Fox "News"

On Monday, the TV in my hotel room came on mysteriously. (Some earlier guest had programmed it to function as an alarm clock.) Fox News was on, and the cheerful bubbleheads with too many teeth offered the results of a recent poll. Seems that most Americans think the financial crisis is the result of debt. Most also think that private sector spending is the way out. And fully half think that the country is drifting away from capitalism and toward socialism.

So what's the message? Start with debt. We can agree that it's a problem. But how did we get into the debt mess? A big part of the answer is that lenders were doing crazy things that any sane system of regulation would have stopped them from doing. I'm guessing Fox would rather not have you think very hard about that. (I heard recently that there's a new slogan going around the American Banker's Association: innovate, don't regulate. Hmm... didn't "innovation" have a lot to do with the mess we've ended up in?)

On to private sector spending. If most people think this is the solution, then most people simply don't understand what's going on. We're in a liquidity crisis. Credit has dried up; banks aren't lending. Businesses aren't in a position to do the kind of spending it would take to turn things around. And there's no reason to think that consumers are either. The point about government stimulus is that in situations like the one we're in, the government is the only place the money can come from. But I don't think Fox wants you to think about that either.

And then there's the socialism thing. There's a small semblance of truth here: at least in the short run, government will end up owning more stuff that's usually part of the private sector. Call it socialism if you like. But if the alternative is a prolonged recession, then worrying about the label seems pretty pointless -- unless you're Fox. Because they get to take advantage of all the bad associations of the word "socialism" without having to talk about the real issues.

Someone might say: Fox was just reporting. They were just telling us what people thought. But that overlooks the question of why they asked what they did at all, and why they thought it was worth reporting in the first place.