Mitt Romney's mendacity

When future historians study this election they will condemn the legacy media for failing to inform the voters. Big media is all about the horserace. In their quest for false balance and “above it all” neutrality, they just report what the candidates say. They rarely mention the reality, which is Mitt Romney has been shamelessly lying to the electorate for months.

Telling the truth is left to bloggers. Steve Benen has been tracking the rhetoric for weeks now, and Mitt Romney has told hundreds of lies on the campaign trail. You can access the whole list at the link., but let’s just look at one from Steve’s fourteenth post:

19. Romney, in the same speech, shared one of his new favorite talking points: “The number of new businesses started per year is down 100,000 a year under the Obama term.”

Actually, for those who take facts seriously, just last year, more than 540,000 new businesses were started each month — which is well above the levels seen before the Great Recession began.

This isn’t just some small deviation from the truth. It’s a whopper of a lie but the majority of Americans won’t know this, because the corporate media they rely on for information won’t tell them. The TV pundits make their money on creating controversy. So they don’t talk about the lies, they discuss whether the tactic of constant lying is going to win the race. This is why civil society is breaking down.