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Yes, lets. Because I hadn't noticed the Greek austerity defense piece (until you pointed it out) but I certainly did notice that the overall slant of the SSDI piece was to portray SSDI as welfare.

Here's something else I noticed. The week after Planet Money's SSDI piece, the NYT did their own SSDI piece, also going to a town with a disproportionate number of people on SSDI. And found something entirely different. They didn't find under-educated people using SSDI as a way to make up for the loss of manufacturing jobs in America, they found a non-union workplace thumbing its nose at OSHA and ignoring its suppliers' own MSDS warnings, and resultingly crippling every single assembly line worker in as little as a year on the line.

This didn't surprise me, because I also read Nick Reding's Methland, and one of its primary findings was that every major meth epidemic in America can be traced back to a non-union workforce with poor ergonomics or other safety risks, no paid sick leave, and little or no health care; that the first people to bring huge amounts of meth to a town are injured workers who have to find some way to work through the pain if they want to keep their jobs. Earlier reporting found the same thing about opiate pill mills.

I see no evidence that Alternet's columnist is right in suggesting that Planet Money gets this wrong on purpose, no evidence that this is some kind of conspiracy to suck up to rich potential sponsors. Given Planet Money's willingness to go after various sacred cows (I should say, by the way, that I am a huge fan of the show) I assume that it's not. But it does say something about the biases of the show that, to Planet Money, given a choice between looking for evidence that American employers are crippling unusually high percentages of their workers through neglected safety measures combined with over-work or looking for evidence that somebody, however well meaning, is organizing mass welfare fraud, Planet Money's reporters went looking for the latter.