Tag Archives: false equivalence

Austerity has lost its truthiness

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I googled "austerity," and this was the first image that appeared in the results. (Thanks, The Independent.)
I googled “austerity,” and this was the first image that appeared in the results. Seemed appropriate enough. (Thanks, The Independent.)

Back in February, The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein registered his frustration with the way that deficit reduction was covered in the media:

For reasons I’ve never quite understood, the rules of reportorial neutrality don’t apply when it comes to the deficit. On this one issue, reporters are permitted to openly cheer a particular set of highly controversial policy solutions. At Tuesday’s Playbook breakfast, for instance, Mike Allen, as a straightforward and fair a reporter as you’ll find, asked Simpson and Bowles whether they believed Obama would do “the right thing” on entitlements — with “the right thing” clearly meaning “cut entitlements.”

A few days earlier, Ron Fournier, the editor of the National Journal, wrote that President Obama was giving America “the shaft” by taking an increase in the Medicare age off the table. It is difficult to imagine him using similar language for a situation in which Republicans reject universal health care, or Democrats say no to a tax cut. Over the past couple of weeks, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough has reacted with evident astonishment to Paul Krugman’s argument that the long-term deficit is not a problem we need to solve right this second.

The secret to the special treatment that deficit reduction enjoys in Washington, I think, is that it’s a rare policy area that lends itself to pox-on-both-their-houses politics. “It’s such fun for me to irritate the AARP and Grover Norquist in equal measure,” Simpson told Allen. “It makes your life worthwhile.” It also makes deficit reduction a safe topic for otherwise strenuously nonpartisan figures to issue strong opinions on. After all, they can’t be accused of being partisan, as both parties are standing in the way!

Klein’s disappointment came, of course, only two months before the ideological underpinnings of austerity itself were subjected to the same remedy they proposed for American and European governments: death by a thousand cuts. And thus, two additional months later, the case for austerity has now been severely damaged.

Which is why yesterday’s article in The New York Times caught my eye. Regarding the newfound optimism of many economists in the expected growth rate of the American economy, reporter Nelson D. Schwarz provides some context:

“It’s better than it looked,” Mr. Cowen said. “Technological progress comes in batches and it’s just a little more rapid than it looked two years ago.” His next book, “Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation,” is due out in September.

Certainly, there are significant headwinds that will not abate anytime soon, including an aging population, government austerity, the worst income inequality in nearly a century and more than four million long-term unemployed workers.

Since when did “government austerity” become an accepted consensus target of criticism, so obviously detrimental to whatever economy it affects that even The New York Times feels safe citing it as a “significant headwind” in a news article?

Well, since mid-April, when the Reinhart-Rogoff paper was in large part dismantled. On a very surface-y level, this can be seen as progress — a sign that the dense fog of austerity has lifted and been replaced with a healthy level of skepticism. But far more concerning is the ease with which “straightforward and fair” reporting incorporates whatever dominant perspective holds sway in government offices at the time, as if it were an uncontested truth.

In other words, if austerity (or rapid deficit reduction, to use the example from Klein’s article) was right back in February — when even the news media’s straight reporting sections treated its efficacy as a foregone conclusion — then it can’t possibly be wrong (or a “significant headwind”) now.

Something’s got to give — and not just the viability of austerity as an economic policy. The entire foundation of traditional journalism — objective reporting — rests on the notion that some sort of absolute truth exists and that reporters are bound to it regardless of prevailing political ideologies. But when such a premise is shown to be so clearly false — as it is here with austerity — then the viability of objective reporting itself appears vanishingly low.

The New York Times’ credibility takes another blow

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The new New York Times public editor has already stepped in it, it would seem. From Margaret Sullivan’s column yesterday:

Readers are quick to cite examples. Several who wrote to me thought there was an element of false balance in a recent front-page article in The Times on the legal battles over allegations of voter fraud and vote suppression — hot topics that may affect the presidential race.

In his article, which led last Monday’s paper, the national reporter Ethan Bronner made every effort to provide balance. Some readers say the piece, in so doing, wrongly suggested that there was enough voter fraud to justify strict voter identification requirements — rules that some Democrats believe amount to vote suppression. Ben Somberg of the Center for Progressive Reform said The Times itself had established in multiple stories that there was little evidence of voter fraud.

“I hope it’s not The Times’s policy to move this matter back into the ‘he said she said’ realm,” he wrote.

The national editor, Sam Sifton, rejected the argument. “There’s a lot of reasonable disagreement on both sides,” he said. One side says there’s not significant voter fraud; the other side says there’s not significant voter suppression.

“It’s not our job to litigate it in the paper,” Mr. Sifton said. “We need to state what each side says.”

Mr. Bronner agreed. “Both sides have become very angry and very suspicious about the other,” he said. “The purpose of this story was to step back and look at both sides, to lay it out.” While he agreed that there was “no known evidence of in-person voter fraud,” and that could have been included in this story, “I don’t think that’s the core issue here.”

It’s shocking to read a national reporter so casually dismiss the central point of his own article:

In the last few weeks, nearly a dozen decisions in federal and state courts on early voting, provisional ballots and voter identification requirements have driven the rules in conflicting directions, some favoring Republicans demanding that voters show more identification to guard against fraud and others backing Democrats who want to make voting as easy as possible.

The most closely watched cases — in the swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania — will see court arguments again this week, with the Ohio dispute possibly headed for a request for emergency review by the Supreme Court.

But this is the New York Times, after all. Even a column ostensibly criticizing the use of false equivalence manages to boldly reassert the practice by the bottom of the page.

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