Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Number Five is a rationalization, not a reason. I can, in my mind, redefine my sheep herding job so that it doesn't require that I herd sheep; but a shepard herds sheep.

A reporter covering the flat Earth convention is required to report the objective fact that the Earth is an oblate spheroid.

As Paul Krugman has said, if the Republicans were to claim that the earth is flat, the newspaper headline the next day would be, "Opinions of Shape of Earth Differ."

The problem is only temporary.

I'm confident that by January, the press will be aggressively 'debunking' Administration sources.

I've said it once and I'll say ti again. There has never been a more Stalinist operation in the WH, and the press toadies are either just clueless to the extent of it's reach, or more likley, they just don't care anymore. As long as you supply the needs for their lifestyles, they remain happy and will report the party line. Until a Dem is in office that is. Then they'll attack.

Unless there are commensurate spending cuts, it's better to say "tax shift to the future" or "tax deferment" rather than "tax relief". As Berkeley linguist George Lakoff says in this interview http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/04/01/int04003.html:

George Lakoff: The first thing to know about language is that it expresses ideas and thoughts. Every word is defined with respect to what cognitive scientists call a frame. A frame is a conceptual structure of a certain form. Let me give you an example. Suppose I say the word "relief." The word "relief" has a conceptual frame associated with it. Here’s the frame: In order to give someone relief, there has to be an affliction and an afflicted party -- somebody who’s harmed by this affliction -- and a reliever, somebody who gives relief to the afflicted party or takes away the harm or pain. That reliever is a hero. And if someone tries to stop the person giving relief from doing so, they’re a bad guy. They’re a villain. They want to keep the affliction ongoing. So when you use only one word, "relief," all of that information is called up. That is a simple conceptual frame.

Then there’s metaphorical thought. We all think metaphorically. When you add "tax" to "relief" to give you the term "tax relief," it says that taxation is an affliction. That’s a new metaphor. Then, using the metaphor, anyone who gets rid of the taxation -- the affliction -- is a hero, and anybody who tries to stop him is a bad guy.

On the first day that Bush came into office, the language completely changed coming out of the White House. The press releases all changed. One of the new expressions that came in was the term "tax relief." It evokes all of these things -- that taxation is an affliction that we have to get rid of, that it’s a heroic thing to do, that people who try to prevent this heroic thing are bad guys.

The press releases went out to all the TV stations, all the radio stations, all the newspapers -- and soon the media started using the term "tax relief." That puts a certain frame out there: a conservative frame, not a progressive frame. Soon a lot of people are using the term "tax relief," and, before you know it, Democrats start using the term "tax relief," and shooting themselves in the foot.

That’s a nice example of how language can evoke a way of understanding society, the world, economic policy, and so on, with just two words -- very, very simple. This happens all the time.

"David Rosenbaum believes that his professional role is to report the fact of what Josh Bolten said, rather than the opinion that what Josh Bolten said was factually and logically false."

Good, pithy summary of what's wrong with "objective" reporting.

Real GDP growth equal to 5% (mid-2003 to mid-2004) appears strong only if one forgets how far from full employment we were (and still are). And how did the 3% growth for 2004QII compare to White House forecasts?

I also believe that, in all the media, there are top-down right and right-center political biasses which the working media quickly figure out. Objectivity, neutrality, and (especially) jokey cynicism and shallowness are figleafs the working media use to conceal from themselves and others that they're working for a propaganda operation in the strict sense of that phrase (i.e., detailed top-down prescription of content, not just the weak sense that "all political discourse has a point of view").

The trivialization of news into light entertainment in order to get advertising dollars is consistent with the propaganda function. The two are very closely entwined -- one of the factors people talk about is the way advertising salesmen get promoted to management positions rather than news people or other "talent", and thereafter dictate content. Media advertising salemsmen are not a liberal group.

A test of my theory (i.e., that politics is an independent mover, and not just marketing) would be when liberal-slanted programs are discontinued even though they are popular. There is evidence that this does happen, especially in talk radio.

Brad DeLong for Minister of Information!

Uh, Brad...

I don't think the article's all that bad at all. First, Bolton's quote was followed by:

"But Democrats said the revised forecast for the 2004 fiscal year, still almost 20 percent higher than the record $375 billion deficit in the previous year, showed just how much the government's fiscal health had deteriorated under Mr. Bush.

"'They're claiming improvement?' said Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee. '"That is utterly preposterous.'"

Second, had Rosenbaum asked your hypothetical question, surely Bolton would've replied that the earlier projections were simply too conservative, and that the new estimates prove that the Bush administration's economic policies have been even more successful than anticipated. This would've been bullshit, of course, but that's what Bolton would've said.

Perhaps Rosenbaum did ask your question or something like it, then decided that the reponse wasn't worthy of inclusion in the article. Note that the article touches on some other highly relevant issues, and does so quite concisely. All in all, I suspect Rosenbaum (and/or his editors) did a pretty good job with the issues and the material. Or, at worst, I'd give 'em the benefit of a doubt.

Your "Why oh why" posts are usually on point, but not this time. IMO, you've treated Rosenbaum unfairly, and if I were him, I'd make a note of it.

2. David Rosenbaum knows that if he does anything other than parrot what Josh Bolten wishes him to parrot he will lose his ability to get administration-quotes-on-deadline, and his editors will be mad at him.
4. David Rosenbaum believes he has to be a little extra-friendly to the Bush administration or else the wingnuts on the right will come down heavily on his editors, and they'll come down heavily on him.

This, taken to its conclusion, is the American way (Bushco way) of government control of the media. Instead of men in dark suits showing up and "disappearing" David Rosenbaum and sending him off to a salt mine somewhere, his boss will simply fire him, relegating him to burger flipping, and replace him with someone who *will* publish the official government propaganda on time.

For most of our press, their jobs are instrumental to a greater goal: becoming as popular as Katie so that they too can take batting practice at Fenway with Ben Affleck, rather than telling their viewers anything at all about John Kerry's health care policy.

Shorter test:
True or False - David Rosenbaum is a media whore.

Changes in forecasts can also be the result of errors (deliberate or inadvertent) in previous estimates. Rosenbaum actually does Bush mouthpiece Bolten a disservice (by journalistic standards) in not permitting him to answer the proposed follow-on with a glowing account of the unlooked-for benefits of tax "relief" on the greatest economic engine in the history of human society, etc., etc. Perhaps such an answer would be baloney -- one suspects the January deficit number was deliberately overinflated, since so much else of that forecast was of make-it-up quality -- but running that one to ground really would be altogether too much like work.

Collender predicted this one weeks before it was released:

"By Stan Collender
NationalJournal.com
Tuesday, July 13, 2004

At some point over the next few weeks, the Office of Management and Budget will release the administration's midsession budget review and try to convince everyone the federal deficit is falling.

Don't believe them."

http://nationaljournal.com/members/buzz/2004/budget/071304.htm

As Paul Krugman has said, if the Republicans were to claim that the earth is flat, the newspaper headline the next day would be, "Opinions of Shape of Earth Differ."

Posted by Brad DeLong at July 31, 2004 09:32 PM
~~~

The joke -- or perhaps the humorless sense of persecution -- in this is of course the conceit that only "if the Republicans" say such a thing will the press fell obligated to come out with a knee-jerk weasel 'but some opinions may differ'...

~~~
New York Times, 5/20/97, in a science section article on environmental economics, William K. Stevens wrote:

"Virtually everyone agrees that without the natural world, the human economy, and indeed human life, could not exist."

Virtually?
~~~~~

I'm afraid such behavior is endemic to the press -- and not a sign of the NY Times's famous toadying to Republican causes in its science section.

You know, coming out of the ivory tower to very belatedly discover a univeral behavior that many others have been complaining about for *ages*, be so naively shocked by it, and then egotistically conclude that is aimed partisanly at *you*, is hardly the kind of close contact with reality that helps win elections.

It is quite amusing though to see here so much sudden wailing about how reporters and editors at the Times and like places have their own agendas, apart from being the dutiful public servants you beleive they should be (as per your all version of public service).

A note of consolation: Since Krugman and all have discovered this *so late* (though better late than never!) they can be confident that it has operated much less to their cost than to the cost of others who have been wailing about it for decades.

BTW, does anyone think that the Times' reporting on, say, the public schools, is any better? Or that its reporting on anything else is?

No, Jim: people haven't been complaining for ages about institutional flaws within the nature of reporting and journalism.

Right-wingers have been working the refs for ages with claims of "liberal bias" that fail every empirical test.

Jim Glass wrote, "It is quite amusing though to see here so much sudden wailing about how reporters and editors at the Times and like places have their own agendas, apart from being the dutiful public servants you beleive they should be (as per your all version of public service)."

You posted this garbage in another thread, too.

"...sudden wailing..."? The left has been pissing and moaning about this for decades.

And what Howard said.

What does Mr. Glass DO when he's "quite amused"? Inquiring minds want to know.

Off-topic, but interesting:

"The Speaker of the House will push for replacing the nation's current tax system with a national sales tax or a value added tax, Hill sources tell DRUDGE."

This line of thought is expressed in Hastert's new memoir (cleverly entitled "Speaker").

Last I looked, sales tax/VAT was about as regressive as you could get in forms of taxation, right? Comments?

This strike me as one of those times that an apt graphic is what was needed. One line showing the steady growth of the deficit, along with another showing the Bush administration"s estimates. Then the claim that Bush tax policies have been working better than expected would highlight that Bush policies had been expected to create an even more massive deterioration in the budget than has occurred - "we planned to mess things up even worse, but as it is, we only messed things up really badly."

Another point that needs to be made is that the White House estimate was so far off other estimates. The CBO estimate from around February, for instance, was a few tens of billions of dollars away from what the White House now expects. The article mentions that CBO will publish its own estimates in September, but fails to include the earlier estimate. Otherwise, the article does get the Conrad quote in, but that makes this look like the typical "he said - she said" partisan bickering, rather than actually pointing out the duplicity of the earlier figure. It does, however, manage to catch Bolton ignoring the impact of tax cuts on the deficit.

One wonders why Brad cannot seems to grasp the simple concept of underestimation... as in, "well, earlier we underestimated the impact that tax cuts would have on the deficit".

Why, oh why, can't we get smarter academics?

is wasn't an underestimate...it was a misunderestimate