Special report: Banana republic press corps!
PART 1—JUST WAIT A WHILE (permalink): We know exactly what you said when you read yesterday’s New York Times:
“Our DAILY HOWLER keeps getting results!” We could almost hear you say it!
We appreciate your kind remarks. But we’ll have to dispute your judgment a tad, in a few basic ways.
Presumably, you offered your kind remarks when you read this piece by Teresa Tritch—a piece which was described in the “Today’s Paper” listing as a “Deconstruction.”
To her credit, Tritch asked a blindingly obvious question. This is the way she began:
TRITCH (7/24/11): How the Deficit Got This Big
With President Obama and Republican leaders calling for cutting the budget by trillions over the next 10 years, it is worth asking how we got here—from healthy surpluses at the end of the Clinton era, and the promise of future surpluses, to nine straight years of deficits, including the $1.3 trillion shortfall in 2010. The answer is largely the Bush-era tax cuts, war spending in Iraq and Afghanistan, and recessions.
Really? With the nation pretending to conduct a discussion about our raging federal deficits, “it is worth asking how we got here?” Of course it’s worth asking how we got here—how we moved from those recent surpluses to our current massive shortfalls.
Three cheers for Tritch for asking this question! It should have been done long ago.
If you had a real press corps instead of a Potemkin replacement, detailed reporting on this obvious topic would have appeared long ago; such reporting would have appeared on the New York Times front page. But judging from what she wrote in that passage, Tritch seemed to think that she was exploring an important new question—a question New York Times readers hadn’t seen thrashed out before.
We’d say Tritch was basically right in that apparent judgment. And omigod! As she continued, she finally let Times readers encounter a few basic facts! By the time she finished her short report, Tritch was letting her readers ponder a startling fact:
TRITCH: A few lessons can be drawn from the numbers. First, the Bush tax cuts have had a huge damaging effect. If all of them expired as scheduled at the end of 2012, future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels.
Tritch makes a remarkable statement here. If we return to the Clinton-era tax rates, she says, “future deficits would be cut by about half, to sustainable levels.”
In recent weeks, we’ve suggested that this is one of the topics which should have been covered, long before this, on the nation’s front pages. Presumably, that’s why you gave us credit for Tritch’s long-overdue piece. Question: How many readers of the Times have ever heard that remarkable fact? Next question: Why did they have to wait till now to acquire this information—if it really is information, and if they bothered reading Tritch’s “Deconstruction” at all?
We think this piece was long overdue. Having said that, we’ll note three problems with it. Let’s start with an obvious question: Who is Teresa Tritch?
Who is Teresa Tritch: Who the heck is Teresa Tritch? We’ll admit we didn’t know her name when we saw yesterday’s piece. And indeed: According to the Nexis archives, this was just the third time her name has ever appeared in a New York Times by-line. Her previous by-lined efforts appeared in 2006 and 2007. (Based on letters to the editor, Nexis seems to have missed an earlier piece from 1999.)
Who the heck is Teresa Tritch? As it turns out, Tritch is a member of the Times editorial board—sixteen people whose names the New York Times doesn’t bruit all around. As far as we know, Tritch is a highly capable person; you can read her official bio here, along with those of her fifteen colleagues on the board. But unless you know just where to look, it isn’t real easy to find that page at the New York Times web site. Don’t waste your time with the obvious searches! If you enter “editorial board” or “masthead,” you won’t be led to those names!
Who the heck is Teresa Tritch? We think the Times should have said.
Where did Tritch’s piece appear: Tritch’s piece did not appear as a front-page news report (or news analysis). Indeed, it didn’t appear in the New York Times’ news pages at all. Instead, it appeared on page 11 of yesterday’s “Sunday Review” section, clustered there with the day’s editorials. On-line, the piece is officially branded as a “DECONSTRUCTION/EDITORIAL.”
Essentially, this seems to be the type of signed piece the Times used to publish under the somewhat puzzling name, “Editorial observer.”
Tritch’s piece didn’t appear in the paper’s news pages. As usual, you had to turn to the Times editorial page to encounter a few basic facts. But alas! This brings us to our most basic question:
Tritch makes a striking factual claim. Is her claim accurate?
Is Tritch’s claim accurate: In a rational world, citizens would have been told, long ago, about the role the Bush tax cuts have played in creating our current deficits. As a basic point of reference, they would have been told, long ago, about the likely effects of returning to the Clinton-era rates. That wouldn’t necessarily mean the Bush tax rates should be dumped; it wouldn’t necessarily mean that the Clinton-era rates should be restored. But it would give readers a basic framework for approaching two blindingly obvious questions: How did we ever get to this place? And how might we get the current problem under control?
So how about it? Is Tritch’s claim accurate? Would a return to the Clinton tax rates “cut future deficits by about half?” In a rational world, this would have been explored long ago, perhaps as part of a large series, out on the New York Times front page. It would have been hashed out in some detail, resolving possible contradictions.
Sadly, we mention those “possible contradictions” for an obvious reason. As we noted just last week, the Times’ David Leonhardt made a substantially different claim about this matter less than two weeks ago. Like Tritch, Leonhardt explained what would happen if the Bush tax cuts expire as scheduled. But doggone it! What’s a poor Times reader to do? Leonhardt gave a different account of what would happen:
LEONHARDT (7/13/11): So what kind of tax increases do Americans support? The old-fashioned kind. Seventy-two percent support raising taxes on income above $250,000, according to a recent New York Times/CBS poll, and a large majority likewise favor raising Social Security taxes on the affluent.
In the end, the most likely tax increase may be the one that's already on the books. On Jan. 1, 2013, all the Bush tax cuts—on the affluent and nonaffluent alike—are set to expire, which would solve roughly one-quarter of our long-term deficit problem. If Republicans have their way, all the tax cuts will be extended. If the Democrats have their way, most of them will be.
Tritch said future deficits “would be cut by about half.” Leonhardt seemed to say that they’d be cut by one quarter. That is a rather large difference.
As we noted last week, we were a bit surprised by Leonhardt’s claim. We thought we’d seen on-line reports that the Clinton tax rates would solve more of our long-term problem. But in this peculiar contretemps, you see the soul of Times “news coverage.” You see a problem which confronts every Times subscriber.
Tritch sits on the Times editorial board. Leonhardt is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist. Within eleven days, they gave significantly different accounts of this relatively basic matter. And as far as we know, this obvious question hasn’t been examined in the paper’s news pages at all!
It’s like the old joke about New England—if you don’t like the weather, just wait a while! But so it goes at our greatest newspaper when it comes to essential facts. This pattern has obtained for a very long time—and it has obtained all through the recent coverage of the debt limit crisis.
By and large, there are no facts in the New York Times—just changing patterns of weather. Typically, such “journalism” would be seen in a banana republic press corps.
Tomorrow—part 2: If you don’t like the editors’ data, just wait till the next day!
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