White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said the media are partially responsible for the nasty rhetoric that is dominating political discourse. AP

POLITICO 44

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel on Monday night said the media are partially responsible for the nasty rhetoric that is dominating political discourse.

Emanuel said during an interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose that “everybody’s accountable … including the media” for the overheated language that was used during the health care debate and beyond.

“They play a role in exacerbating the sense that America's pulled apart, and it's not as pulled apart as being reported,” he said.

Emanuel conceded that anger in the country is running “deep” but suggested that economic factors drive the grass-roots resentment toward Washington as much as anything. 

“There's a lot of factors that go into that,” he said, “principally on the areas of the economic anxiety that's out there and the — we're in the middle of a severe economic transition.”

Emanuel also responded to speculation that has come from former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer and others that the White House knew ahead of time that the SEC was planning to file fraud charges against Goldman Sachs.

“Everybody at the White House found out like everybody else, when it hit the news,” he said. “Nobody at the White House knew anything ahead of anybody else.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0410/36079.html#ixzz0ll7t7hgZ