NowThis props up partisan think tank as impartial commentator on Biden policy
August 2, 2022
In a new piece, NowThis presents a partisan Washington think tank as an independent commentator on the Inflation Reduction Act.
Of course, the Center for American Progress is not the sort of impartial source that should be used, alone and unchallenged, as to whether the Inflation Protection Act is a good idea.
Yes, we know that CAP is described as “non-partisan,” but that’s more to do with how the tax forms for donations are filled out than anything else. CAP tends to cheer anything that approaches the progressive end of Democratic Party law or policymaking. Everyone’s entitled to their political views, however odd they might be. But that’s not the sort of impartiality that leads to their being a suitable single source for how wondrous the progressive end of the Democratic Party plan or policymaking is at the beginning of an election campaign.
Yet this is exactly what NowThis has just used them as and that is, as the saying goes these days, problematic.
We can see CAP’s views on the act here. There is no deviation, not by a single word as far as we can see, from the Biden administration line on how wonderful this is all going to be. That would be fine for a campaign video, but for a piece of news reporting, it leaves something to be desired. Like, in fact, not being a campaign video.
NowThis runs articles, but its specialty is in videos that suit those short social media attention spans. Of which this is a good example, 1 minute 30” of an Inflation Act supporter telling us all how wonderful the Inflation Act is. It’s not news. It’s a campaign video.
Possibly a useful solution to all of this is that from now until November NowThis – and many other media outlets possibly – could just register as being part of the D campaign and be done with it. It’s unlikely to change what they show us after all.