Watching Fox News and CNBC lately has been painful for Beezer, who was trained initially as a professional print journalist.

Start with CNBC, which bills itself as the world’s premier news channel for business.  While the channel does spend much of its time reporting actual business events, both in the US and around the world, the same people who are reporting spend a lot of time commentating.  It’s as if the journalist who pens a front page news story, also writes the day’s official editorial.

There’s an old adage in journalism.  The editorial writer has an audience of one: The Publisher.  In professional journalism the two writers are kept separate and the need for such a distinction is understood.

When the reporter melds with the editorial writer, you get bad journalism.  Which means you get poor, honest reporting of the facts.  Which means, inevitably, the audience is fed inaccurate, or at minimum, unbalanced, reporting of what’s truly going on.  Editorial writers will subsume facts that don’t support the ideas of the publisher, and highlight those that do.  Journalist are supposed to draw attention to facts that may be inconvenient to one or both sides of a story. 

Journalists do have opinions, of course.  But professional journalists take a sort of grim pleasure in playing the devil’s advocate, even if they agree strongly with the side of a debate that they discomfit with their questions.  They must do this, because not doing so invariably leaves important information in the dark, unseen by the viewer.

Journalists, in a sense, are the world’s referees.  They are supposed to be as unbiased as possible, trained in the art of writing clearly, and knowledgeable enough to challenge questionable assertions by one side or another debating an issue.

Exhibit one for CNBC would be Larry Kudlow.  An economist with experience on Wall Street, Kudlow is much more commentator than journalist.  The facade of honest reporting crumbles almost immediately when Kudlow is at the desk.  Kudlow commented today that “Republicans were put on the earth to cut taxes.”  Which is fine to say if you preface the remark by noting that you are writing an editorial.  But CNBC exists to no small degree based upon the audience’s assumption they’re getting an honest recitation of the facts.    Of course CNBC may exist to get Kudlow’s particularly misogynist form of economics into the mainstream of American thought.

Guests on Kudlow’s show who might knowledgeably present a different opinion appear as foils only.  If they start to make sense (and most do because they are professionals in the area to which they speak), Kudlow waste no time interrupting them, and if that isn’t immediately successful in shutting them up, he literally hollers over them so the audience can barely tell what’s being said by anyone, including Kudlow.  As journalism, as a tool for honest reporting, Kudlow’s show is a total waste of time.  As a platform for espousing Ayn Randian,  conservative economics, it is quite good.

To make matters worse, every segment of the CNBC channel is dominated almost exclusively by Kudlow clones.  They don’t have his chutzpah and are more polite, but given the opportunity they will trot out what amounts to the Kudlow editorial line (the opinion of the publishers).

Experience tells Beezer to be wary of the reportage on CNBC.  People so openly ideological are bound to latch onto facts that might satisfy their preconceptions, but will be relatively unimportant in helping inform the audience about what’s truly going on out in the business world.

Fox news suffers from some of the same ills.  This news channel started out asserting it was going to be “fair and balanced.”  The implication, one assumes, was that the other news channels weren’t fair and balanced. 

That’s possible.  TV journalism has always been held in low esteem by print journalists.  Most TV stories are simply rehashes of a print journalist story.  An “exclusive” for TV is getting to a newsmaker first “live” where the newsmaker repeats what he’s already said, normally many times, in print.

Fox seems to be constructed, instead of fair and balanced, as a counterbalance to its perception of the liberal bias at the other news channels.   Instead of truly being “fair and balanced,” Fox is the conservative counterweight to other news channels.  Here again, honest reporting is tossed in the dustbin as a result. 

For CNBC and Fox, both quite conservative news organizations, it’s partisan debate in lieu of accurate and unbiased reporting.  Sort of like the US Senate, which is partisan debate instead of sensible leadership and legislation.  Under these circumstances the first victim will be honest fact exposition and truthful news journalism.  The second victim will be the audience, who will inevitably end up being ill informed.

Contrast these two conservative channels with MSNBC.  From an editorial perspective, MSNBC is liberal compared to Fox or CNBC.  Other than that bias distinction, there is another important one where MSNBC separates itself from the other two:  MSNBC still maintains the distinction between its journalists and its commentators.  It may be biased, but it clearly identifies it’s biases as coming from “commentators” not journalists.

If you want real business reporting you’ll have to get Bloomburg, which not only does a more thorough job than does CNBC, but also has an extensive reporting organization with desks around the world.  It’s quite a delight early in the morning to hear journalists from around the world explaining their particular geographic area.   And nary a Kudlow, or Kudlow wannabee in sight.  Refreshing, and more informative.

As for Fox news, I have no clue where one can go for respite.  If Fox is correct and everyone else is liberally biased, then there is no alternative to get truly balanced reporting.  Maybe you can watch Public television and Fox to get a balanced mix.  Like mixing oil and vinegar, with a few spices, to get a tasty salad dressing.

I would like to point out one TV show, Fareed Zakaria’s CNN show ”GPS” on Sunday, as a notable exception to this sorry state of affairs.   As I’ve written previously, Zakaria is refreshingly well informed, and fearless in his questioning–no matter one’s bias.  If you want to see how a good journalist works, watch Zakaria.

It would be nice to get a non business focused news channel equivalent to Bloomburg on business.  But such is not the case, at least it seems to this writer.

The real antidote is to read.  Despite the sorry state of financial affairs in the print news business, there’s still terrific journalism being written.   The New York Times is the unquestioned leader in this field.  The New York Times, a generalist newspaper, has become so good at business analysis that many believe it to be superior to that of the Wall Street Journal.  And there’s numerous general and specialist magazines that regularly churn out great news and analysis.

It’s a lot of work, and costs some money.  But reading may be the only alternative available to the sorry state of reporting by big media, particularly television.

In my previous post I said that Fareed Zakaria’s CNN newshour show called GPS may be the best such show on television today. 

In it I said Zakaria appears to be more liberal than conservative, but that is an appearance.  It depends upon the subject.  What follows is an interview of Zakaria where he discusses budget deficits and the problems they present Congress.

New York (CNN) — The solutions to America’s long-term budget deficits are surprisingly simple, but they’re politically unthinkable in today’s Washington, says analyst Fareed Zakaria.

America’s failure to deal with its growing budget deficit is hurting its image internationally, according to Zakaria. President Obama proposed a $3.8 trillion budget Monday, projecting a deficit of more than $1.5 trillion this year and nearly $1.3 trillion for the 2011 budget year.

Zakaria, author and host of CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria: GPS,” spoke to CNN Wednesday.

CNN: So the president released his budget this week, projecting deficits almost as far as the eye can see. What do you make of it? 

Zakaria: The real problem is not the current deficits that the president has projected. These deficits are to a large extent inescapable because of the financial emergency we find ourselves in, the rescue of the financial system, the stimulus package to jump-start the American economy. But it’s worth understanding why this gets us to 10 percent of GDP, the worst deficit since World War II.

And it is because, as the president points out, the budget was broken in the first place. It was broken by three decisions made during the Bush administration.

The first was to have massive tax cuts, which was a decision made in the wake of the Clinton surpluses.

The second decision was to have a massive new entitlement program — prescription drugs for the elderly — which took the fastest growing part of the American population and joined it to the fastest-rising costs in American health care, which is prescription drugs. It was therefore a marriage made in budgetary hell.

And the third, of course, was to have two wars that were going to be funded without any tax increases, the first time in modern American history that that decision was made. … A partial exception was Vietnam, which produced an economic catastrophe in the 1970s.

And then you add to it the fact that we were in a financial and economic crisis and needed to spend money to get out of it, and you have the current budget problem.

CNN: Right now the United States has a triple-A credit rating and the dollar is the reserve currency for the world. Do you think America’s financial stability is threatened in the short term?

Zakaria: Not in the short term. These are understandable choices America has to make. The entire industrialized world is facing very similar budget deficits. We have probably five years to try to bring our budget into some kind of manageable situation. And if we can’t do it within five years, it suggests two things. One is that the trends at that point become so deep that fixing them at that point becomes very difficult. And the second thing is that it becomes a signal to the world that we really cannot get control of our budget. And at that point, I do think that America’s reputation, its credibility, its ability to borrow vast amounts of money all will come into jeopardy.

CNN: Do you think that President Obama should have taken more dramatic steps to curtail spending?

Zakaria: If he were to cut spending at this point, the economy would quite likely go into a second recession, a double-dip, and then frankly everything collapses. If you don’t have growth, you have no prospect of getting out of this budgetary situation. … But he must in a year begin really to address the serious issues that make up the budget crisis that we have.

The most significant one is health care costs. … Obama’s health care plan, while it has some cost control measures, is mostly about expansion and adding to the costs. … There has to be a much, much more serious focus on costs.

The second is a number of sacred cows in the federal budget which are very large but which frankly make no sense. We have a $250 billion a year hole in the federal budget because employers are given a tax deduction for health care plans. This is actually bad for health care, because it is one of the factors that contributes to these out of control costs, because it’s an invitation to have inflation in the system.

CNN: Are there other large “sacred” budget items?

Zakaria: Another is the deduction of mortgage interest, which is taken in America as some kind of great measure that has enabled Americans to own homes, whereas we have the same rate of home ownership as Britain and Canada, neither of which have interest deductions for their home mortgages.

What it is really is a subsidy for homeowners to take on debt. … We take on more debt than people in other countries and we can see that has been part of the distortion of the market that has produced the financial crisis that we’ve just gone through.

That deduction is a hundred billion dollars. When you hear people talking about freezing this or that federal program, there you’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars, occasionally a billion dollars. But the real big money is in all these middle class entitlements that are regarded as sacred cows.

And the third part is taxes. You’re not going to bring the budget into balance unless you talk about tax increases. The only real question is what kind of tax increases. If we were to have a modest value added tax, the kind we have in Europe, it would probably raise $150-$250 billion a year. It would discourage excessive consumption, it would encourage savings. …

CNN: So if the solutions are so simple, why aren’t they happening?

Zakaria: If you take those three things — health care, middle class entitlements and taxes — we have effectively solved America’s budget crisis. So the good news here is that we have a $14 trillion economy.

There’s more than enough money to have a very substantial federal budget, moderate taxes (we are still at the low end of the industrialized world in terms of taxes as a percentage of GDP). So it really is worth thinking about how strange it is, that a fairly sensible set of discreet measures could put us back into a situation where we would be the envy of the world in terms of our fiscal condition.

The steps I outlined are economically simple and sensible and yet they’re political dynamite.

If we were to raise the retirement age on Social Security, modestly and on a sliding scale so that it was phased in. If we were to trim the benefits very slightly … the program would be solvent for the next 75 years. And yet think about it. That simple commonsensical fix is politically absolutely impossible in Washington today.

CNN: Why do you think that is?

Zakaria: Because we have a political structure in Washington today, that if one side proposes any solution to these problems, the other side does not ask itself: How can we have a compromise that solves this problem?

Instead they think: How can we demagogue this issue to fundraise, to win votes, to scare people, to polarize the political climate and gain advantage from it? It’s almost that the entire strategy now is how can we take any proposal that anyone makes and turn it into a fundraising opportunity for our extreme wing.

And if you do that, you’re never going to actually solve the problems of the country because every proposal can be demagogued.

CNN: You just came back from Davos. What’s the view of world leaders of this American budget problem?

Zakaria: There is great unease not just about the numbers … the real unease is about the sense that Washington is no longer working, that you cannot count on the United States to be able to make hard decisions, to sort its own internal affairs out. One European CEO said to me, what worries us more than anything else is that problems you’re facing now are the same problems you were facing 10 or 15 years ago.

They don’t seem to go away. In other words, we keep kicking the can down the road.

Journalist Fareed Zakaria is the host of a one hour interview show on CNN which comes on at 10am Sundays, with a repeat showing the same day at 1pm.  Called GPS (global public square) it may be the most informative news hour on American television today.

Zakaria was born in Mumbai, India in 1964 but has become a naturalized US citizen.  He is a graduate of Princeton and received a Phd in Political Science from Harvard.  He is Muslim.

As an interviewer, Zakaria is fearless.  And he’s hard to pin down as to his ideology.  Having watched him the past several months, Beezer believes Zakaria is more liberal than conservative, but he has strong conservative tendencies.

As an example, Zakaria pointed out that when both former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan were asked whether the Bush tax cuts of 2003 should be allowed to expire, they responded that raising taxes would not be a good idea right now considering the recession.

How, Zakaria asked, will the government stop running huge deficits?  Particularly when one realizes those tax cuts are the primary culprit in creating the “dark hole” of long term deficits created under Bush.  If Paulson and Greenspan, neither of whom are now employed by government or running for political office, cannot bring themselves to restore the tax rates under Clinton, how can can politicians ever gain the courage to do so, Zakaria asks?   Particularly if the only alternative is to slash middle class entitlements–an action considered politically impossible.

Today’s show featured former Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker.  Under questioning by Zakaria, Volcker said that his greatest concern for the future of the United States is the breakdown in the ability to govern.  He said it was the worst he’s seen in more than 40 years of government involvement.

As an example of something he’s never witnessed before, Volcker pointed out that the Senate has held up critical government appointments simply for political purposes.  These are non controversial appointments, Volcker noted, which have been thoroughly vetted.

Most recently GOP Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama has held up 70 government appointments to the Obama administration because he wants some $40 billion in defense contracts channeled to Alabama based facilities.  Volcker is too polite to be specific on a nationally televised show, but Shelby’s actions are what he’s referring to. 

And this after Senate Democrat Ben Nelson decided to vote for health reform only after gaining a concession where Nebraska wouldn’t have to pay the 2.2% share of Medicaid costs that other states would pay.  And Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu needed $100 million in low income assistance for her state before she would support national health care reform.

Given the public outrage over these shenanigans it should not be surprising that health care reform foundered and financial regulatory reform (favored by Volcker) seems to be foundering as well.

Unlike the old days when back room wheeling and dealing were the lifeblood of compromise, today’s internet doesn’t easily allow for this type of “compromise.”  Those days are gone forever.  Washington needs to put the national public interest first over pork barrel trading for votes, but this kind of principled governance will have to be forced on Congress in particular.

Right now it appears the Democrats are bearing the brunt of the public’s anger.  But will the GOP tactic of total intransigence be successful in the end?  Sooner or later, the GOP will have to respond in detail what they want.  If they don’t come up with believable proposals, the internet will trash them.  And the public at large will respond in kind.

The days of a sleepy media are over.  The back room deals become public thanks to a militant internet.  Legislation as sausage making is probably over for good.  If the old dogs in Congress can’t learn some new tricks, the next Congressional elections are likely to cut very hard on incumbents of both parties.