and are also busy buffing the reputation of Ronald Reagan, who up until George W. Bush was our worst president ever, worse even than Nixon:

The myth of Ronald Reagan was already looming in the spring of 1997 — when a highly popular President Bill Clinton was launching his second-term, pre-Monica Lewinsky, and the Republican brand seemed at low ebb. But what neoconservative activist Grover Norquist and his allies proposed that spring was virtually unheard of — an active, mapped-out, audacious campaign to spread a distorted vision of Reagan’s legacy across America.

In a sense, some of the credit for triggering this may belong to those supposedly liberal editors at the New York Times, and their decision at the end of 1996 to publish that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. survey of the presidents. The below-average rating by the historians for Reagan, coming right on the heels of Clintons’ easy reelection victory, was a wake-up call for these people who came to Washington in the 1980s as the shock troops of a revolution and now saw everything slipping away. The first Reagan salvos came from the Heritage Foundation, the same conservative think tank that also had feted the 10th anniversary of the Reagan tax cut in 1991. After its initial article slamming the Times, the foundation’s magazine, Policy Review, came back in July 1997 with a second piece for its 20th anniversary issue: “Reagan Betrayed: Are Conservatives Fumbling His Legacy?”

That was just the start of the full-force Bogosity Barrage the conservatives and their media allies started shoving down our throats. That barrage is well-documented in a new book called Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future. The book is by Will Bunch, senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News and who, with his primo blog Attytood, is both one of the first and one of the best journalist bloggers working for an MSM outlet.

And now we have the Bush-Cheney Hagiography Machine kicking into high gear. Bleeargh.

And just to reinforce the point that right-wing frames dominate our discourse, check out these snippets from this AP piece by Calvin Woodward on Obama’s stimulus efforts, including the likely tempoary extension of COBRA (insurance coverage for the unemployed) benefits:

Altogether it’s a pricey lifeline: $40 billion to subsidize health insurance for the unemployed and more than twice that to support Medicaid.

Budget hawks, whose voices are practically lost in the wind these days, wonder whether the relief really will be temporary. They know it’s politically tough for the government to take something back once people get a taste of it.

Hello?! If budget hawks’ voice really were lost in the wind, we’d be talking about a $3 trillion stimulus package, not one less than a third that size. Paul Krugman is but one of the many economists arguing for much more stimulus than the current stimulus bill provides.