Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

ah, prof, it's touching that you still think, in the face of all the contrary evidence that you yourself have adduced, that most journalists care about "getting it right."

Most journalists, like most people in other professions, care about "getting ahead." Noting uncomfortable truths about the emperor's new clothes is not a way for an aggressive young journalist to get ahead, regardless of what it did for woodward and bernstein 30 years ago....

I really don't understand why reporters are having such a hard time covering this campaign.

Me either professor. I heard Bush say Robert Rubin looked at the Kerry ecoonomic plan and said it wouldn't work. Today on Closing Bell, Maria Bartiromo asked Robert Rubin if he said that The answer, of course not.

I have never seen such lies like Bush and Cheney go unchallenged in the "mmainstream, lazy ass press' in my life. I do not know why the press takes Bush statements and reports them as fact. Must be GE, Disney, Fox, no truth in reporting.

The media sounds like they take their cue from that drug adict Limbaugh.

To say that Bush and Cheney lie like a rug would be to insult rugs.

Two questions here:

1. Are we being unduly harsh on reporters in general because of the poor efforts of some? I've been around plenty of bad professors, but I'm not screaming, "Why, oh why can't we have better universities?"

2. Let's assume the press corps is really that bad. Is this anything new? David Pearson wrote about the "media as lapdog" thirty years ago. His argument was that reporters will always be dependent on politicians, while politicians are not particularly dependent on the press. Thus reporters don't want to ruin their access by writing negative articles.

>

But you should.

Just to let everyone know, the analysis of the cost of Kerry's plans by the Lewin group are wildly inaccurate. Kenneth Thorpe of Emory, who also debunked the cost estimates of AEI, showed why. Here's the link: http://www.sph.emory.edu/hphpm.html

I hope all of my fellow Democrats use this in debunking the nonsense from the right.

me,

I had the same thought. Why in the world, even if the plan didn't work, would Rubin say something like that? He's not trying to sabotage Kerry, nor is he an idiot. And he has worked in Washington before.

So I just assumed he was lying. And guess what? He was! This is an example of Brad's rule in action.

Here's another question. Was news coverage ever really any good in the US? I mean, was there ever a golden age of journalism that existed? I'd propose that journalism is as crappy now as it was under Clinton's term. Before that, I can't compare.

What Howard said. Bob Somerby has talking for a long time about reporters "writing to script". He just recently talked about them getting phone calls from the boss -- the first time he's said this, I think.

A considerable number of reporters and opinion writers not only take a Republican point of view, but make exactly the points that the RNC wants made at any given time -- i.e., beyond having a point of view, they are coordinating their work with the RNC.

From a market perspective -- reporters trying to advance within the systems, media businesses trying to get the best return on their investments -- there's no problem with this. Large diversified companies are using their media outlets to keep their taxes low.

It's only when you impose non-market analyses on the situation -- ethics, professionalism, citizenship, truth -- that a problem can be seen. And since the media are just businesses, after all, what problem can there be? Maximizing, optimizing, satisficing, whatever you call it -- that's what they're doing.

Push for better reporting and analysis everywhere. But, for me the New Yotk Times is always a joy. They can always improve, but the paper is a joy from arts to international affairs.

Why, oh why?

1. We now have a Republican media.

2. Corporate America has shaped the Republican media through its various pressures.

3. Broadcast media has been threatened by the Bush Administration. Licenses. Print media has been threatened in other ways, including threats to access.

In a thread below, there some discussion about what to do outside the normal channels. An additional bullet point in the plan: Liberals and Democrats must boycott all media, with the exception of a few friendly outlets. No appearances, no discussion, no interviews, have bodyguards for all liberal candidates and celebrities kick Fox and the rest off the premises. If Kerry is elected, before the first question is asked in the first press conference, have Fox, the Washington Times and the rest of the jackels escorted from the White House.

They are the enemy.

Declare war. Finish it for good. And forever.

It's not reasonable -- nor desirable unless you want a fascist system -- to not have some organisation report the news raw. That is AP's raison d'etre and they do it very well. Without AP we would not have any reports of just what Bush said -- the evidence of the lies. If AP did what you want, they would just say, "Pres Bush today made a bunch of lies about Kerry which Kerry people rebutted." Of course the other side -- which is supported by nearly half of the American people, for better or worse -- would find such reporting unacceptable. I for one am happy there is AP to give us the raw news, or a fair summary of it, and leave the analysis for later or for others, to work from their raw material.

As economists, scientists and generally educated people who read (and produce) this blog, it's pretty shocking that you can't appreciate the supplier of the raw material, as distasteful as it is. As soon as we accept Brad's prescription for media coverage -- "One clear rule is all that's needed: assume as a rebuttable presumption that the Bush campaign is lying." -- we are on a really slippery slope.

"It's not reasonable -- nor desirable unless you want a fascist system -- to not have some organisation report the news raw."

But you miss the point. The "raw news" ought to include the fact that Bush lied. That's not a matter of opinion.

When two politicians make contrary statements about objective reality, the media ought to look behind the statements to the facts, and tell the public which politician is right.

"One clear rule is all that's needed: assume as a rebuttable presumption that the Bush campaign is lying."

YES, YES, YESSSSSS!!!!

(I'll have whatever you're having for dinner also, BTW... :-)

I finally figured out yesterday why our politics have become so polarized. It was lurking just below my consciousness all along, but it only just bubbled to the top.

You see, the polarization is not between Republicans and Democrats, nor between Liberals and Conservatives. It's between those who believe what Bush & Co say, and those who don't. It's a question of Faith. Facts and Reason have nothing at all to do with it. There is a large segment of the population that just will not accept that the President is lying (even though it's apparently the same faction who made such a fuss when they caught the previous President lying).

You see, our faction realize that all politicians tell lies sometimes -- that all humans tell lies sometimes. They don't. They apparently believe everything they say, themselves. Our faction is appalled at spending $25 million of public funds investigating our President's sex life. Their faction is apparently ready to spend billions of borrowed money to make their President's fantasies come true.

The rebuttal to Paulo's slippery slope is that journalists should always assume that *all* politicians are lying, and always look for external corroboration, or at least, report what's said as "unconfirmed".

Might lead to a less disgusting state of affairs eventually, if they could keep that up.

what is the 1% that Junior is not lying about?

Reporters = WHORES

thats why they have a hard time covering this campaign.

WHORES = reporters

If AP did what you want, they would just say, "Pres Bush today made a bunch of lies about Kerry which Kerry people rebutted."

Your problem is that you're still thinking under the he said / she said rubric. An actual article along the lines of what DeLong suggests would say

[Bush] said Kerry's proposed changes would put millions of people looking for health care into "a government program."

However, this statement is misleading, as Kerry's health plan would actually do X, Y, and Z.

Independent analysis by the Lewin Group and Factcheck.org confirm the misleading nature of Bush's claims

Rather than reporting what Bush says about Kerry's health plan, and then what Kerry says about Kerry's health plan, the reporter would actually review Kerry's actual health plan, using independent analysis where possible to verify his conclusions.

Your safe Online Pharmacy

Agrajag,
Should the reporter then say, "John Kerry said this about his own health plan but actually, according to XYZ, this is what really underpins it and its costs . . ."?

I don't think that every story of something that happened should carry through to all the analyses of what happened, why, etc. Brad's solution, which you follow, is that every basic factual story has to be reported with context and analysis. In this case, the story becomes about the health plan, and not about what Bush said.

This is a formulaic approach to news, sure, but there is a demand for the basics as well as a demand for the analysis and context. AP serves us well by giving both kinds of stories -- they have also issued stories taking down Bush' empty claims. There are different markets for different products (not everyone wants the kind of rice cooker Brad wants) and AP fills crucial niches (no, I'm not with AP). If you want all events, context and analysis in your news, don't read the wire reports, read magazines which get it all in one place. Just as it takes a little knowledge to digest econ statistics, it takes a little brain work to digest the news. And that's the way it should be.

Zizka,

Even if we accept that the news business is just a business, we readers intermediate between the press and advertisers at an important point. If we turn away from news outlets that are obviously slanting the news to please their corporate advertising clients, the revenue from those corporate clients will be lower than it otherwise would have been. (Joshua Marshall has taken up this idea.) If money is what determines what sort of news will be reported, then let's start manipulating some of the money.

Paulo,

No such thing as news in the raw. The choice to publish one statement verbatim, rather than another, is an editorial choice. The WP and NYT offered apologies to their readers for getting the illicit weapons story wrong, and in the process admitted to being White House mouthpieces, giving the White House a far greater weight than other sources of news. That led those papers to mislead their readers.

Objectivity is in the eye of the beholder, but surely, quoting non-partisan, expert testimony in the same piece as he-said-she-said would be a valuable contribution to readers understanding of issues. Non-partisan, expert testimony is, in itself, news, but there is far less coverage of testimony than of self-serving White House press releases. A reasonable place to cover expert views is right along side White House statements.

Beyond that, reporters should, I think, resort as much as possible to credible sources of information. At some point, letting the White House say whatever it wants, no matter how dishonest, is too lax even for a "first cut" news wire like AP.

On reflection I have to agree with Paulo that there is a place in journalism for stories that simply report "A says 2 + 2 is almost 5. B responds that 2 + 2 is actually more nearly 3", as well as a place for stories that add "An informal survey of experts in the field of arithmetic shows a strong consensus that 2 + 2 is very close to 4". While we my sometimes be disappointed when we read the former and want the latter, both types of reporting do exist.

I just don't think that there's any improvement in journalism that will help much when A says over and over that 2 + 2 is 17 and no matter how many security experts, b-school professors, retired military and diplomats write open letters, a huge segment of the population will continue to insist that 2 + 2 = 17 because A says so.

And thus after weeks and months of harangue by the esteemed professor have we now observed the official establishment of DeLong's Law in regards to the Bush Administration, ca. 2004: "Statements made by members of the Bush Adminstration should be assumed to be distortion, diversion or outright lie 90% of the time."

Discovering the 10% that are true is left as an exercise for the reader.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/13/business/13corptax.html?

How Tax Bill Gave Business More and More
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

WASHINGTON - Senator Charles E. Grassley needed every possible vote to pass his mammoth corporate tax bill. So he was more than willing to accept Zell Miller's plea on behalf of imported ceiling fans.

Senator Miller, the Georgia Democrat who became a Republican hero at the party's convention with his impassioned denunciation of Senator John Kerry, was determined to help Home Depot, the home-improvement chain based in Atlanta. And Home Depot, which sells about half of all ceiling fans in the United States, wanted an end to the tariff on imported fans, most of them from China.

On Monday, everybody involved was a winner. The Senate gave final approval to Mr. Grassley's bill, which would shower $137 billion in tax breaks into every corner of industry. While the bill's primary purpose is to bolster American manufacturers, it will also help Chinese ceiling-fan companies by eliminating $44 million in tariffs over the next two years. President Bush is expected to sign the bill into law shortly.

The Home Depot provision is just one tiny example of how the need to solve a narrow tax problem in 2002 gave birth to the biggest free-for-all in corporate lobbying that Congress has experienced in nearly 20 years.

The story began nearly three years ago, with an initial impetus simply to replace a $5 billion annual tax break for American exporters that the World Trade Organization had ruled was illegal. It ended this week with a 633-page behemoth that offers new tax giveaways to everyone from corporate titans like Boeing and Hewlett-Packard to an array of oil and gas producers, shopping mall developers, wine distributors, even restaurants. Many companies, like General Electric and Dell, are likely to end up with far more tax relief under the new bill than they had ever received from the old tax break. Some, like Exxon Mobil, never qualified for the old tax break at all but will enjoy tax savings now.

Even the "losers" came away with something. Movie executives are complaining that they were punished at the last minute, when House Republicans stripped out about $1 billion worth of tax credits, in part because the industry is closely identified with the Democratic Party. But they still held on to $336 million in tax breaks for movies made in areas with high unemployment.

Similarly, the final bill would also raise more than $60 billion by cracking down on major tax shelters and punishing companies that try to avoid American taxes by moving their headquarters outside the country. But in a gesture of mercy to a handful of oil service companies from Texas, House Republicans gave a green light to companies that moved offshore before March 4, 2003. The beneficiaries of that decision include the Noble Corporation, Weatherford International, Cooper Industries and Nabors Industries - all in or near the district of Tom DeLay, the House majority leader.

"It was a perfect storm for pork, in that they added all these provisions that were really important to lawmakers in an election year,'' said Keith Ashdown, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan public-interest group in Washington. "It will take days, if not months, to figure out everything that's in here.''

Within the Washington Beltway, the political logic was in many ways predictable. What was not predictable was how brazen and open the frenzy would ultimately become.

Simply read through the New York Times today, and there are as always a number of important and insightful articles. The need is to stay with a fine news source and push the source to improve, and not to neglect so much that is done well over the limited complaints. Broadcast network news lack insight or decided bias strikes me as a far more serious problem that our leading newspapers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/13/international/asia/13uprising.html?

China Crushes Peasant Protest, Turning 3 Friends Into Enemies
By JOSEPH KAHN

WANGYING, China - A decade ago, three friends shook hands, downed a bottle of rice wine and vowed to fight to the end against Communist Party officials who imposed illegal taxes and fees on them and their families.

Wang Junbin, an army veteran, was their strategist. Wang Hongchao, eager and voluble, rallied fellow villagers. Wang Xiangdong fearlessly confronted party bosses. The three peasants, who share the same surname but were bound only by their mission, endured a violent police crackdown, got tax refunds, and even won the right to govern their own village in the arid plains of northwestern Anhui Province.

Yet power, vanity and the guile of the Communist Party tore them apart. The authorities persuaded Wang Hongchao to testify against Wang Xiangdong in court, creating lasting animosity. Neither can abide Wang Junbin. He was lured away to become a party official and is today as much a target of protest as the bosses they once battled together.

Since China's peasantry began falling far behind the urban elite in the go-go 1990's, the countryside has been a font of unrest. It is the rare village, among the 700,000 across China, where residents are not protesting something - corruption, high taxes or fees, confiscated land, punitive birth-control policies.

Like thousands of peasant activists, the three Mr. Wangs raised funds, petitioned township, county, provincial and national officials, and got some redress.

But they were also typical in their failure to bring lasting change. They were susceptible to the carrots and sticks the Communist Party uses to keep order in the hinterland and to ensure that heroism is no more than a chapter in a tale of submission. China has not yet figured out how to make its capitalist-style economic growth egalitarian. It has become one of the developing world's most unequal societies.

Hu Jintao, China's president, party chief and military leader, has said he intends to make the economy work for those left behind. The government has promised to limit the financial burden imposed on peasants.

But leaders before him have said similar things, and Beijing's priorities have remained consistent.

The government uses China's 800 million farmers to provide grain, labor and capital for urban development. State banks take deposits in rural areas but make loans almost exclusively to richer ones. The authorities pour resources into prestigious urban projects, like the $1.24 billion Shanghai spent to build a state-of-the-art Formula One racetrack and play host to the European event through 2010.

Villages rarely get such help. All farm families, regardless of income, pay land and agriculture taxes as well as fees for social services, often exceeding what wealthier urban residents pay.

Partly as a result, the authoritarian government has learned to live with seething social discontent. It has become practiced at defusing confrontations that threaten one-party rule.

The village of Wangying shows how the party operates: the three Mr. Wangs led a sustained protest that was forcibly put down in April 1994. The ringleaders were then intimidated or tamed, and ultimately turned against one another.

The differences between the three former allies are so acute today that when a local party boss brought a libel suit against the authors of a best-selling book that featured the village, his star witness for the boss was Wang Junbin. Wang Xiangdong and Wang Hongchao defended the writers.

'There's no hope for our organization,' said Wang Hongchao, who stopped fighting for village rights and now collects scrap metal in the city of Hangzhou.

'It used to be that no matter where you were, you came back to help the village,' he said. 'Now it's every man for himself.'

Origins of an Uprising

Throughout Chinese history, peasants have been heavily taxed and lightly represented. Mao Zedong rode to power on the shoulders of a peasant army 55 years ago and promised a revolution. He eliminated the feudal landholding system. But he also embraced the Soviet model of rapid industrialization, keeping grain prices low and devoting capital to building factories.

When Deng Xiaoping undertook economic reforms 25 years ago, he began by dismantling collective farms and giving peasants the right to sell produce at market prices. Soybeans, spring onions, cabbage and corn, the staples of this village's patchwork of tiny plots, saw big price increases, and residents prospered.

The 1990's undermined those gains. Taxes soared even as the state ended most Maoist-style education and health benefits. Cities now impose a graduated income tax on well-off residents. But rural governments, made to finance themselves without state support, place a heavier burden on much poorer peasants. Here in Wangying, villagers say, a tax on cash crops was applied to everyone, even those who grew only grain. Fees were assessed to pay official salaries, fix roads, hold banquets, even cremate the dead. In the early 90's, Wang Hongchao refused to pay fees assessed for school renovations. 'They never touched the school,' he said. 'They just wanted money.' The authorities confiscated his television in retaliation.

DeLong writes, "One clear rule is all that's needed: assume as a rebuttable presumption that the Bush campaign is lying. That's all you need to do. And you will 99% of the time wind up getting the story right."

I appreciate the humor of this, of course. But it's clearly tongue-in-cheek. It suffers from the logical flaw of: says who? I'm sure blogs on the right make exactly the inverse claim (that Kerry lies 90% of the time).

The role of the press could be (as long as we are dreaming) to rigorously evaluate claims that can be impartially evaluated. The truth, in such cases, is not hard to discern. When the media gets these kinds of judgments wrong, it's usually because they are trying to "dumb down" their analysis to what they think their audience can grasp (which, over the long term, becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy).

But there are many claims that cannot be objectively verified at all, such as "my plan will balance the budget in four years." The media could say that such projections are based on a series of dubious assumptions--but ALL long-term economic projections are based on the same kinds of dubious assumptions. It's a lot trickier, and perhaps impossible, to sort out which set of assumptions is MORE dubious.

The underlying problem, which DeLong's tongue-in-cheek suggestion does nothing to alleviate, is that the truth is subtle and concerns shades of gray, not clear black-and-white fairy-tale divisions of good and evil. Americans seem to have lost whatever appreciation of nuance they may once have had, to our great peril.

There is nothing new about the right-wing domination of the media. In the 1930s and 1940s George Seldes, an ex-Chicago Tribune journalist, wrote a number of books -- even founded his own magazine "In Fact" -- to tell about the press overlords who were dictating the kind of coverage there papers would publish.

Anne, the New York Times remains a pretty good paper, but it's not the paper it once was. And while many fine journalists work at the times (Joe Kahn, whom you cite this morning, is an old acquaintance of mine and certainly doesn't go in the tank for anyone), none of them seem to be employed in the matter of covering politics and the presidential race.

People like Adam Nagourney and Katharine Seelye are ill-informed, lazy, and quite frankly, don't like either John Kerry or (in Seelye's case) Al Gore. The thumb-suckers that Bill Keller (presumably) assigns have, this season, also had a consistent theme, having something to do with the "phoniness" of John Kerry vs. the "authenticity" of George Bush, a description that is sadly at odds with reality. This is what some of us - well, me, in particular, i won't speak for anyone else - criticize the Times for (see the daily howler for in-depth cites of various Nagourney, Seelye, and related Times shoddy coverage of the election).

Parke, don't you understand that, according to Bush, the only legitimate place for "gray" is in accounting?

Why don't the Democrats run a commercial saying ..."Hi Republicans and un-decided voters Vice President Dick Cheney would like you to visit Factcheck.org to find out who is telling the truth in this campaign (show the debate moment), we at the Democratic party would like to encourage you to do so"

Howard

The case you argue is strong. I will consider anew. My sense was always the coverage is so broad there is a variable quality to the New York Times. Possibly I am not tough enough, for I do notice problems.

The major problem I have with all the coverage is that when they're not doing he said she said they're doing "here are the lies." What we REALLY need is reduced transcipts showing what's left after you line out all the distortions.

I don't understand how the Lewin Group's estimate that 97% of people will keep their health insurance refutes Bush's claim. Bush seems to imply that many people *without* coverage will be put into a government program. Isn't that what Kerry wants to do: give coverage to the uninsured?
Is everyone seeing so much red whenever Bush says anything that they don't even listen closely any more?

Lewin, at this late date, Bush gets no benefit of the doubt on anything. He hires skilled wordsmiths who love to make factually sorta legit claims in language that is intended to make another claim altogether.

So, for example, when Bush says the Kerry wants to "put" millions of people "looking" for healthcare, why shouldn't millions already covered be convinced that Kerry wants to nationalize health care? Hell, i'm "looking" for health care all the time; as a self-employed person, i pay an enormous amount for health insurance for my family, and even so, it doesn't cover every health-related expense that we have.

Now, if Bush wanted to specifically say, I object to John Kerry expanding Medicaid, then he could say that. But that wouldn't sound nearly as scary.

And when Bush adds into his comments, unnoted by the AP writer but part of the Bush coordinated attack on Kerry's health-care plans, that the government would "interfere" with your health-care decisions, that's complete crap, and merely an attempt to continue the scare tactic of "government takeover of the health-care system" that bush is, more broadly, employing.

Think about it this way: when Bush didn't want the "smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," he wasn't specifically saying that Saddam had an active nuclear weapons program, but he may as well have been....

Anne, conduct this experiment: over the remainder of the campaign, note every day what Adam Nagourney and Katharine Seelye in particular have to say (Seelye, for instance, tends to do live debate coverage) and write and compare it to your awareness of the world. Then ask yourself why they are still employed at the Times....

er, not Lewin, "uber." sorry for the brainlock.

..."Isn't that what Kerry wants to do: give coverage to the uninsured?"

Kerry is not advocating "giving" health insurance coverage to a large number of people. Rather, he suggests tax incentives to encourage employers to provide employees with coverage. Only for those suffering a long-term catastrophic illness, accidents, etc. would health care expenses be assumed by government. Making sure that all children have timely access to health care is a daunting task, and no plan that I am aware of addresses this problem in a realistic way.

Howard

Thank you for the comment!

Hmm. Kerry's plan (from his website) would put 20 million kids, 7 million of their parents, and 6 million other poor adults being paid for by the government for insurance. That's "millions" looking for insurance. This is a government program. That means millions of people in a "government program" is true. QED (Quite easily done).

He also would allow businesses and individuals to "opt in" to the Federal insurance program. To the extent that this program is successful, that is a major subsidy to companies providing Federal insurance - there are several insurers. Since businesses and individuals with relatively high costs will opt in ("adverse selection"), in essence the feds will be subsidizing them by spreading high per person costs over a pool of lower cost federal employees. FEHB also qualifies as a "government program", in that it is a program administered by the government. That it has private providers doesn't make it any less government-controlled - the US Government is those providers' customer.

This isn't Clinton's nationalized plan, but it is no lie to say that a lot of people will be put on the government dime. And it will cost far more than is "projected" by supporters. Government programs always do. Rule of thumb - take supporters' estimates - average. Take opponents estimates - average. Then take the average of both. Then multiply by 3. That gives a reasonable approximation of the cost of your typical government program.