The Washington Post reported (11/5/09) that some Democrats are "questioning whether they should emphasize job creation over some of the more ambitious items on the president's agenda." A couple paragraphs later, reporters Michael Shear and Paul Kane elaborate:

Moderate and conservative Democrats took a clear signal from Tuesday's voting, warning that the results prove that independent voters are wary of Obama's far-reaching proposals and mounting spending, as well as the growing federal debt.

The implication that "job creation" is somehow at odds with "mounting spending" and "ambitious" or "far-reaching" government proposals is a another example of the neo-Hooverism that corporate reporters seem to instinctively subscribe to. In reality, spending money is one of the basic tools governments have for creating jobs during a recession--and cutting government spending is one of the surest ways to make that recession deeper.

It's worth noting that none of the sources actually quoted in the article makes the case that cutting federal spending would be a good way of creating jobs.

"Tax Refugees Staging Escape From New York," a New York Post headline declared yesterday (10/27/09). In an ordinary newspaper, you might take that as a signal that the story below was prepared to offer evidence that tax refugees were leaving New York--but the New York Post is no ordinary newspaper.

Instead, the piece by Andy Soltis (which is likely getting extra attention thanks to link from the Drudge Report headlined "'RICH' NEW YORKERS FLEEING AT ALARMING RATE") describes a report by a branch of the right-wing Manhattan Institute that says that people moving from New York, and particularly from New York City, make more money than people moving to New York. Soltis writes:

The average Manhattan taxpayer who left the state earned $93,264 a year. The average newcomer to Manhattan earned only $72,726.

As an explanation for this phenomenon, the Manhattan Institute "blames the state's high cost of living and high taxes," according to the story.  People who make less money are moving to New York City because it costs so much to live there? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Here's an alternative explanation: People often move to the city at the beginning of their careers, and leave when they get enough money to buy a house in the suburbs or retire.  Maybe that would explain the fact that the top two states New Yorkers moved to, according to the story, were Florida and New Jersey. At any rate, I've just given you more evidence to substantiate my theory than the Post offered to back up its "tax refugees" headline.

But then, it's hard not to think that the conscious aim of this story was to bamboozle its readers. Look at the lead paragraphs:

New Yorkers are fleeing the state and city in alarming numbers--and costing a fortune in lost tax dollars, a new study shows.

More than 1.5 million state residents left for other parts of the United States from 2000 to 2008, according to the report from the Empire Center for New York State Policy. It was the biggest out-of-state migration in the country.

The vast majority of the migrants, 1.1 million, were former residents of New York City--meaning one out of seven city taxpayers moved out.

How many people reading that would suspect that the population of New York state  actually grew by about half a million people between 2000 and 2008--despite 1.5 million people "fleeing" the state?  Or that New York City gained about 200,000 residents from 2000 to 2006 (the latest Census estimate)? Or, based on the Manhattan stats cited earlier, that the median household income of Manhattan actually rose 20 percent from 2000 to 2007 (in 2007 dollars)?

For the New York Post reader, life is full of surprises.

Under the headline "Washington Post Publishes More Information About Exciting Alternate Universe," A Tiny Revolution blogger Jonathan Schwarz (9/13/09) lets us know that, while "lots of banks had to get a bailout from the federal government," do "you know who didn't? The ultra-smart guys at BlackRock investment management, that's who"--at least according to the September 13 Post, which featured this passage:

BlackRock emerged as one of their principal advisers as the agencies bailed out major companies and tried to put a price on their toxic assets. BlackRock is also managing tens of billions of dollars worth of AIG assets for the government. In August, officials selected the company to help arrange the purchase, partly using taxpayer money, of toxic assets from banks. Although BlackRock, which avoided the plague of toxic assets, has turned to Washington by choice, some firms have been forced to Washington.

Schwarz's response can hardly contain his excitement:

Impressive! Impressive work there by BlackRock! Let's stroll over to BlackRock's own website, so we can find out who owns them and extend our congratulations:

Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bank of America Corporation, and The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. own approximately...47.4 percent and 31.5 percent of BlackRock’s capital stock...

Whoops!

Bailout Recipients

Bank of America $45.0 billion
Bank of America, NA $6.0 billion
PNC Financial Services $7.6 billion

But Schwarz really feels "there's no need for the Washington Post to report on what's going on in this universe," since "it would only upset and confuse their readers."

By now it's old news to any reasonably critical observer that corporate outlets' "business reporters failed to see the crisis in the mortgage and credit markets as it brewed and bubbled," as former City Limits editor Alyssa Katz puts it (CJR.org, 9/14/09), but Katz also gives props to others who noticed how "evidence of its unsustainability was plain to see for those who chose to look":

The fact is, and as immodest as it may seem to say, independents were repeatedly ahead of the curve on covering the mortgage and real estate bubble and in connecting the dots between vital elements of the bigger story—especially the links between predatory and lending and the metastasizing mortgage-backed securities market.

In 2002, the Nation warned that the mortgage-backed securities market’s bottomless appetite for subprime mortgages was financing an epidemic of destructive lending. In 2003, Southern Exposure exhaustively documented Citigroup’s move into the mass production of high-interest loans designed to drain borrowers' meager wealth. In 2005, Mother Jones assigned me to find out why the streets of Cleveland were lined with vacant houses. A reasonable question, and I found the answers on the Wall Street credit securities market. Indeed, all through this period, alt-weeklies told tales found in living rooms and legal services offices of homeowners who had believed a mortgage broker’s misleading sales pitch and wound up facing foreclosure.

Examining "the fact" that "independent journalists exposed the dimensions of the problem with a depth and timeliness that mainstream news organizations simply and regrettably did not match," Katz thinks "it's not about being better journalists; it is about being tuned to a different audience and set of interests." Read FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Busted Bubble: The Press Fell Down on the Job on Housing Prices" (11–12/08) by Veronica Cassidy.

A September 7 Washington Post report on Japanese healthcare claims that "more than one-third of the workers' premiums are used to transfer wealth from the young, healthy and rich to the old, unhealthy and poor." Which Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 9/7/09) understatedly calls "a striking statement":

Fire insurance transfers wealth from people who don't have house fires to people who do. Car insurance transfers money from people who don't have car accidents to people who do. This is the basic concept of insurance. It protects people from bad events, transferring money from people who don't have bad events to those who do. In other words, this quote is telling us that Japan's health insurance system is operating like a health insurance system.

The article is also quick to tell readers that Japan's system may be unsustainable. Its subhead is: "Aging population could strain system." It is worth noting that Japan's population is already far older than the U.S. population.

"If the United States had the same age distribution as Japan," writes Baker, "its healthcare costs would almost certainly already be above 20 percent of GDP, compared to the current 17 percent." Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Trudy Lieberman on Healthcare Reform" (8/14/09).

Adam Liptak of the New York Times (8/31/09) says that we can thank Riverside, California's Press-Enterprise for having "fought ferociously" in multiple Supreme Court battles ensuring "the press and the public have nearly an absolute constitutional right to attend jury selection in criminal cases."

According to Liptak, "news organizations used to consider those kinds of lawsuits a matter of civic responsibility":

"For the last four decades, maybe longer, citizens have been able to rely on small, medium and large news organizations, mostly newspapers, to fight their access battles on their behalf," said Lucy Dalglish, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press....

These days, she said, "the access litigations have dried up."

It is notable, for instance, that the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups have taken the leading role in trying to shake loose information about the Bush administration's policies and actions, while news organizations have largely sat on the sidelines.

Also notable are exactly which public interests the Times usually wields its own considerable budget in favor of--still, its valuable, if disconcerting, to read Adam Liptak reporting that the Press-Enterprise is now "so strapped that it’s quit distributing free copies of the paper to staff members in the city room."

"Robert Samuelson Doesn't Like Trains" is what Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 8/24/09) takes to be "the unifying theme from his column today, since his arguments against high-speed rail do not make a lot of sense."

In his August 24 broadside against what he dubs Barack Obama's "Rail Boondoggle," Samuelson trots out the tired argument against "almost $35 billion in subsidies into Amtrak" that "the federal government has poured" in the last four decades--with the usual corporate pundit omissions, like the fact that, as long ago as 1994 it was determined that "hidden subsidies for drivers amount to well over $2 for every gallon of gasoline sold."

Beyond that, "Samuelson tries to tell us that trains might be useful in Japan and Europe, but they won't work in the United States":

He tells readers that:

Densities are much higher, and high densities favor rail with direct connections between heavily populated city centers and business districts. In Japan, density is 880 people per square mile; it's 653 in Britain, 611 in Germany and 259 in France. By contrast, plentiful land in the United States has led to suburbanized homes, offices and factories. Density is 86 people per square mile.

The density for the United States as a whole would be relevant if the plans were to build a train network going from Florida to Alaska, but that is not what is on the agenda. Instead, the issue is about deepening and improving the network in relatively densely populated parts of the country, like Ohio (277 people per square mile), New York (402) and New Jersey (1,134). The population densities of much of the United States are very comparable to the regions in Europe through which high-speed rails travel.

Baker then tells how "Samuelson also bizarrely compares long-distance train with the 140 million daily trips to work each day," even though "most people do not travel between cities every day, so it's not clear what the point of the comparison is."

Recapping, Baker writes that "Robert Samuelson doesn't like trains. He told us that this morning in his column." However, "he didn't tell us anything else."

See the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Railroading of Amtrak: Trains, Planes and Automobiles Held to Different Standards" (7–8/02) by Christopher Ott.

Economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 8/9/09) sees the Washington Post as simply "keeping with its strict editorial policy of only letting others tell readers what 'populists' think," when publishing its August 9 "front-page article on setting executive compensation at banks receiving bailout money"--one which "never presented the views of an actual populist."

Instead, Baker writes "readers got to see the comment of Robert Profusek, a lawyer at Jones Day who is identified as having advised major banks on compensation matters," and Linda Rappaport, "head of the executive compensation practice at the firm Shearman & Sterling"--both of whom unsurprisingly argue for maintaining high executive pay in order to attract "talent" that will "make the money for the shareholders."

Baker voices the unspoken aspects of this assertion:

If the Post had solicited the views of a populist, or an economist, they might have told readers that much of what the banks earn comes directly at the expense of consumers and businesses....
The public has no obvious interest in subsidizing traders to speculate in financial markets. If the speculators win, then the loans that Goldman and the others receive will be repaid, but this repayment will only be a portion of the higher prices paid by consumers and lower profits earned by producers as a result of Goldman's speculation.

And, "moving beyond the world of speculation," Baker doubts that "if most of these individuals were replaced by the person next in line...the bank's profits would suffer in any big way." Which means that "these high salaries are just a drain on the bank, its shareholders and the taxpayers. But you won't see this argument presented in the Post."

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Robert Johnson on AIG Bonuses" (3/20/09).

Partisan blogger Nick (8/6/09) has republished a new email campaign from American Rights at Work that reviews how, "just before Bear Stearns went under, CNBC's Jim Cramer had strong advice for his Mad Money viewers: buy Bear Stearns stock, and fast!"

Of course, "then the company imploded and thousands of ordinary people saw their retirement savings vanish. Oops." Nick continues:

Now Cramer is telling his viewers the Employee Free Choice Act will hurt the U.S. economy.

Cramer was wrong then, he's wrong now! But this time we know exactly what will happen if viewers listen: Millions will lose out financially.

Jim Cramer is claiming that the Employee Free Choice Act will stall the U.S. economy, even though numerous economists (including Nobel Prize winners!) and institutional investors who manage $757 billion in assets recognize that the bill is critical to rebuilding the broken economy.

Discussing on Joe Scarborough's MSNBC show the act he calls "a 'sword of Damocles' hanging over our economy," Cramer "and other guests claimed they couldn't identify a single successful unionized company."

But American Rights at Work happens to know that "GE owns both MSNBC and Jim Cramer's own employer, CNBC. And guess what? GE’s employees are represented by unions"--and General Electric "earned more than $18 billion in profits in 2008!"

Take action by letting CNBC know that "Jim Cramer needs to stop parroting the talking points of the same greedy CEOs who got us into this economic crisis."

Also read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "For Media, 'Card Check' Promise Is One to Break: Corporate Outlets Suddenly Discover 'Workers Rights'" (February 2009) by Janine Jackson.

A Tiny Revolution blogger Bernard Chazelle (8/2/09) thinks it's  possible that "people fail to appreciate how tough it is to run the government." As evidence, he offers "two questions Treasury officials and politicians will soon have to answer":

• Should a Connecticut trader receive $100 million in executive pay from a bank that would be dead had it not received $45 billion in taxpayer money? Apparently, the guy's genius was to drive up the price of gas to $4 a gallon. Does he deserve 100 million bucks from you for that?
• Should unemployment benefits be extended for 1.5 million jobless Americans who will otherwise run out of money by the end of the year and fall into destitution and, sometimes, homelessness?

Chazelle notes that "the New York Times features both stories on its front page, but never connects the two" --their job "explaining the complexity of the issue" encapsulated by him as, "If the trader fails to be paid, it'll get truly ugly: The guy will go trade somewhere else!"

"On the other hand," writes Chazelle, "if mom and dad don't get their unemployment benefits, things are not quite nearly as bad: Only their kids will die." Leading him to sarcastically exclaim, "Thank god I am not in government having to make tough choices like that!"

Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "The Recession and the 'Deserving Poor': Poverty Finally on Media Radar—but Only When It Hits the Middle Class" (3/09) by Neil deMause.

Presenting yet another example of corporate media failure to grasp the concept of "Adjusted for Inflation," Kevin Drum (MotherJones.com, 7/26/09) has written up a Washington Post piece in which "David Brown says that as treatment for heart attacks has gotten better, it's also gotten more expensive":

"Over the same period, the charges for treating a heart attack marched steadily upward, from about $5,700 in 1977 to $54,400 in 2007 (without adjusting for inflation)."

I continue not to understand why anyone would write this. Why not this instead?

"Over the same period, adjusted for inflation, the charges for treating a heart attack marched steadily upward, from about $20,000 in 1977 to $54,400 in 2007."

Technically, Brown's wording is correct. But it's not helpful, since most people don't have even a vague notion of how much cumulative inflation there's been since 1977. The revised wording, however, is helpful: It gives people a correct impression of how much more we spend treating heart attacks these days. Namely, two to three times as much as 30 years ago.

And Drum maintains "this wasn't just a slip of the keyboard. Brown and his editor obviously made a deliberate decision to use nominal figures even though this doesn't give the average reader a very good idea of how much costs have actually risen."

Detroit Free Press columnist Mitch Albom--best known for his bestseller Tuesdays With Morrie--had a July 25 column that criticized the Obama healthcare reform with an argument that suggested an unfamiliarity with how the U.S. tax system works:

In explaining why it was OK to sock a new 5.4 percent tax on the highest earners in this country--to pay for healthcare reform--President Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said this:

"The president believes that the richest 1 percent of this country has had a pretty good run of it for many, many, many years."

Ah. So that’s it. The old "You’ve had it good enough for long enough" policy. That’s why a family earning a million dollars a year should now cough up $54,000 of that--in addition to all the other taxes it pays--to cover healthcare for people who may not pay a penny of new tax themselves.

But a family making $1 million a year wouldn't pay an extra $54,000 in taxes from the proposed 5.4 percent surcharge--because that surcharge would only apply to income beyond the first million dollars of income. A smaller surcharge would kick in at $350,000, and increase at $500,000--but the total tax increase for a couple making $1 million would be $9,000, or one-sixth of what Albom claimed was a "grossly overweighted tax."

This is how taxes generally work, with marginal tax rates that apply to income over a certain level. You'd think that Albom, who has an MBA from Columbia University, would be familiar with the concept. But media outlets have been known to trip up on this subject, even when their stories are prepared in conjunction with tax experts (FAIR Action Alert, 9/22/08).

Albom's charge that the Obama administration is "engag[ing] in the worst and most destructive form of politics: class warfare" is also a familiar corporate media trope (Extra!, 1-2/01). Given that for the media, "class warfare" is almost always waged by the bottom against the top, it's perhaps not surprising that Albom has trouble figuring out what Gibbs means when he says that " the richest 1 percent of this country has had a pretty good run of it for many, many, many years." (Albom speculates that he's "suggest[ing] that the top 1 percent are a bunch of Bernie Madoffs, that they’ve been scheming their way to riches, evading the system, hiding their money in complicated offshore deals.")

Gibbs is presumably referring to data compiled by the Congressional Budget Office (CBPP, 4/17/09) showing that income for the top 1 percent has climbed by 256 percent from 1979 to 2006, while the take-home for middle-income households has grown by only 21 percent; for poor households, growth was just 11 percent. The share of all after-tax income that's gone to the top 1 percent has more than doubled since 1979, from 7.5 percent to 16.3 percent.  You might say they've had "a pretty good run."

Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 7/21/09) has synopsized the latest fiasco of a David Brooks column under the headline "David Brooks Wanted Tax Increases to Pay for Stimulus"--since, Baker writes, "that is presumably the implication of his complaint that the Democrats paid for the stimulus package 'with borrowed money.'"

Predictably, "this is not the only peculiar item in his column. He also claims that only 11 percent of the stimulus will be spent in the first seven months of the program." Even though, as economist Baker explains, the "Congressional Budget Office puts the figure at 20 percent, which doesn't seem bad for a program that is just getting started and should be spent out over time in any case." And

then, in full Republican talking point mode, Brooks tells us:

The House [health care] bill adds $239 billion to the federal deficit during the first 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It would pummel small businesses with an 8 percent payroll penalty. It would jack America's top tax rate above those in Italy and France. Top earners in New York and California would be giving more than 55 percent of earnings to one government entity or another.

Let's see if we can rewrite this slightly:

The House bill adds an amount equivalent to 10 percent of the spending on the Iraq and Afghan wars to the federal deficit during the first 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Some small businesses will end up converting as much as 8 percent of their wage bill into healthcare insurance for their workers. The richest 1 percent will see an increase in their marginal tax rate, but it will still be lower than in most European countries. And the effective marginal tax rate for the wealthy will still be far lower than the marginal tax rate and reduction in benefits that most moderate income families face.

Baker's version of the same points renders somewhat silly the sentiment he attributes to Brooks' screed: "Are you scared?"

Stating quite succinctly how "there is an ongoing issue about whether global warming deniers should be treated seriously by the media, given that they have about as much scientific support for their position as the flat-Earth crew," economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 7/11/09) notes how the July 11 "New York Times goes them one better in finding a global warming ignorer":

Apparently, Ben Stein has never heard about global warming. How else can someone interpret this paragraph:

I don't believe we need to do something radical about energy, but even assuming that we do, why do it right now? Do we need to take one of the few sectors that is working like clockwork through the recession--oil refining--and wring its neck by making it pay for pollution "cap and trade" credits? Why attack a healthy industry when so many other sectors are ill? What is all of this anger at Big Oil, which has not done anything blameworthy, all about? Why endlessly beat up the companies that keep the country going?

He then goes on to complain about the Obama administration's efforts to change the laws on foreclosures. This would be a good idea, except the Obama administration is not working to change the laws on foreclosure.

Baker explains that "Stein is opposed to this plan because he is worried that it will further discourage mortgage lending," even though "there is no problem of mortgage lending at present. Mortgage rates are near historic lows and the Mortgage Bankers Association applications index indicates that few people are having trouble getting mortgages." Baker is impressed with how, "once again, Ben Stein distinguishes himself by how many things he can get really seriously wrong in a relatively short column."

Viewing "two excellent pieces by the American News Project about the Fed's astonishing actions during the current meltdown," A Tiny Revolution's Jonathan Schwarz (7/12/09) confirms that "ANP does great work, and I commend them for taking on this subject—especially since it's covered nowhere else, including on progressive blurms." But he's nonetheless reminded of a June 29 TruthDig piece in which war reporter Chris Hedges tells why "The Truth Alone Will Not Set You Free":

The public is bombarded with carefully crafted images meant to confuse propaganda with ideology and knowledge with how we feel. Human rights and labor groups, investigative journalists, consumer watchdog organizations and advocacy agencies have, in the face of this manipulation, inundated the public sphere with reports and facts. But facts alone...make little difference. And as we search for alternative ways to communicate in a time of crisis, we must also communicate in new forms... This style, one that turns the abstraction of fact into a human flesh and one that is not afraid of emotion and passion...will permit us to counter the force of corporate propaganda....

We will have to descend into the world of the forgotten, to write, photograph, paint, sing, act, blog, video and film with anger and honesty that have been blunted by the parameters of traditional journalism. The lines between artists, social activists and journalists have to be erased.

Despite their great efforts, Schwarz feels ANP still are "suffering from exactly the problem Hedges describes. To start with, what is the Fed? How does it work? Perhaps 900 people total in the U.S. could tell you. So for everyone else it's automatically like gossip about strangers--i.e., extremely boring."