So How Did the Media Get Taken By Paul Ryan?

     This is a question the media has asked itself a lot lately. Since Ryan become Romney's VP perhaps nothing has been more painful for the media that it's shattered illusions.

      Of course, there is major progress in that mainstream media now recognizes that Ryan is a hoax. However, the question is how did it happen-how did so many drink the Koolaid? One theory is the cluelessness of an insular Beltway press. Krugman questions this narrative:

     "Alec MacGillis has a long, interesting piece on the Paul Ryan phenomenon — on how Washington managed to convince itself that he was a Serious, Honest Conservative when he was nothing of the sort. There’s a lot of useful information in the piece. But I’d question MacGillis’s central thesis — namely, that Ryan was mainly exploiting the Beltway’s innumeracy."

      "The key tell comes when MacGillis gets a response from Bill Bixby of the Concord Coalition, which gave Ryan an award for fiscal responsibility in early 2011.:

Paul Ryan .. Bixby announced, had “earned his Fiscy Award really by being the first [congressman] in several years to step forward with a specific scorable budget plan that would actually solve the nation’s long-term structural deficits.”
There were two problems with this. First, Ryan’s plan, the “Roadmap for America’s Future,” wasn’t truly “scorable”—he had instead simply given the CBO estimates for future revenue and spending, prompting the organization to note that its analysis “does not represent a cost estimate.” The other problem was that, just a few weeks prior, but after the groups had decided to award a Fiscy to Ryan, he had rejected the recommendations of the Simpson-Bowles debt-reduction commission he had served on.

     "Bixby responds to the question about Bowles-Simpson — but not to the “scorable” thing, which is much more important and represents a clear error on his part."

     "And it’s not the kind of error Concord, or any of the other organizations behind the Fiscy, should have made. They know what CBO reports mean and how to read them; I can’t believe that their staff failed to notice that CBO was given a revenue number but no explanation of how that revenue number might be achieved."

     "So Bixby was either refusing to listen to his own staff, or just being dishonest, when he praised the Ryan plan. And either way it has to have been essentially political: he and people like him felt that they needed a Republican policy wonk to praise, so they invented one out of thin air."

     "And Ryan will continue to get kid gloves treatment for years, because the people responsible for this screwup will never admit their error."

     http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/concord-conned-etc/

     So Krugman sees the Beltway error as being much more about the vanity of the press and it's desire to be "fair"-as Ezra Klein has told us, the idea of being fair means criticizing and praising Republicans and Democrats more or less equally.

     Of course if one side is much more dishonest then you are essentially biased in their favor. It is good to see the media asking the right questions however.

     For an in depth look at the Ryan Phenomenon see the article Krugman references in the New Republic. The title says it all: How Ryan Convinced Washington of His Genius.

     http://www.tnr.com/print/article/politics/magazine/107242/how-paul-ryan-convinced-washington-his-genius