Special report: Banana republic press corps!
PART 2—PITY THE FOOL (permalink): We pity the voter who’s trying to follow the debt limit/budget debate.
More precisely, we pity the voter who tries to get relevant facts from the Washington Post or the New York Times, two of our greatest newspapers.
How hard can it be to get basic facts from these, our most famous political papers? Consider what happened last Friday night, when “a visibly angry” Barack Obama held a press conference shortly after John Boehner walked away from the budget talks. (In news reports the next day, each paper used the term “visibly angry” to describe Obama’s demeanor.)
Back to Obama on Friday night: As he began his visibly angry press conference, he described the deal he had been offering Boehner. If you had been reading our biggest newspapers, you probably would have been puzzled by some of the things you saw Obama say—especially by the things he said about his proposal for additional revenues:
OBAMA (7/22/11): Good evening, everybody. I wanted to give you an update on the current situation around the debt ceiling. I just got a call about a half hour ago from Speaker Boehner, who indicated that he was going to be walking away from the negotiations that we've been engaged in here at the White House for a big deficit reduction and debt reduction package.
And I thought it would be useful for me to just give you some insight into where we were and I think that we should have moved forward with a big deal.
Essentially what we had offered Speaker Boehner was over a trillion dollars in cuts to discretionary spending, both domestic and defense. We then offered an additional $650 billion in cuts to entitlement programs; Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. We believed that it was possible to shape those in a way that preserved the integrity of the system, made them available for the next generation and did not affect current beneficiaries in an adverse way.
In addition, what we sought was revenues that were actually less than what the Gang of Six signed off on. So you had a bipartisan group of senators, including Republicans who are in leadership in the Senate, calling for what effectively was about $2 trillion above the Republican baseline that they've been working off of.
What we said was, give us $1.2 trillion in additional revenues, which could be accomplished without hiking taxes—tax rates, but could simply be accomplished by eliminating loopholes, eliminating some deductions, and engaging in a tax reform process that could have lowered rates generally, while broadening the base.
So let me reiterate what we were offering. We were offering a deal that called for as much discretionary savings as the Gang of Six. We were calling for taxes that were less than what the Gang of Six had proposed and we had—we were calling for modifications to entitlement programs would have saved just as much over the 10 year window.
In other words, this was an extraordinarily fair deal. If it was unbalanced, it was unbalanced in the direction of not enough revenue.
According to Obama, he had offered Boehner a deal which involved $1.65 trillion in spending cuts and $1.2 trillion in additional revenues. That’s roughly a 4-3 ratio.
For starters, you might have been surprised by Obama’s claim that this was “an extraordinarily fair deal”—a deal that “was unbalanced in the direction of not enough revenue.” (You might have been surprised by that claim because previous reported deals had tended toward ratios of 3-1 or 5-1, spending cuts over new revenues.) But more specifically, you might have been surprised by Obama’s claim that his request for $1.2 trillion in new revenue was actually less than the amount of new revenue the Gang of Six had proposed.
At Friday evening’s conference, Obama said the Gang of Six had proposed $2 trillion in new revenue. But all week long, you had read in your nation’s most famous newspapers that the Gang of Six had proposed one trillion dollars, or roughly $1 trillion, in new revenues. For example, you had read these things in the New York Times just one day before the press conference:
HULSE (7/21/11): That plan is the one put forward Tuesday by the so-called Gang of Six, a bipartisan group of senators who worked for months to reach an agreement and whose work was lauded by Mr. Obama as a sign that a deal was possible. The plan included a net increase in government revenue of about $1 trillion over a decade.
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (7/21/11): The Gang of Six plan calls for at least $1 trillion in new tax revenues by eliminating and reducing tax breaks and deductions. For conservative senators like Saxby Chambliss, Lamar Alexander, Michael Crapo and Tom Coburn to accept this reality shows how willfully blind the House majority has really become.
Hulse’s piece was a front-page news report; his account was largely echoed by an editorial that same day. But then, if you double-checked your facts in the Washington Post, you still were told that the Gang of Six had proposed (roughly) $1 trillion in new revenue. Again, we’ll match a front-page news report with an editorial:
MONTGOMERY (7/20/11): The proposal, crafted by a bipartisan group of senators known as the "Gang of Six," calls for $500 billion in immediate savings and requires lawmakers in the coming months to cut agency spending, overhaul Social Security and Medicare, and rewrite the tax code to generate more than $1 trillion in fresh revenue.
[…]
[The Gang of Six plan] calls for raising more than $1 trillion over the next decade by reducing a variety of popular tax breaks and deductions, including breaks for home mortgage interest and employer-provided health care. While some of those savings would be dedicated to debt reduction, the rest would go toward lowering tax rates for everyone, with top individual and corporate rates dropping to at least 29 percent, down from 35 percent.
WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL (7/21/11): Mr. Norquist's comments come at a moment of remarkable and welcome fluidity in what had seemed to be a solid wall of Republican opposition to raising any tax revenue at any time for any reason. The surprising reemergence and expansion of the Senate Gang of Six this week was accompanied by a flurry of statements from Republican senators endorsing a proposal that included $1 trillion in new tax revenue.
According to all accounts in these two famous papers, the Gang of Six plan would have involved $1 trillion, or roughly $1 trillion, in new revenue. Now, Obama was saying that the Gang of Six plan had involved two trillion dollars! On that basis, he was saying that his own proposal for $1.2 trillion in new revenues was smaller than the Gang’s proposal. According to Obama, he had been “calling for taxes that were less than what the Gang of Six had proposed.”
Pity the fool who tries to resolve a conflict like this by reading the Post or the Times! The next day, each newspaper simply changed its account of what the Gang of Six had proposed; the papers offered no explanation for why their number had suddenly changed. If you read the Washington Post or the New York Times, you aren’t supposed to notice such things. But by the next morning, each paper had simply changed its figure, bringing its account in line with what a visibly angry man said:
MONTGOMERY (7/23/11): White House officials said that there was no handshake agreement on taxes, and acknowledged that they upped their revenue request after the bipartisan Senate "Gang of Six" released a plan to raise $2 trillion in taxes over the next decade. But they said Obama offered Thursday to drop the extra $400 billion if Boehner would accept smaller cuts to entitlement programs.
In the end, Obama told reporters he had offered Boehner "an extra-fair deal" on "the biggest debt-reduction package that we've seen in a very long time." Obama said it would have raised taxes significantly less than the Gang of Six plan, which was endorsed by the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, Lamar Alexander (Tenn.).
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL (7/23/11): Mr. Obama, in fact, had already gone much too far in trying to make his deal palatable to House Republicans, offering to cut spending even further than the deficit plan proposed this week by the bipartisan ''Gang of Six,'' which includes some of the Senate's most conservative members.
[…]
The ''bargain'' would require that alongside these cuts, tax revenues would go up by $1.2 trillion, largely through a rewrite of the tax code to eliminate many deductions and loopholes. That's substantially less in revenue than the $2 trillion in the ''Gang of Six'' plan.
Pity the fools! They aren’t supposed to notice such things when they read the Post and the Times. But in this Post news report and this Times editorial, readers were now told that the Gang of Six had proposed two trillion dollars in new revenues. As far as we can tell, neither paper offered any explanation for the overnight change in their facts.
For today, we’ll leave the story right here—while noting that this pseudo-journalistic conduct is nothing new at the Post and the Times. Before the week is done, we’ll return to the halcyon days of yore; more specifically, we’ll return to August 2000, when these Potemkin newspapers (and the Associated Press) pretended that they were explaining the size of Candidate Bush’s tax cut proposal. From one day to the next, the numbers would change at these famous newspapers, without anyone making the slightest attempt to explain the reason for the ever-changing, contradictory accounts. Indeed, contradictory accounts of this seminal matter would even appear, side-by-side, on the very same page of a given day’s newspaper! Editors at these famous newspapers didn’t notice—or just didn’t care.
As we deathlessly said at the time: If voters weren’t completely confused by that point, it could only mean one thing. It meant they weren’t reading the Post!
Let’s return to last weekend’s change in the numbers. In this case, some readers may feel that they understand the conflicting accounts of how much new revenue the Gang of Six did propose. We’ll guess that very few readers could really explain this in anything like a full-blooded way—we certainly know we couldn’t—although the conflict does seem to involve those “baselines” to which Obama briefly alluded.
That said, there was no way for the average reader of the Post or the Times to understand the sudden change in the numbers which occurred at both newspapers last Saturday. That reader is supposed to flip his newspaper’s pages each day, nodding assent as he sees basic numbers change without explanation.
When papers are willing to function this way, it isn’t clear why they bother including numbers in their news reports or editorials at all. But one thing is abundantly clear: Whatever such work is supposed to be, it plainly isn’t “journalism.” Rather, it’s the type of Potemkin “journalism” which signifies a banana republic.
It’s the type of which emerges from the pages of a banana republic press.
Tomorrow: Part 3 (so many choices!)
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