‘Watching the Detectives’ Category Archive
Every once in a while you’ll read a bit of commentary about an opinion columnist or editorialist making some claim that flatly contradicts facts in reporting by that columnist’s own news organization (see, e.g., the disconnect between editorial and reporting in the Washington Post). There are all sorts of potential reasons for this happening, and it provides a lot of fodder for eager media critics in the blogosphere.
But I was really surprised to see this coming from a blogger, and particularly one who is generally quite insightful. Steve Benen, the blogger behind the Washington Monthly‘s Political Animal, has an op-ed in the New York Daily News today suggesting that Barack Obama could be successful in the upcoming legislative session by co-opting Republican ideas that he largely agrees with and supports. The two examples he gives are presenting John McCain’s 2008 cap and trade system and George W. Bush’s immigration reform plan as his own bipartisan proposals. How could Republicans suddenly oppose things they’d so recently supported? Put aside the fact that Republicans, en masse, were never fans of either of those proposals. Republicans just did this! The health care bill that almost every congressional Republican voted against was nearly identical to the Clinton-era Republican counter-proposal and the system signed into law in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney. In 2009, that market-driven, Republican-approved plan became a socialist plan to pull the plug on grandma.
The point of this, though, is not to make a counter-argument to Benen’s op-ed. It’s to point out that he spelled out why this can’t work just yesterday in a post called “When (and Why) Bipartisanship Is Impossible.” In it, he notes exactly the health care process that played out last year, and quotes Ezra Klein noting that Democratic moves toward (then through and past) the center are always met with Republican moves to the right. So it was very surprising to read this from Benen, and it’s hard not to wonder if the venue — a daily metro newspaper, as opposed to a blog hosted by a monthly opinion journal — influenced his argument and the conclusion he reached.
Two news stories today that feature totally contradictory ideas coming from the same source, with no attempt by the journalist to explain. One, a George Stephanopoulos piece on Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND) entitled, “Sen. Conrad: Extend All Tax Cuts; Time to Get ‘Serious’ About Deficit.” In the piece, Conrad is quoted as saying: “I proposed some weeks ago that we extend all the tax cuts for a period of time until we are able to fundamentally reform the tax system. Because that is what is required in part here along with spending reductions. Both are going to have to be done if we are going to get out of this deep hole.” It’s not at all clear how tax cuts and spending cuts lead to deficit reduction, and unfortunately Stephanopoulos neither presses Conrad to explain this self-contradictory statement, nor does he explain to his audience the role revenues and expenditures actually play in creating deficits.
In the other, a story from Bloomberg, we find this lede: “Investors around the world say President Barack Obama is bad for the bottom line, even though U.S. corporations are on track for the biggest earnings growth in 22 years and the stock market is headed for its best back-to- back annual gains since 2004.” Later, this: “Worldwide, 63 percent of all respondents say his policies are detrimental to the U.S. investment climate. That number increases to 68 percent among U.S. investors, even though the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index has risen more than 43 percent since Obama was inaugurated in January 2009 and corporate profits have rebounded almost to the pre-recession peak reached in 2006.” Author Mike Dorning goes into territory that Stephanopoulos avoids by directly contrasting the attitudes of poll respondents to actual investment outcomes during Obama’s time in office. Interestingly, he does little to point out contradictions in respondents’ open-ended answers about their views of Obama, perhaps because the respondents largely traffic in talking points about the “uncertainty” and “lack of clarity” in future fiscal and regulatory policy. Divergent results between US and foreign investors suggest that US investors may be responding with their personal financial interests in mind — 60% of them think all the Bush tax cuts should be extended, as opposed to just 30% of foreign investors.
This prompts a couple of questions for me. The first one is broad, and is one that my grad school colleague Ray Pingree dealt with in his dissertation: What is the effect of the press refusing to adjudicate fact-based disputes? In each of these cases, contradictions arise over fairly basic and well-accepted facts: lowering revenues (e.g., by cutting taxes) increases deficits, business profits and economic growth are up under Obama. How is the audience supposed to interpret stories that don’t allow those pieces of information to have a privileged position?
This question is much more relevant to traditional “on the one hand, on the other” coverage, which quotes each side and doesn’t adjudicate. What makes these two stories interesting is that it’s the same sources dealing with two conflicting pieces of information. Conrad says we need tax cuts and deficit reduction. Investors say Obama is bad for the economy even though their profits are through the roof. There are issues here for the audience, to be sure. Do they even process this type of story the way they might process a more typical “argument” story? Do they understand, without prompting from the reporter, that there’s any dissonance in what the source is saying? Dorning seems to think they might, and balances many of Bloomberg’s poll findings with actual economic data. Stephanopoulos doesn’t take that step, potentially leaving readers so much in the dark that they don’t even know the light exists. Let there be light, George! Let there be light!
Dylan Matthews (guesting for Ezra Klein) has a nice piece on the way perceived audience make-up affects news framing:
[C]limate hawks aren’t in charge. Because of the filibuster, and now GOP control of the House, the balance of power rests with people who deny the need to take just about any action to stop climate change. So why is Fallows concerned with rebutting them, rather than trying to win over people to his right, who are actually in a position to change things?
In fairness, Fallows, like any journalist, has to target a specific audience, and chances are that the average Atlantic reader believes that manmade global warming is a serious threat, and are skeptics about clean coal insofar as they have views on the matter. Presenting the piece as a defense of coal makes more sense as a response to them than as an attempt to influence the political system.
He further notes that, though elite political journals all have narrowly perceived audiences, the long-form journalism they produce can be influential all around Washington — even if you think all your readers are center-left think-tankers, what you produce will be seen and used by pro-coal figures. The classic example of this is perhaps Betsy McCaughey’s “No Exit,” published and later retracted by The New Republic, and coincidentally cited as the most destructive impact on public discourse of the 1990s by James Fallows, who wrote the above-mentioned clean coal piece. “No Exit” presented an extreme, right-wing (and fictitious, as it turned out) view on the Clinton health care proposal to TNR’s middle-of-the-road audience, informing them that the proposal would forbid Americans from purchasing health care services outside of the new government-run system. While its first-level affect might have been to lead moderates away from supporting the plan, it also became a springboard for conservatives — George Will later claimed the proscription on outside care would be enforced by jail time.
All of which is to say, who you think you’re writing for matters, and who you’re actually writing for matters. Being able to reconcile the two could be key in producing journalism that can positively affect public policy.
