Three somehow related stories of the day:
1. Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center is an important part of the machinery that has, for the most part, successfully intimidated the news media into adopting a right-wing slant. (I’ve faced mass mailings, concerted attacks on my university email, and so on.) But Jim Romenesko finds something interesting: Bozell doesn’t write his own columns or books, forcing a staffer to do it.
2. The Koch brothers have been running ads in Louisiana with distressed citizens facing ruination from Obamacare. But the people in the ads are all paid actors.
3. Best of all is the news from The Can Kicks Back, which is a Bowles-Simpson-run outfit that was supposed to be the youth arm of Fix the Debt. It has always been an astroturf operation, and aclumsy one at that, doing things like hiring dancers to stage fake flash mobs and placing identical ghostwritten articles in college newspapers. Now, The Can Kicks Back’s campaign against debt is running into trouble, because it’s, um, running out of money.
What these stories have in common is that they show how much of what passes for genuine expression of public concern is really just a bought and paid-for (or, in the case of The Can, not sufficiently paid-for) front for plutocratic priorities.
via:http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/faking-it/
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