Tag Archives: media objectivity

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.

False equivalency and the White House: Obama becomes a media critic

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From the newly released New Republic interview with the president, Obama had some thoughts on the prevailing practices of today’s political media:

One of the biggest factors is going to be how the media shapes debates. If a Republican member of Congress is not punished on Fox News or by Rush Limbaugh for working with a Democrat on a bill of common interest, then you’ll see more of them doing it…

The same dynamic happens on the Democratic side. I think the difference is just that the more left-leaning media outlets recognize that compromise is not a dirty word. And I think at least leaders like myself—and I include Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in this—are willing to buck the more absolutist-wing elements in our party to try to get stuff done…

In fact, that’s one of the biggest problems we’ve got in how folks report about Washington right now, because I think journalists rightly value the appearance of impartiality and objectivity. And so the default position for reporting is to say, “A plague on both their houses.” On almost every issue, it’s, “Well, Democrats and Republicans can’t agree”—as opposed to looking at why is it that they can’t agree. Who exactly is preventing us from agreeing?

The media’s free pass to the Republican Party

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On Friday, the Huffington Post‘s Dan Froomkin posted an article on how the media whiffed on “the single biggest story of the 2012 campaign:”

But according to longtime political observers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, campaign coverage in 2012 was a particularly calamitous failure, almost entirely missing the single biggest story of the race: Namely, the radical right-wing, off-the-rails lurch of the Republican Party, both in terms of its agenda and its relationship to the truth.

Mann and Ornstein are two longtime centrist Washington fixtures who earlier this year dramatically rejected the strictures of false equivalency that bind so much of the capital’s media elite and publicly concluded that GOP leaders have become “ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

The 2012 campaign further proved their point, they both said in recent interviews. It also exposed how fabulists and liars can exploit the elite media’s fear of being seen as taking sides.

“The mainstream press really has such a difficult time trying to cope with asymmetry between the two parties’ agendas and connections to facts and truth,” said Mann, who has spent nearly three decades as a congressional scholar at the centrist Brookings Institution.

“I saw some journalists struggling to avoid the trap of balance and I knew they were struggling with it — and with their editors,” said Mann. “But in general, I think overall it was a pretty disappointing performance.”

“I can’t recall a campaign where I’ve seen more lying going on — and it wasn’t symmetric,” said Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who’s been tracking Congress with Mann since 1978. Democrats were hardly innocent, he said, “but it seemed pretty clear to me that the Republican campaign was just far more over the top.”

Lies from Republicans generally and standardbearer Mitt Romney in particular weren’t limited to the occasional TV ads, either; the party’s most central campaign principles — that federal spending doesn’t create jobs, that reducing taxes on the rich could create jobs and lower the deficit — willfully disregarded the truth.

“It’s the great unreported big story of American politics,” Ornstein said.

After banging around on the blogosphere over the weekend, Froomkin’s piece received renewed attention today, when the New York Times‘ public editor, Margaret Sullivan (most recently seen taking her own employer to task — twice — for its lack of coverage of the Bradley Manning trial), highlighted it:

I find Mr. Ornstein and Mr. Mann’s observations smart, provocative and on target in many, though not all, places.

I disagree, for example, that the move toward fact-checking has made the press’s performance worse. On that subject, I agree with The Times’s political editor, Richard Stevenson, who told me last September in a column I wrote on this subject that he saw the move toward “truth-squading” as “one of the most positive trends in journalism that I can remember.” But to take it one step further, I believe that fact-checking should be more integrated into every story and not treated as a separate entity off to the side.

And I think the two commentators fail to see the progress that The Times and other newspapers are making – away from false equivalence and toward stating established truths and challenging falsehoods whenever possible.

That progress, granted, isn’t happening fast enough or – more important — sweepingly enough. And their point of view ought to provoke some journalistic soul-searching.