When John Boehner says "Everything is on the Table" to reduce the deficit, Television "News" replays the clip endlessly as a serious statement, without ever forcefully challenging Boehner on the fact that increasing taxes is NOT on Boehner's negotiating table tilted toward the Republicans' ultra-wealthy sponsors. The debate on Television becomes centered around how much to cut, and where.
This narrowing of the permissible debate by the MSM is a subject Bill Moyers addressed in an interview on the Tavis Smily show.
Tavis Smiley interview of Journalist Bill Moyers
Tavis: Let me ask you to set your modesty aside for just a second here. I want to ask whether or not you are concerned – and if so, to what degree – that there aren’t the kinds of voices. It’s not so much a question just about Bill Moyers as it is about the dearth and the paucity of voices on television, public television, commercial television, what have you, that are expressing points of view about the fragile nature of our democracy around these kinds of issues that you have laid out in this book.
Moyers: Television, including public television, rarely gives a venue to people who have refused to buy into the ruling ideology of Washington. The ruling ideology of Washington is we have two parties. They do their job; they do their job pretty well. The differences between them limit the terms of the debate. But we know that real change comes from outside the consensus. Real change comes from people making history, challenging history, dissenting, protesting, agitating, organizing.
Those voices that challenge the ruling ideology – two parties, the best of all worlds, do a pretty good job – those voices get constantly pushed back to the areas of the stage you can’t see or hear. You got voices like those on your show. You got them on Amy Goodman “Democracy Now!” and a few other places like that, but not as a steady presence in the public discourse. American TV is saturated with conservative views of the "ruling ideology".
Moyers comes back to this theme later in the interview.
Moyers: We have a relatively narrow spectrum even in public broadcasting so that many of our shows that are usually establishment figures, experts, top of the business journalists who are on, people who have forums. You rarely get the radical voice, the dissenting voice, the voice of the populace, the voice of the progressive, the voice of the libertarian, the voice of the radical.
You rarely get those because, again, journalism in America is organized around opinion from Washington, around the debate in Washington, and that debate is narrowly defined as whether the truth lies between a Republican opinion and a Democratic opinion, not from outside of that consensus.
Of course we've all seen how this works with the way Markos has been black listed from all of the Sunday Shows. Yet CNN felt free to hire the Republicans favorite smear fabricator Andrew Breitbart to CNN's inevitable embarrassment.
American Television helps push the debate into into narrower and narrower range of choices acceptable to our ruling elites.