An Experiment in Understanding: Attempt 2

After my first ramble I felt it necessary to follow up with another ramble as quickly as I could muster. So here goes.

Now I will discuss the Fox News article linked in my previous post. I will re-link it here.

As I'm reading this article it feels so very much like hero worship. I'm going to see if I can find a better one (I'm pretty sure I looked earlier and was unsuccessful).

I will try this one instead. Hopefully there is much less "Boehner is amazing!" in this one.

The gist of this article is that this budget battle is only really just beginning. There are a lot of big decisions still to be made.

On first read this is a very clean-cut article making disclaimers for opinions when necessary and claiming as fact things that might be fact (I don't know. I haven't researched them). This clean-cut feeling might be due in part to the fact that this is from the Fox Business Network rather than the slop of hero worship that came from the main Fox News. So let's try to take a deeper look.

The first few paragraphs seem very straightforward. There are paragraphs like:

"The debate over this year's budget that took the U.S. government to within an hour of a shutdown is only a dress rehearsal for bigger spending clashes to come."

or

"That fight could last well into the 2012 campaign season, when President Barack Obama, one-third of the U.S. Senate and the entire House will face voters."

The writer mentions this being the largest domestic spending cut in US history and calls it a big win for Republicans since that's what they campaigned for in 2010. In my previous post I talked about how it sounded like Obama was trying to claim credit for this feat. This writer doesn't mention any Democrats happy with this. Fine. I don't know if it is as partisan as that. Maybe it is.

Next, the writer starts mentioning facts about the whole situation:

"[T]he size of that cut, $37.8 billion, is less than the amount the federal government spends in four days."

"Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner estimates the government could hit its current debt limit of $14.3 trillion by mid-May and has warned failure to raise it would be "catastrophic." Treasury could employ a variety of tricks to avoid defaulting for several weeks, but eventually it would run out of options."

"Raising the debt ceiling is always a politically difficult vote no matter the circumstances, but it will be a heavier lift for Republicans. Facing pressure from fiscally conservative Tea Party activists, they say they will not vote to raise the debt ceiling without significant concessions to slow government spending further."

The first paragraph I can see as having real problems is this one:

"Democrats have already promised to block the Republican proposal to give states control over the Medicaid health program for the poor and turn the Medicare health program for retirees into a voucher system."

This paragraph mentions the struggle in seemingly straightforward sentencing, but having read the CNN article we know that there is a different view on this. The author has just mentioned the Republican view on the matter. Democrats don't see this so simply. There is more to this issue.

This paragraph, however, I feel is quite nicely worded:

"Democrats also have criticized House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan's refusal to end tax breaks for wealthy oil companies or to propose other tax increases that many budget experts think are necessary to solve long-term fiscal woes."

The author states some main points of Paul Ryan's deal and the Democratic opposition to such and then mentions at the end that Democrats have very legitimate reasons to be concerned. "[M]any budget experts" are cited as being opposed to Paul Ryan's deal.

The author then finishes off with some details about Paul Ryan's ideas and then says that the House could vote on Ryan's deal as soon as "next week" which is, I guess, this week, or something (side note, did they vote on it?).

So, to wrap up, I don't think this article was written as sloppily as the CNN article, but it did take me biting off on a horribly written article on John Boehner to motivate me to find this article. Maybe for future analysis I'll try to wade through the rough articles rather than hunting for articles found elsewhere on the site.

Sorry if this Attempt 2 was a little rushed. I felt that it was important for me to get out another rant so that I could try to come across as not so much, "I hate CNN" and more like, "I hate shoddy news reporters." I'm trying hard to overcome my own political leaning. I'm a conservative with libertarian ideas and a constantly changing viewpoint on several key issues (read "Freakonomics" for an interesting view on abortion and refrence Utah's recent immigration law for a different view on illegal immigration: just some of the things I'm still working on in my own brain). Once again, this wasn't proofread. I apologize.

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