By the tone of  some of the media coverage, you might have thought Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced a plan to slash military spending yesterday.  On the front page of USA Today (1/27/12), under the headline "Panetta Backs Far Leaner Military," readers learn in the first paragraph:

The Pentagon's new plan to cut Defense spending means a reduction of 100,000 troops, the retiring of ships and planes and closing of bases--moves that the Defense secretary said would not compromise security.

The piece quotes critics of the cuts like Sen. Joe Lieberman and an analyst at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. And the article talks about the most commonly cited figure of $487 billion in cuts over 10 years. As economist Dean Baker writes about such coverage--"Military Budget Cuts: Denominator Please"--there is no way people can assess the significance of what sounds like a lot of money if they don't know how much the Pentagon is planning to spend over the same 1o-year period--roughly $8 trillion.

The PBS NewsHour did little to clarify the issue. The broadcast began with Jeffrey Brown announcing, "The Pentagon today outlined almost half a trillion dollars in budget cuts that would shrink the size of the U.S. military by trimming ground forces, retiring ships and planes, and delaying some new weapons." PBS aired clips from Republicans Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich denouncing the budget cuts, and then interviewed a Pentagon official.

Even coverage of the Pentagon's new "austerity" that managed to include some helpful context didn't make things very clear. "The Pentagon took the first major step toward shrinking its budget after a decade of war" was how a New York Times story by Elisabeth Bumiller (1/27/12) begins. In the fourth paragraph, readers found this:

Even though the Defense Department has been called on to find $259 billion in cuts in the next five years--and $487 billion over the decade--its base budget (not counting the costs of Afghanistan or other wars) will rise to $567 billion by 2017. But when adjusted for inflation, the increases are small enough that they will amount to a slight cut of 1.6 percent of the Pentagon's base budget over the next five years.

So the "first major step" in cutting the military budget... isn't really a cut?

A Washington Post piece by Craig Whitlock (1/27/12) had a more accurate lead--"The Pentagon budget will shrink slightly next year"-- but later tries to make a 1 percent cut sound more significant: "While the difference may sound small, it represents a new era of austerity for the Defense Department."

To make matters even more confusing, the Post points out later that

Although the defense budget will decline next year, to $525 billion from this year's $531 billion, under Obama's current projections it will inch upward in constant dollars between 1 percent and 2 percent annually thereafter.

Kudos to Nancy Yousef of McClatchy for writing a piece (1/26/12) that took a different tack. Under the headline "Defense Budget Plan Doesn't Cut as Deeply as Pentagon Says," Yousef led with this:

Pentagon officials on Thursday announced the outlines of what they called a pared-down defense budget, but their request would increase baseline spending beyond the projected end of the war in Afghanistan, even as they plan to reduce ground forces.

To Yousef, the Pentagon was " employing a definition of the term 'reduction' that may be popular in Washington but is unconventional anywhere else."

And activist/writer David Swanson pointed out that the first question at Panetta's briefing got right at this question of whether the cuts are really cut. From the transcript:

Mr. Secretary, you talked a little bit on this, but over the next 10 years, do you see any other year than this year where the actual spending will go down from year to year? And just to the American public more broadly, how do you sort of explain what appears to be contradictory, as you talk about, repeatedly, this $500 billion in cuts in a Defense Department budget that is actually going to be increasing over time?

Panetta's answer:

Yeah, I think the simplest way to say this is that under the budget that was submitted in the past, we had a projected growth level for the Defense budget. And that growth would've provided for almost $500 billion in growth. And we had obviously dedicated that to a number of plans and projects that we would have. That's gotta be cut, and that's a real cut in terms of what our projected growth would be.

See the new release from the Institute for Public Accuracy for more of the context largely missing from the Pentagon budget coverage.

The fact that Time magazine named "The Protester" its Person of the Year was maybe a little surprising. Totally unsurprising, though, was the choice of a runners-up: Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, a hero to many in the corporate media for his bold calls to slash government spending on the poor.

It's hard to know where to start with reporter David Von Drehle's tribute. But let's try here:

Through a combination of hard work, good timing and possibly suicidal guts, the Wisconsin Republican managed to harness his party to a dramatic plan for dealing with America's rapidly rising public debt.

Dealing with the rising debt. Remember that idea.

He goes on:

The supply-sider from Janesville, Wis., tapped into a deep well of anxiety over trillion-dollar deficits at home and the threat of debt-fueled calamity in Europe. Did he deliver a perfect plan? Not even he claims that. But Ryan, 41, offered a budget that began to convey the scale of change necessary to defuse the American debt bomb: Sweeping tax reform. Unprecedented spending freezes. Most important, a thorough reinvention of federal entitlements.

Ryan's plan isn't perfect? And he admitted this?  What a guy! Ryan's heroic stance, readers learn, caused fury in both parties. Republicans were forced to make  difficult choices, while "Democrats howled at the sacrilege and Ryan's refusal to raise income tax rates on the wealthy."

Ryan's is a "tough budget"  that "brought President Obama down from his cloud of happy talk about windmills and high-speed trains to acknowledge that America has a plateful of peas to choke down after its binge at the dessert bar." That's right--massive cuts in social spending are good for you, just like eating your veggies.

The crux of the whole piece comes down to this:

Ryan's dramatic proposal would not have gained any traction if it did not address a widely acknowledged problem: Over the next two generations, the U.S. government is on track to spend many tens of trillions of dollars more than it plans to raise. Unless changes are made, that will force so much borrowing that interest payments alone will sink the federal budget.

Thankfully, Time tells us, Paul Ryan has "the courage to look the future in the eye. It is a seer's work to glimpse around the corner and sound an alarm."

The piece closes by noting that this brave bold plan "wouldn't balance the federal budget until 2040. The prophet of 2011 will be 70 years old."

Wait a second. I thought this was a bold deficit-reducing roadmap to deal with the debt?

The secret to the Ryan plan--the thing media don't talk about much--is that it doesn't do the thing they say they like about it-- namely, reduce the deficit. As Paul Krugman explained in the New York Times, the projected deficit in 2020 under the Ryan plan would be

about the same as the budget office's estimate of the 2020 deficit under the Obama administration's plans. That is, Mr. Ryan may speak about the deficit in apocalyptic terms, but even if you believe that his proposed spending cuts are feasible--which you shouldn't--the Roadmap wouldn't reduce the deficit. All it would do is cut benefits for the middle class while slashing taxes on the rich.

Or as James Horney of the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities wrote of Ryan (4/8/11):

Despite proposing $4.3 trillion in what would be the most severe and wrenching budget cuts in U.S. history--two-thirds of which would come from programs for people of low or moderate incomes--the plan barely reduces deficits at all over the next decade. That's because his budget cuts are offset by $4.2 trillion in tax cuts that would go disproportionately to those at the top. In essence, at least for the next decade, this plan is far less a blueprint for addressing deficits and far more a proposal to redistribute large amounts of resources from those at the bottom to those at the top.

Dean Baker writes that "Representative Ryan's program would imply a massive upward redistribution to the one percent." Maybe that explains why he's a Time runner-up. If "The Protester" is the Person of the Year, journalistic "balance" requires saying nice things about the One Percent.

Dean Baker (12/9/11) flagged this NPR Morning Edition report today (12/9/11), and it's well worth a positivity.

In the debate over the payroll tax cut, Democrats want to pay for extending the tax break with a surtax on the wealthy. Republicans claim--usually without being challenged by reporters--that a surtax on millionaires would be an attack on job-creating small-business owners.

So NPR decided to go to GOP officials and ask to speak with these small-business-owning, millionaire job-creators. Turned out there was trouble finding any:

We wanted to talk to business owners who would be affected. So NPR requested help from numerous Republican congressional offices, including House and Senate leadership. They were unable to produce a single millionaire job creator for us to interview.

So we went to the business groups that have been lobbying against the surtax. Again, three days after putting in a request, none of them was able to find someone for us to talk to.

They did find a few wealthy business owners willing to talk--and they said their personal tax rate wasn't a factor in their hiring decisions.

Imagine if journalists did this kind of thing all the time?

News that Newt Gingrich was receiving millions of dollars to advise Freddie Mac has to be a little unsettling for at least some conservative voters, who are accustomed to demonizing the government-sponsored entities Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for causing the housing bubble, and hence the recession.

But it's not just right-wing pundits like Bill O'Reilly who are fond of blaming it all on Fannie and Freddie. Here's ABC reporter Jonathan Karl, speaking in conservative shorthand in his job as network news correspondent on This Week yesterday:

Meet this week's new front-runner. He's a good debater, man of ideas, and now Newt Gingrich is riding high in the polls, which means now the spotlight turns to all his baggage. Exhibit A: the nearly $2 million he got from Freddie Mac, a government-backed mortgage company that made so many bad loans, it helped bring the economy down.

We'll set aside the stuff about Newt Gingrich, Man of Ideas (his most recent one involving having poor children replace janitors at their schools).

The more important question: Did Freddie Mac make the bad loans that crashed the economy?

No. You can read about that here or here, among many others. (UPDATE: To be clear, Fannie/Freddie don't actually lend money to people buying homes-- as McClatchy's Kevin Hall and David Goldstein explained back in 2008).

Or read this concise explanation from Fannie/Freddie critic Dean Baker,  part of this response to a David Brooks column on this subject:

The worst junk mortgages that inflated the housing bubble to extraordinary levels were not bought and securitized by Fannie and Freddie, they were securitized by Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Lehman and the other private investment banks. These investment banks gobbled up the worst subprime and Alt-A garbage that sleaze operations like Ameriquest and Countrywide pushed on homebuyers.

The trillions of dollars that the geniuses at the private investment banks funneled into the housing market were the force that inflated the bubble to its 2006 peaks. Fannie and Freddie were followers in this story, jumping into the subprime and Alt-A market in 2005 to try to maintain market share. They were not the leaders.

So why is conservative mythology being treated as if it were fact by Jonathan Karl? Because that's what he does.

On its Sunday front-page, the Washington Post published an incredibly dishonest attack on Social Security.

Under the headline, "Social Security Adding Billions to U.S. Budget Woes," reporter Lori Montgomery reported that "Social Security passed a treacherous milestone"--a moment where the program, largely because of the recession, spent more in benefits than it took in.

What does this mean? Montgomery tells readers: "Social Security is sucking money out of the Treasury."

Montgomery complains that "fixing Social Security has largely vanished from the conversation" about the country's fiscal crisis, and politicians are "ducking the issue." She adds: "Many Democrats have largely chosen to ignore the shortfall, insisting the program is flush."

This is the kind of language one might expect in an editorial, where papers are normally free to take a position on an issue under debate. Here the Post is declaring in a news piece that politicians who do not believe Social Security is in a crisis are wrong.

Montgomery singles out Democratic Sen. Harry Reid for a fact check:

In an MSNBC interview, he added: "Social Security does not add a single penny, not a dime, a nickel, a dollar to the budget problems we have. Never has and, for the next 30 years, it won’t do that."

Such statements have not been true since at least 2009, when the cost of monthly checks regularly began to exceed payroll tax collections.

Economist Dean Baker weighed in at his Beat the Press blog (his takedown of the Post's propaganda is a must-read):

Of course Senator Reid is exactly right. The system is self-financed under the law. In 2009 it began drawing on the interest on the government bonds it held. That is exactly what the law dictates, when Social Security needs more money than it collects in taxes, it is supposed to draw on the bonds that were purchased with Social Security taxes in the past. This means it is self-financing.

Anyone in the mood for factchecking at the Post might want to focus less on Reid and more on their own reporter. Here Montgomery tries to argue that people get more out of Social Security than they put in:

The average worker spends 20 years drawing benefits. A quarter will see their 90th birthday.

As a result, the average retirees have gotten back far more in federal benefits than they paid into the system during their working life, according to research by Eugene Steuerle, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. That return is diminishing, in part because people today have paid more into the system than previous generations. But a two-earner, middle-income couple retiring this year can expect to get $913,000 in Social Security and Medicare benefits over their lifetimes, in return for $717,000 in payroll taxes.

Did you catch that? Montgomery switches gears from talking about Social Security to talking about the media's favorite underfunded safety net program, SocialSecurityandMedicare. Why? Because the research she's citing shows that the couple in question pays in more than it receives in benefits.

People who read the Washington Post know this--from a January 3, 2011, piece about this Urban Institute report:

The same hypothetical couple retiring in 2011 will have paid $614,000 in Social Security taxes, and can expect to collect $555,000 in benefits. They will have paid about 10 percent more into the system than they are likely to get back.

Montgomery needs readers to know that there are no politics involved here: "No crystal ball is necessary to predict Social Security’s future. Hard numbers tell the story." That's a pretty rich assertion coming from someone who's writing such a dishonest article.

Somewhat unhelpfully, deep into the article readers are told:

Social Security can pay full benefits through 2036. Once the trust fund is depleted, the system would rely solely on incoming taxes, and benefits would have to be cut by about 25 percent across the board.

Well that doesn't sound like much of a crisis anymore, unless you believe the money in the trust fund won't be paid back to taxpayers. Which is what Montgomery seems to be warning, since the alternatives are apparently so dire:

The $2.6 trillion Social Security trust fund will provide little relief. The government has borrowed every cent and now must raise taxes, cut spending or borrow more heavily from outside investors to keep benefit checks flowing.

As Baker pointed out, this process is exactly what the government does when someone redeems bonds. The challenge for Social Security bashers is to turn these events into a crisis--and demand that citizens accept the idea that the government should not pay them back what they are owed.

Yesterday's AP "factcheck" (9/20/11) of Barack Obama's speech about raising taxes on the super-wealthy cleverly debunked an argument that Obama didn't make. No one is saying that all millionaires pay a lower rate than their secretaries--Warren Buffett drew attention because he said he did, and there are undoubtedly other multi-millionaires in the same boat. As Dean Baker observed at Beat the Press today (9/21/11):

President Obama made a simple and true statement in his speech on the budget Monday. He said that there were millionaires and billionaires who pay tax at a lower rate than middle income families.

Many news outlets went to town to point out that on average millionaires and billionaires pay tax at a higher rate than middle income families. Of course this is not what Obama said. He was pointing out that some of the richest people in the country (Warren Buffet was his model) get most or all of their income as capital gains and therefore only pay taxes at the 15 percent capital gains rate.

Baker recommends a piece in today's New York Times (9/21/11) that was more factual than AP's factcheck:

In 2009, 238,000 households filed returns with adjusted gross incomes of at least $1 million. One-quarter of them paid an effective federal income tax rate of less than 15 percent, the data shows, and 1,470 paid no federal income tax at all....

Though the group is small, the dollars are large. For the top 400 taxpayers, the effective federal income tax rate has dropped from 29 percent in 1993 to 18 percent in 2008. The average adjusted gross income of those 400 households was $271 million. By comparison, households with $50,000 to $75,000 in income paid an effective rate of 15 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

But the AP piece has legs--a Slate article noted: "But as a general point, Buffett is wrong: In aggregate, richer earners do pay higher rates." The link goes to the AP factcheck. Again--Buffett was talking about himself and others like him. It would not seem to be a hard concept to grasp, but for whatever reason there are reporters who seem interested in protected the super-wealthy.

In other tax news: Fox's Bill O'Reilly has apparently threatened to quit working if his taxes go up. Let's hope Congress considers the enormously positive political and social effects this could have on American life.

There's a category of media criticism we've often called "Seen and Not Heard." It's usually a protest that's covered via a photo and caption, with no accompanying story to inform readers about what seems like an important issue.

I came across this today in the Washington Post (9/16/11)--the caption headline (not pictured here) is "Nurses Rally for a Tax":

A little more reporting on what they're talking about would have informed readers about an issue the Post probably doesn't spend much time discussing. (Read this paper by Dean Baker about the $150 billion a speculation tax could raise every year--you'd think deficit-obsessed media would rally around this, right?) With any luck that article would include a better headline than "Nurses Rally for a Tax."

Forget about "winning the future"--Barack Obama wants to win the center. That's what the Washington Post is telling readers (7/25/11):

Obama 'Big Deal' on Debt a Gamble to Win the Center
Advisers think securing his plan would ensure general-election victory

The Post's Zachary A. Goldfarb (who can't be held responsible for the headline) explained that Obama was making Republicans

an offer they couldn't refuse. In exchange for trillions of dollars in cuts, including to Medicare and Social Security, Republicans would have to agree to a fraction of that in increased tax revenue.

He added:

Obama's political advisers have long believed that securing such an agreement would provide an enormous boost to his 2012 campaign, according to people familiar with White House thinking. In particular, they want to preserve and improve the president's standing among political independents, who abandoned Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections and who say reining in the nation's debt is a high priority.

Perhaps this is, indeed, what White House insiders are saying. But a newspaper should point out that such ideas are hard to align with reality. As Dean Baker noted at Beat the Press:

Every poll done on this issue shows that people across the political spectrum, including Tea Party Republicans, overwhelmingly oppose cuts to Social Security and Medicare. The Post either has some polls that no one else knows about or it's just making things up.

Or it's the same old story, where the media define the "center" somewhere well to the right of center.

Yesterday New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse (6/16/11) reported on efforts in several states to get public-sector workers to increase contributions to state pension funds--or, to put it more bluntly, to take a pay cut.

Political leaders are claiming this is simply the only thing they can do--and Greenhouse helps them make their case. Right from the start, Greenhouse frames the political shift as "the most definitive sign yet that the era of generous compensation for public-sector employees is ending." Many studies have shown that public sector compensation isn't actually all that generous, and such workers might lag slightly behind their private-sector counterparts.

Greenhouse presents the case:

The Pew Center on the States estimates there is a more than $1 trillion funding gap for government workers' retirement benefits in the 50 states. At the same time, many voters resent that public employee pensions are generally better than their own.

A trillion dollars is a lot of money. But over what period of time? And is that figure correct in the first place? Dean Baker at the Center for Economic and Policy Research wrote a great paper (2/11) explaining the origins of the crisis--which is rooted mostly the housing bubble--and that the estimates of one or two trillion dollars were misleading in at least two ways: Such figures might not fully account for a recovery in stock prices (which would improve the outlook for pension funds, and thus reduce the funding gap), and expressing funding gaps as a dollar figure absent any context is rather useless.

Express the gap as a share of the economy, and things aren't so alarming. As Baker wrote:

The size of the projected state and local government shortfalls measured as a share of future gross state products appear manageable. The total shortfall for the pension funds is less than 0.2 percent of projected gross state product over the next 30 years for most states. Even in the cases of the states with the largest shortfalls, the gap is less than 0.5 percent of projected state product.

But it's Greenhouse's language near the end of the piece that might be the most galling part:

But with tales of six-figure pensions and public employees comfortably retiring in their early 50s, many lawmakers say it is outrageous that some of these workers pay nothing out of pocket toward their pensions.

Six-figure pensions are, as you'd imagine, quite rare. And workers who "pay nothing" for their pensions actually do pay something--they get some of their compensation in the form of a retirement package instead of wages. But these very exceptional cases get a lot of attention, as Dean Baker noted in his critique of Greenhouse's piece:

The media have been repeating tales circulated by right-wing and business organizations who are attacking public-sector workers and public-sector unions. In fact, the vast majority of public-sector workers do not retiree in their early 50s and do not enjoy especially generous benefits....

If the media had been doing a competent job reporting on this issue, legislators would be hearing tales of 70-year old retirees trying to get by on less than $20,000 a year. (Roughly 30 percent of public sector employees do not get Social Security.)

Journalists are supposed to challenge conventional wisdom and political rhetoric--not reinforce it. McClatchy's Kevin Hall wrote an exceptional piece on state pensions on March 6. We'd be having a very different political debate if more reporters were following his lead.

At his Beat the Press blog (4/23/11), Dean Baker caught this in the L.A. Times (4/23/11):

Congress is on its first recess since Republican leaders unveiled a plan to end the federal deficit by dramatically changing Medicare, cutting other government programs and reducing taxes.

As Baker points out, what the paper is referring to--the Paul Ryan budget proposal--does not "end the federal deficit." As he put it:

This is like saying they had a plan to fly to moon because they said they would build a rocket. The whole point is the specifics. How would they build a rocket? How would they raise taxes to meet their revenue targets?

But someone at the L.A. Times seems to like Paul Ryan's budget--at least judging by the unusually flattering (and misleading) descriptions of it that have appeared in the paper recently.

On April 11, the Times reported:

Ryan's 2012 budget proposed major changes to the longstanding federal programs.

For Medicare, seniors would receive a stipend to buy insurance on the private market. Analysts expect it would raise individual out-of-pocket health costs while making federal costs more stable and predictable.

Stabilizing costs--well, that's one way to put it. Making poor seniors pay much more for their healthcare in order to give tax breaks to the wealthy--that's another way.

About a week earlier (4/5/11), the L.A. Times debuted the Ryan budget this way:

The budget resolution unveiled Tuesday by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) would dramatically improve the nation's overall fiscal picture, reducing deficits projected in President Obama's budget and moving the federal government into surplus by 2040, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

As FAIR noted, one should be wary of claims about what the Congressional Budget Office is saying about the Ryan plan--Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post explained why:

The Post's Kessler, however, reports that this claim "seriously overstates the case," since the CBO analysis "reflects the scenarios that Ryan has concocted. There are, for instance, no real revenue estimates, just an assumption that federal revenues will remain at about 19 percent of GDP." The spending cuts imagined by Ryan are equally implausible--a "bare-bones government...not experienced since before the Great Depression."

Dean Baker's Beat the Press is the best Early Warning Media Mythbuster. It's simple: You read it every morning before you read the papers (he is up before you are, trust me) and you're well prepared to deal with the economic nonsense you'll be subjected to.

Today (4/6/11) he proposes this headline for stories about Rep. Paul Ryan's budget blueprint:

Representative Ryan Proposes Medicare Plan Under Which Seniors Would Pay Most of Their Income for Healthcare

Baker writes: "That is what headlines would look like if the United States had an independent press." He explains that the central idea in Ryan's plan--voucher-like "premium support" instead of Medicare--will leave people paying a lot for healthcare. It's a simple idea, but not one that is expressed so simply in many press accounts.

Take one Washington Post article today (4/6/11) by David A. Fahrenthold. It leads with this:

This is the essential question for Rep. Paul Ryan: Can this man really manage the hardest sales job in U.S. politics?

That might be "essential" for him, but it's of little importance to us. We need to know what the plan actually wants to do. But papers too often find space to run these kinds of man-in-the-news profiles at the expense of telling readers, as often as they should,  how policy ideas will affect them.

In the piece we learn that Ryan "is the lanky, wonky chairman of the House Budget Committee" and "an unlikely revolutionary." The Post tells us that "Ryan studied economics in college, and in Congress he has embraced the weedy issues of the federal budget." One source seems to think that "sticking to his wonky reputation would be a good idea."

Back to the sales job:

So far, the sales pitch appears to be classic Ryan. He will make his case with earnestness and a hope that a quiet explanation of budget math can swing the country in a way that previous politicians could not.

He's just trying to explain math! That's nice, since the Post article doesn't:

The vision also includes a change in the Medicare program, in which the federal government acts as a health insurer for seniors. In coming years--Ryan's plan does not apply to people who are already 55--he would shift the program so that seniors would choose a private health plan. The federal government would then provide "premium support" to help them pay for coverage.

The main math question is how much "support" seniors will get. The answer is not much, and certainly not enough to cover the skyrocketing cost of healthcare. Pointing this out should be part of every story--even ones that tell us that Paul Ryan's a "wonk."

The Washington Post's Lori Montgomery has what sounds like a pretty important story in today's paper (3/25/11). 

The headline:  

Democrats Splinter Over Strategy for Reducing Deficit
Battle Lines Drawn as More Are Willing to Put Entitlements on Table

The piece leads off:

Democrats are sharply divided over whether to tackle popular but increasingly expensive safety-net programs for the elderly, particularly Social Security. 

According to Montgomery,  a "growing number of Democratic lawmakers say they are willing to consider controversial measures such as raising the retirement age and reducing benefits for wealthier seniors."

That would be big.  Who are they? She tells us who they aren't:

But senior lawmakers such as Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) and Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) are lining up against them, arguing that tampering with Social Security would harm the elderly--as well as the political fortunes of Democrats hoping to maintain control of the White House and the Senate in 2012.

OK--that's not them. And then there's this:

And House Democrats this week signaled their intention to use Social Security as a cudgel in next year's elections by launching an ad campaign accusing 10 GOP lawmakers in swing districts of plotting to cut the program.

Not them, either. So where is this split, exactly?

Meanwhile, Third Way, the centrist Democratic think tank, plans to release a memo Friday arguing that the deficit has emerged as an uncommonly powerful political issue and that 2012 voters will reward the party that takes bold action to restrain government spending--including overhauling Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Well, that's not really noteworthy at all--it's exactly the sort of thing a right-leaning, corporate-funded Democratic think tank would say. What else?

Democrats have traditionally defended the program, but even some liberal lawmakers now say changes in the benefit structure are required. Last week, 32 Senate Democrats joined 32 Senate Republicans on a letter in support of a broad-based deficit reduction effort that includes changes to entitlement programs.

That letter is a rather bland call for Obama to engage more forcefully on deficit reduction--certainly not evidence of a "sharp divide."

She also adds:

Since the program's creation in 1935, the cost of Social Security benefits has been entirely covered by payroll taxes paid by current workers. This year, however, payroll tax revenues are projected to fall $45 billion short of covering benefits, and the problem is projected to grow as the number of retirees balloons compared with the number of working adults.

As Dean Baker points out, there have been other years when taxes did not cover benefits; the suggestion here is that this is something new. And, of course, the program's massive trust fund surplus, which is money the Social Security system loaned to the U.S. Treasury, was designed to deal with precisely this situation. By calling it a "problem" for the trust fund surplus to be used for its intended purpose, Montgomery is suggesting that it would be better if the Treasury didn't pay back its debts--which is an odd position for the Washington Post to take.

Under the headline "Lawmakers Aiming to Increase Civility," the New York Times (1/17/11) reports from the front lines of the improved, post-Tucson political climate:

And the House speaker, John A. Boehner, used the phrase ''job-destroying'' instead of "job-killing'' in reference to the Democrats' healthcare overhaul in a speech to colleagues on Saturday--a subtle but pointed shift in tone, though not in substance.

Change is in the air!

On a serious note, this would suggest a shift from a mean-sounding, unsupported-by-the-facts attack on one's opponents to a slightly less mean-sounding, still fact-free attack on the Democrats and the Obama White House. As Dean Baker wrote at his Beat the Press blog today (1/18/11), many reports quote Republican politicians saying the new healthcare law is going to destroy jobs--without any suggestion that they should provide compelling evidence that this is in fact true.

Baker points to an AP "fact check" piece that does a good job of setting the evidence down--and showing that the Republicans have very little going for them. As he put it on Saturday:

In principle, reporters have the time to investigate allegations like the claim that the healthcare bill is costing jobs. Readers, on the other hand, do not. If the Republicans can make an untrue assertion and simply have it passed along as a credible statement because reporters do not do their jobs, then we should expect them to make even stronger statements. Perhaps we will soon be reading accusations from Republicans that President Obama and the Democrats are baby killers. After all, given the current practice of the national media, they would likely just pass the charge along as a reasonable statement about events in the world.

There's been a spate of reporting and commentary attacking public workers for having lavish pensions that are bankrupting various states. CBS's 60 Minutes got into the act in December with a report (12/19/10) that was criticized for lionizing Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (obviously this came before his snow troubles) for his attacks on public workers (particularly school teachers).

The New York Times featured an article by Michael Powell on January 2 headlined "Public Workers Face Outrage as Budget Crises Grow." The piece focused primarily on these pension plans, some of which "dangle perilously close to bankruptcy." The article doesn't adequately explain why this is so, but from the headline and focus of the piece readers are left with the impression that unionized workers are getting cushy benefits. This is somewhat undercut later in the article, when it is noted, "A raft of recent studies found that public salaries, even with benefits included, are equivalent to or lag slightly behind those of private sector workers." That left one Times letter writer puzzled about why the focus was on workers' supposed perks.

One of the main criticisms of this kind of reporting, from CEPR's Dean Baker, is that it fails to account for the impact of the recession. Pension funds are invested in the stock market; a major downturn in the stock market would obviously affect the health of those funds.

When Baker made this point about the Times article, Powell wrote a response on his Times blog, chiding Baker for making an "easy" argument:

The economist Dean Baker of the liberal Center for Policy and Economic Research takes greater issue with my report. He argues that the financial crisis was the original sin, as it caused the stock market to plunge, which in turn upended public pension finance. This, he argues, is the "major cause" of the pension problem.

Mr. Baker is a careful follower of the economy, but this argument may be too easy. In New Jersey, California and Illinois, to name three states, Democratic and Republican legislatures and governors repeatedly ignored their obligation to pay into the pension systems.

Which brings us to today's papers. The Washington Post and the New York Times both have articles based on a new Census report showing that pension funds experienced huge losses due to the stock market downturn.  The Post explains that states' revenue drops "resulted largely from the big investment losses experienced by state pension funds during the worst period of the downturn."  The Times says much the same, in a piece headlined "Pension Fund Losses Hit States Hard, Data Show."

Which is another way of saying that critics like Dean Baker were right.

Reporting on various White House personnel changes, specifically the idea that Clinton administration veteran Gene Sperling will soon head the National Economic Council, the New York Times explains (1/6/11):

Mr. Sperling, much like Mr. Obama, is a liberal but with a pragmatic bent.

"Pragmatic," in corporate media code, means "centrist," because it's an article of faith in journalistic circles that smart Democrats move away from their progressive base.

The Times adds:

Some liberal activists have opposed his becoming the director because of his openness to compromise with Republicans, and because he once was a well-paid consultant to Goldman Sachs, managing a charitable program to teach skills to poor women in Africa and elsewhere.

If a piece is supposed to explain what "liberal activists" think of Sperling and others, a reporter should go ahead and ask some of them. Instead the Times makes it sound like progressives dislike Sperling's work to help poor African women.

For an actual critique of Sperling's record, check Dean Baker's blog:

The primary issue is not that Sperling got $900,000 from Goldman Sachs for part-time work, although that does look bad. The primary issue is that Sperling thought, and may still think, that the policies that laid the basis for the economic collapse were just fine.

Sperling saw nothing wrong with the stock market bubble that laid the basis for the 2001 recession. The economy did not begin to create jobs again until two and half years after the beginning of this recession, and even then it was only due to the growth of the housing bubble. Gene Sperling also saw nothing wrong with the growth of that bubble. Gene Sperling also saw nothing wrong with the financial deregulation of the Clinton years which, by the way, helped make Goldman Sachs lots of money. And he saw nothing wrong with the over-valued dollar which gave the United States an enormous trade deficit. This trade deficit undermined the bargaining power of manufacturing workers and helped to redistribute income upward.

In short, Sperling has a horrible track record of supporting policies that were bad for the country and good for Wall Street.