PART 3—CAN ANYONE PLAY THIS GAME: Candidates discuss their children too much! And the Twilight Zone is still highly relevant!
A press corps which finds itself drawn to such topics is unlikely to show much technical competence on the occasions when it feels forced to discuss serious issues.
How incompetent is our current press corps? Let’s consider two fleeting examples. Then, let’s review a discussion from the NewsHour, a program which is supposed to be our smartest TV news show.
Let’s start with Daniel Stone, described here by the Daily Beast as “Newsweek’s White House correspondent.”
Who is Daniel Stone? For one thing, he’s a recent college graduate. In 2005 and 2006, he was editor of the Cal Davis student newspaper—for a while. He seems to have come to Newsweek after working for the TV program, America’s Most Wanted. Not that there’s anything wrong with it!
In this July 4 piece for the Beast, Stone lists what his headline calls the “Biggest 2012 Campaign Whoppers.” Needless to say, there are ten.
Yes, we know, it’s only the Beast—and Newsweek ain’t what it used to be. But Stone’s report is utterly hapless, a virtual parody of reporting. Here are two of his alleged biggest whoopers. Each is attributed to President Obama, although Stone makes some hazy claims about GOP whoppers too:
Pick a Health Care Number, Any Number. While trumpeting his budget ideas, President Obama claimed that under the Republican plan—Paul Ryan’s "Path to Prosperity"—"up to 50 million Americans have to lose their health insurance in order for us to reduce the deficit.” But that number came from vague speculation, much of it partisan.
Lowest Taxes Ever: To combat Republican attacks that taxes are too high, President Obama, on at least two different occasions including his press conference this week, has pointed out that the tax burden on the wealthy is at the lowest point it’s been in 50 years, “since before I was born.” Except that it was lower in 1986, when Obama was 25.
W[hat] was the tax burden on the wealthy lower in 1986? Stone simply makes the assertion, then leaves the matter right there. The reader is given no idea of the basis on which he has made his claim about this top-ten whopper. But then, how about the “vague speculation, much of it partisan,” which allegedly lies behind Obama’s claim concerning health insurance? Obama’s statement may have been wrong. But Stone doesn’t try to explain his claim about that “whopper” either.
As an attempt at journalism, Stone’s piece is an utter embarrassment. But then, how about this news report, which appeared on the Washington Post’s web site yesterday afternoon? Maybe Newsweek has ceased to be Newsweek—but is the Post still the Washington Post?
In this case, we were struck by the famous newspaper’s characteristic semantic fumbling. This is the way the report was teased on the Post web site’s front page:
GOP open to closing tax loopholes in debt talks
In a marked shift, Republicans are willing to close some tax loopholes as part of a final deal to lower the nation’s legal borrowing limit, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor says, but tax increases are still off limits.
In this hazy presentation, we seem to be told that “closing a tax loophole” does not represent a “tax increase,” although “tax loopholes” (tax deductions) have traditionally been included in reports about tax cuts. (For example, President Bush’s 2001 tax cut plan included some changes in tax rates and a whole bunch of tax deductions. No one ever said that the latter weren’t part of the overall tax cuts.) We are also told that Cantor has said that “tax increases” are still off limits. Does that mean that Cantor has rejected increases in tax rates? Or does it mean that he rejected an increase in overall revenues? Such questions were muddled in the tease—and they weren’t much clearer in the news report itself:
SONMEZ (7/6/11): In a marked shift, Republicans are willing to close some tax loopholes as part of a final deal to lower the nation’s legal borrowing limit, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said on Wednesday.
But Cantor said that raising taxes as part of the final debt-reduction package was still off limits.
“If the president wants to talk loopholes, we’ll be glad to talk loopholes,” Cantor said at his weekly roundtable with reporters. “We’ve said all along that preferences in the code aren’t something that helps economic growth overall. But listen, we’re not for any proposal that increases taxes, and any type of discussion should be coupled with offsetting tax cuts somewhere else.”
Republicans had previously rebuffed Democrats’ calls for any comprehensive deficit-reduction package to close tax loopholes such as those for corporate jet owners and oil and gas companies. Such measures, GOP leaders have said, should be considered only as part of a comprehensive tax-reform effort.
If you read that passage with care, it seems that Cantor said that there can be no increase in overall revenues. But the Post reporters did a very poor job clarifying this basic point.
Do such distinctions actually matter? Yes, they matter a very great deal, for various reasons. In a rational world, citizens would want to be very clear about such basic proposals. In a rational world, it would be very surprising to see reporters at our leading newspapers struggling with such elementary distinctions. But things have worked this way at the top of our press corps for a very long time.
By the way, did you know that Rod Serling is still highly relevant? On a related point, why does Bristol Palin’s jaw now look somewhat different?
Our third example comes from the NewsHour, our smartest TV news show. The discussion in question was broadcast last Friday, with Jim Lehrer himself in charge. We’ll offer you a chunk of the chat, though it’s Michael Gerson’s muddled comments on which we will mainly focus. (To watch the full segment, click here.)
As they start, the storied Lehrer and his guest, Mark Shields, are talking about the Republican position on taxes—“or on revenue,” Lehrer said, a distinction he didn’t explain. Things rolled on from there, with Shields and Gerson disagreeing—or something—about where we should go from here. We will focus on Gerson’s statement near the end of this chunk:
SHIELDS (7/1/11): I think the Republicans are irrational. I really do. And I think it’s a politically indefensible and civically indefensible position they have taken.
LEHRER: On taxes.
SHIELDS: On taxes.
LEHRER: Or on revenue. OK.
SHIELDS: On revenue.
The reality is this, that every single group, whether it’s Simpson-Bowles, whether it’s Alice Rivlin and Pete Domenici, whoever it is—semi-serious, we probably should have said: Yes, there have to be budget cuts to deal with the deficit problem and the debt. But there have to be revenue increases.
It’s become a dogma with Republicans now that anybody who votes for a tax increase is no longer a member of the club or the party, and is driven out of the tent. Ronald Reagan raised taxes six times.The amount of money we’re talking about raising taxes, which would be $400 billion over 10 years, is less than 1 percent of the money to be collected in the next 10 years, less than 1 percent!
And if you look at it—and Senator Inouye presented this yesterday, and I thought it was a brilliant document. If you look at it in terms, Jim, from 2001, the last time that the budget was balanced, the fiscal year, $128 billion surplus, and we look at what we’re spending on discretionary spending—that’s one that isn’t mandated—it is exactly the same, in inflationary dollars and in population growth, as it was then.
Defense spending and wars have gone up 80 percent. Tax revenues are down 18 percent. We are actually collecting $500 billion less in 2011 than we collected in 2001.
GERSON: I think, I think Democrats are being equally unreasonable on the issue of entitlements.
This is our long-term spending challenge. It’s not that we tax too little. It’s that we have expensive entitlement commitments, an aging population, and health care inflation that have made that portion of the budget completely unsustainable.
Democrats will not deal with that in this context. And I think that that’s a failure as well in this system. People are going to have to give in this process. And, you know, right now, everyone knows that this debt limit has to increase, OK. Everyone knows it. But no one knows what the path is, given these deeply seeded disagreements.
And Republicans make the point that we have a historically high level of the economy in spending right now, OK? Which has gone up considerably. The normal level of taxes is more like 20 percent of the economy, I mean, which is well below what— You know, the Republicans just want to bring spending down to historical level of taxes as a percentage of our economy. That’s their argument here, not to bring rates up to cover a larger portion of our economy.
LEHRER: But— OK. We’ve got the differences here.
“We’ve got the differences here,” Lehrer said. But did we have any facts? Shields had made a factual claim. “Tax revenues are down 18 percent,” he said. “We are actually collecting $500 billion less in 2011 than we collected in 2001.” This implied that our budget shortfalls might be connected to lower tax rates. But Gerson answered with a statement most notable for its fuzziness. Let’s look at that statement again:
GERSON: Republicans make the point that we have a historically high level of the economy in spending right now, OK? Which has gone up considerably. The normal level of taxes is more like 20 percent of the economy, I mean, which is well below what— You know, the Republicans just want to bring spending down to historical level of taxes as a percentage of our economy. That’s their argument here, not to bring rates up to cover a larger portion of our economy.
“The Republicans just want to bring spending down to historical level of taxes as a percentage of our economy?” Gerson’s statement was clear as mud. Lehrer’s reaction? Move on!
We’re not trying to tell you who was right on the facts. It’s notable that Shields was relying on a statistical claim that had only emerged last Thursday, after many months of pseudo-discussion concerning these seminal topics.
Here’s what we are trying to tell you:
In a rational world, a nation’s smartest TV news show would have hashed out these factual points long ago. Its famous host might even have some familiar charts and graphs around which to frame such discussions. The program’s viewers might be accustomed to seeing such charts—charts which laid out some basic facts about changes in spending and revenue.
Nothing like that ever occurs in the world where we actually live. Who can forget Ted Koppel’s brilliance near the end of Campaign 2000? Koppel appeared on Larry King Live one night after the first, extremely important Bush-Gore debate.
King played tape of a crucial exchange about Bush’s tax cut proposal. Koppel, in an iconic moment, showed you the street where you live:
KING (10/4/00): OK. Were you impressed with this “fuzzy math,” “top 1 percent,” “1.3 trillion, 1.9 trillion” bit?
KOPPEL: You know, honestly, it turns my brains to mush. I can't pretend for a minute that I'm really able to follow the argument of the debates. Parts of it, yes. Parts of it, I haven't a clue what they're talking about.
At the time, Koppel hosted our smartest news show. But when a press corps’ culture is heavily focused on every manner of trivial nonsense, its leading figures will respond in such ways when asked about topics that matter.
More than ten years have passed since that night. Question: Would Lehrer’s brain have turned to mush had he been forced to explain the subsequent changes in spending and revenue—changes which directly relate to that “1.9 trillion bit?”
Koppel showed you the street where you live. You’ve lived on that street for a very long time. Question:
Why have the liberal world’s top career players routinely refused to complain? Why does the career liberal world accept this silly incompetence?
Tomorrow: Sargent’s portrait
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