THURSDAY, JUNE 30, 2011
Our fund-raising drive nears its end/Tomorrow is for history: Our non-annual fund-raising drive its nearing its end. If you want to beat the weekend crowds, we’ll suggest that you simply click this.
Tomorrow, the nation moves toward the fourth of July. For your weekend erudition, we’ll give you another dose of American history—the kind of history good boys and girls all agree we should never discuss.
Easy to be played: Good lord. It’s easy to get our highest journos to fall for semantic sleight of hand.
(As a general principle, this takes us back to the founding of THE HOWLER—back to the days when Haley Barbour convinced the mainstream press corps that no one was trying to “cut” Medicare—that the vile Bill Clinton was lying again when he used that traditional language. Links below.)
Our journalists aren’t skillful with their semantics! Consider a passage from Mark Landler’s front-page report in today’s New York Times. In our hard-copy Times, this is Landler’s bizarre account of those debt ceiling talks:
LANDLER (6/30/11): On Monday, [Obama] took over stalled talks led by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., meeting with Senate Republicans and Democrats, and on Wednesday afternoon he met with the Democrats.
So far, the president’s involvement seems mainly to have dramatized the gulf between the White House and the Republicans on fiscal priorities.
By all accounts, the round of negotiations steered by Mr. Biden made significant progress in identifying spending cuts, like the Pentagon budget, and revenue-generating items, like increased pension contributions by federal workers. But with the Aug. 2 deadline looming for the expiration of the government’s borrowing authority, the partisan maneuvering on both sides has increased.
You’re right: “The Pentagon budget” isn’t “a spending cut. (Although it could be the source of a cut.) But consider the remarkable claim that “increased pension contributions by federal workers” should be seen as a “revenue-generating item.”
We’d have to say that’s just incredible.
On-line, that highlighted passage has been cleaned up. The purported examples have been deep-sixed. Readers are only told this:
LANDLER ON-LINE: By all accounts, the round of negotiations steered by Mr. Biden made significant progress in identifying spending cuts and revenue-generating items. But with the Aug. 2 deadline looming for the expiration of the government’s borrowing authority, the partisan maneuvering on both sides has increased.
By itself, that highlighted passage is quite remarkable—and quite Republican-friendly. Surely, many readers will be surprised to read that the two parties have been able to agree on “revenue-generating items.” The whole complaint about the GOP has involved its refusal to consider new revenues. In that passage, we are told that, “by all accounts,” the two parties have agreed on such items.
What could those items possibly be? For ourselves, we would have had no idea if we read that on-line account. But in our hard-copy Times, Landler actually told us. The GOP has agreed to such “revenue-generating measures” as this: Federal workers will have to pay for a larger share of their pensions!
That may be a perfectly good idea, but it takes a very gentle lamb to buy the semantic claim that this would be a “revenue-generating item” rather than a “spending cut.” Presumably, some Republican got Landler’s ear and discovered that he’s such a lamb.
(Let’s continue. Presumably, some editor, seeing what Landler had wrought, knew that it had to come out of the text. This does leave his text quite Republican-friendly. But who knows how such nonsense is wrought?)
Key point: Even at the highest levels, our journalists have extremely weak technical skills. In the mid-1990s, Haley Barbour got the whole bunch of them to accept a new language—“the Speaker’s new language” (links below).
At some point in the past few days, someone devoured a new lamb.
Visit our incomparable archives: For our money, Gene Lyons’ Fools for Scandal was the most important book of the Clinton-Gore era. Next in line: Maraniss and Weisskopf’s Tell Newt to Shut Up—specifically, the chapter which described the crucial Medicare debate of the mid-1990s.
Barbour, then the RNC chair, ate the press corps for lunch. Later, Maraniss and Weisskopf did a lot of tremendous reporting about the extensive GOP effort. (This included on-the-record interviews with Barbour and other officials.) We posted three reports on the topic—short, medium, long.
To make your selection, click here.
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