Journalistic Excess

In a story about the federal budget proposed by the Obama administration, the KC Star on Friday, February 27, 2009, used a lot of adjectives. The budget and related financial matters were referred to as: bloated, eye-popping, aggressive, unspecified, gargantuan, huge, large, significant, breathtaking, and expanding, to cite a several of the adjectives used. I guess the press thinks that the only way to interpret the President's budget proposal is to adopt the opposition's spin. Well, get over it. The country has about 300,000,000 people and who knows how many businesses and other organizations. I'd guess somewhere between 25,000,000 and 50,000,000 million. That's a lot of people and players. Is the budget supposed to get smaller. Nowhere in the paper's analytical piece, pawned off as news, was there any per capita comparative analysis or adjustments for inflation. Raw numbers, that sound big to people locked in a 60s mentality, were the order of the day. After splattering the front page of the paper with red ink stains and spots, I think they did enough to show that they can't cope with modern day amounts.