The Challenge of Understanding the Budget

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/04/26/970290/-The-threat-to-todays-seniors-in-the-Republican-Medicare-Medicaid-plan

The Daily Kos is an unabashedly partisan blog, but this diary by a member raises and important point only tangentially related to bias. The post makes a point about the ramifications of spending cuts to Medicare - a subject surrounded by confusion and misunderstanding. Here the point is about middle-class beneficiaries 55 and older, who are not directly affected in the cuts, but who the author claims would be seriously impacted by the privatization of the program. Although the credibility of the blog is certainly not a given, the point raised here makes it easy to see why this budget debate is so difficult for news outlets to cover. The unfortunate truth is that it's basically impossible to give it a fair and reasonably comprehensive coverage in few stories - it's just too complicated. In order to even begin to grasp the consequences, the public needs to really look at a range of sources, and decide which of the very different interpretations seems correct to them. Unfortunately, as we know, most of them won't bother.