Economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 6/20/09) has requested you try to "imagine a front-page Washington Post article that talked about how the United States had a shortage of small cars." He reasonable assumes such a piece would address "the limited capacity of the various small-car assembly plants" and "discuss the amount of lead time needed to build new plants. It would also talk about the need to raise small-car prices because it is so much more profitable to build big cars": Imagine that the article never once mentioned the possibility of importing small cars. That's the front-page Washington Post [...]
Jun
03
2009
Wall St. Cheerleaders 'Abandon Economic Reporting'
Looking at last week's "whole series of bad reports on the state of the economy," Dean Baker of Beat the Press and the Center for Economic and Policy Research tells readers of London's Guardian (6/1/09) if they think "these reports might have led to gloomy news stories," such assessments are to be found "not in the U.S. media": "The folks who could not see an $8 trillion housing bubble are still determined to find the silver lining in even the worst economic news": For example, National Public Radio told listeners that the new home sales figure reported for April was [...]
Jun
01
2009
D.C.'s 'Fox on 15th Street' Still Hates Unions
By 1 Comment
Spotting a May 31 Washington Post column "that blamed the United Auto Workers for the bankruptcy of Chrysler and GM," Dean Baker declares (Beat the Press, 5/31/09) that the D.C. daily "showed yet again why it is known as "Fox on 15th Street": So what if Toyota has managed to profitably run a plant in California represented by the UAW for more than two decades? So what if wages of unionized autoworkers in profitable car companies in Europe and Japan are the same or higher than in the United States? So what if the proximate cause of the bankruptcy was [...]
May
28
2009
NYT's Bad Stats Push for European Layoffs
Blogging (Beat the Press, 5/26/09) about how the "New York Times Cooks the Books on Europe's Auto Industry," economist Dean Baker catches the paper "touting the layoffs in the U.S. auto industry as a virtue"–since "it notes that auto industry employment in Europe is remaining steady at around 2.3 million, while it is falling to close to 700,000 in the U.S.": The article and accompanying chart imply that Europe is delaying an inevitable adjustment. The case is far from clear, in spite of the NYT's best effort to make the case. The chart shows that Europe produces about 18 million [...]
May
09
2009
Employee Free Choice for 'Very Slow Reporters'
By 2 Comments
Asking "Can We Get Reporters to Stop Saying That EFCA Takes Away the Secret Ballot?" Dean Baker bluntly states (Beat the Press, 5/7/09) that "it's not true." Even though this is one of the "most often repeated lines of the opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act"–"that it will deny workers the right to vote decide on a union with a secret-ballot election"–Baker explains exactly how "that is wrong, wrong and wrong": First of all, workers do not currently enjoy that right. Maybe that should be repeated a few times in case there are any very slow reporters reading: Workers [...]
May
04
2009
NYT Economics Reporting Still Failing Along
By 1 Comment
While asserting the extremely simple journalistic principle that "Past Records Should Matter In Assessing Views on the Economy," Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 5/2/09) is willing to admit that everyone makes mistakes, but the odds are that anyone who couldn't see an $8 trillion housing bubble is not a really good person to rely upon for predictions on the economy. Joe Nocera gives a quick survey of some radically conflicting forecasts in his [New York Times] column today. It's worth noting that all the optimists completely the missed the bubble and the impact that its collapse would have on the [...]
Apr
22
2009
Empty Economic Rhetoric at the NYT
Asking a simple question about a large issue–"How Do Trillion Dollar Bank Bailouts Fit With 'Free-Market Fundamentalism?'"–Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 4/19/09) tells his readers that "the obvious answer is, they don't"–since, "if you are a free-market fundamentalist, then you are absolutely opposed to bank bailouts" that "involve taking taxpayer dollars and handing them to banks that would go belly up if left to the market": However simple this distinction might seem, it somehow escaped the NYT, which discussed the policies promoted in recent decades as though they could be plausibly described as "free-market fundamentalism." It should be perfectly apparent [...]
Mar
30
2009
Options to the Latest 'Absolutely Essential' Bank Plan
Looking back over how corporate "media abandoned any pretense of objectivity in pushing the original TARP back in the fall," when "they eagerly pushed the story that the economy would collapse if the TARP did not pass," Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 3/28/09) recalls how "media never told the public that the Fed had the ability to takeover the banks in the event of a national emergency and it had plans to do exactly this back in the early '80s debt crisis." Which makes it somewhat unsurprising that "the new line that being pushed to argue that there is no [...]
Mar
27
2009
Media's Deficit Hawk Fixation Yields. . . Record Deficits
Listening to "budget hawk" media figures who urge President Obama "to commit to spending cuts and/or tax increases" because they are "upset that the deficits projected for 2013 or 2019 are too large," Dean Baker (TPM Café, 3/25/09) finds it especially annoying to hear the whining from this group of deficit hawks since their whining in prior years helped to drown out serious discussion of the dangers posed by an $8 trillion housing bubble. While some of us were yelling at the top of our lungs about the imminent disaster that would hit the economy when the housing bubble burst, [...]
Feb
23
2009
NYT: Not Spending Is Not Saving
Economics blogger Dean Baker asserts that "about the only thing that readers can learn from an article on Japan in the business section today" is that "The New York Times Doesn't Like Japan" (Beat the Press, 2/22/09). Among the piece's "variety of complaints about Japan's economy, many of which are contradictory," is "the standard line about people not spending because deflation means that goods will be cheaper in the future if they wait"–which Baker debunks by noting that, with "deflation…generally less than 1.0 percent," a Japanese shopper "considering buying a $600 television would save approximately 50 cents by delaying the [...]
Feb
04
2009
Media: What's This Spending Doing in My Stimulus?
By 2 Comments
There's a trope that you often see in corporate media discussions of the stimulus plan: Yeah, but do you really want to spend money on that? It may have started with the misrepresented contraceptive plan–which seemed to be grounded in a traditional media fascination/embarrassment at anything involving sex–but now it's moved on to anything that…well, it's hard to say exactly what's objectionable about some of the programs media are objecting to. Take this confused passage from an L.A. Times editorial (2/2/09): But too many of the items have little apparent connection with economic growth–witness the nearly $5 billion for prevention, [...]
