What Americans think about "big government"

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Steve Benen, who writes the Political Animal blog for the Washington Monthly, pointed the other day to an opinion polling question that probably doesn't get asked enough in an impartial way---and certainly the results of this question rarely emerge from the black hole of corporate newsrooms. The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll asks this of its respondents:

“I’m going to read you two statements about the role of government, and I’d like to know which one comes closer to your point of view: ‘Government should do more to solve problems and help meet the needs of people’ or ‘government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals.’”

If you click through to Benen's post you'll see the responses provided in this poll as graphed over time (1994 to the present). From the early Clinton years through 2007, the trend lines for both responses are clear, and track in opposite directions as you'd expect. I have no idea what might have happened starting in 2007 to ratfuck the trends, or why the stats today haven't reverted to their 2007 peaks (considering what the crash has done to employment and the safety net), but the basic reality is clear: a majority of Americans want government to do more to solve problems experienced by ordinary people.

I suppose the tangle of trend lines at the end of the record might make fodder for some informed speculation, but I'm just not feeling that well informed this pee em.

In my opinion, though, the significant datum here would seem to be the fact that we never hear a whisper by US corporate media (including NPR) about this curious fact that most Americans want the government to do more to solve the nation's problems.

All of us can have a good laugh about what Jon Stewart confronted Chris Wallace with on Fox News Sunday last weekend (i.e., that the Fox News Network is Lies, Inc.). But the "polite" corporate media are the most important perpetrators of misinformation about public affairs in the US. They do it by ignoring whole swathes of reality. I'll have some more examples in a few days because it's somewhat off-topic here.

(Incidentally, if you look at the Stewart clip at the second link in the previous graf, the apology he offers at the beginning was unnecessary: Politicfact "factfuct" him.)