One of the clearest signals of bias in the press comes in the adjectives and adverbs the reporters and editors hurl. At the end of a New York Times "news" article about a party-line 3-2 vote on hiring a lawyer for a staff job at the Federal Trade Commission comes this paragraph:
Mr. Smith's selection comes at a time of drastic deregulation of financial services — especially enforcement of laws meant to protect poor people — led by Mick Mulvaney, the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In recent weeks, Mr. Mulvaney has scaled back the bureau's investigations into student loan abuses and payday lenders while calling for the elimination of an online database of complaints against banks.
"Drastic"? My authoritative Webster's Second Unabridged dictionary defines it as "acting with force; severe; harsh; extreme; having a violent effect."
The news that financial services have been subject to "drastic deregulation" has got to come as surprising news to the bankers and brokers who spend countless hours complying with regulations and investigations and oversight from places such as Democratic state attorneys general and banking commissioners, the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, FINRA, the FDIC, the National Credit Union Administration, the U.S. Attorneys Offices, the Treasury Department, and various Senate and House committees and offices. Mr. Mulvaney's efforts to keep the BCFP within its legal mandate, while welcome, hardly qualify as "drastic" within the context of all that other regulation, much of which is implemented by nonpartisan, or actually by ideologically left-leaning, career civil servants.
As for the reference to "laws meant to protect poor people," that's a classic left-wing formulation that emphasizes the intent of the legislature — "protect poor people" — rather than any actual results. A lot of these laws mean to "protect poor people" wind up hurting them instead.
