The MSM, the Left, and the Problem of Being RIGHT

By 'right' I mean correct.

It seems that being wrong will almost never harm your career in the MSM (mainstream media). However, being right, and being right early almost never helps, in fact, being right can really hurt you.

Case in point. CNBC's uber-annoying, I-wanna-cuddle-with-CEOs Maria Bartiromo appeared on CNBC today to 'debate' health insurance reform with Rep. Anthony Weiner. In the course of the interview he praised Medicare as a very popular 'public' insurance system in the US. Bartiromo then asked Rep. Weiner, "How come you don't use it [Medicare]? You don't have it. How come you don't have it?" Weiner is 44 years old.

Matt Yglesias has a great post about this very problem, that is the problem with being right and Left in America. Yglesias discusses a report from Dean Baker (Center for Economic and Policy Research) from 2002 which called a spade a spade, or in this case, a housing bubble a, well, housing bubble. And for his heroic prescience, does he get a new plush job and does he get hailed as a hero? Nope. He's just that nutty crank on the soap-box on the Left who says the sky is falling while everyone else says 'It's great beach weather!'

As Mr. Yglesias writes: 'if you start warning about something and then it doesn’t happen, and then you keep nagging people, and then you keep complaining about how nobody’s listening to you, you start getting dismissed as a crank. And when you’re proven right, you’re still that crank nobody wants to listen to. You don’t get hailed as a hero.'