Writing about Newt Gingrich's presidential bid on the New York Times' Caucus blog (5/10/11), Matt Bai seems to confuse GOP rhetoric for fact as he suggest that, when it comes to marriage vows, Republicans are generally known for walking the line:

Mr. Gingrich, a bit of a rogue in his personal life, has never been a favorite of his party's powerful social conservatives, who tend to think of scandalous affairs as the purview of Democrats, and maybe Rudy Giuliani.

In order to maintain a tired and inaccurate cliché, Bai has to have forgotten John McCain, Henry Hyde, David Vitter, Larry Craig, John Ensign, Mark Sanford and Tom Delay, just to name some of the most prominent married Republicans who have had scandalous affairs. (See Extra!, 1/09.)

This is the sort of off kilter, numbingly conventional analysis we have come to expect from the Times political writer who routinely replaces reality with cockeyed conventional wisdom on deficits, Social Security, and the need for the Democratic Party to move to the right, to name just a few.

Today in the New York Times Paul Krugman (1/10/11) suggests that we not pretend that "both sides" are responsible for toxic political rhetoric:

Where's that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let's not make a false pretense of balance: It's coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It's hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be "armed and dangerous" without being ostracized; but Rep. Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the GOP.

...Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you'll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won't hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at the Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O'Reilly, and you will.

Unfortunately, that false balance is not just coming from the right, but appears all across the media. On Meet the Press (1/9/11), NBC's David Gregory rounded up examples of demonizing rhetoric:

Let's be honest, there is a demonization.  It happens amongst all of you, it happens in the public, it happens in the polarized aspects of the press, a demonization of the other side.  Whether it's a congressman saying, "You lie," from the House floor, whether it's a Democrat who literally shoots the cap-and-trade bill in a campaign advertisement.  Or your former colleague, Alan Grayson from Florida, compared Republicans to the Taliban.  I mean, this kind of vitriol on both sides does contribute to that, that demonization.

Dan Balz of the Washington Post (1/10/11):

Politicians in both parties have said this is not a time for one side to try to score political points against the other over who bears responsibility for these conditions, though there is plenty of finger-pointing in the blogosphere and on Twitter. The reality is everyone bears some responsibility, from politicians to political operatives to the media to ordinary Americans.

New York Times (1/10/11):

Not since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 has an event generated as much attention as to whether extremism, antigovernment sentiment and even simple political passion at both ends of the ideological spectrum have created a climate promoting violence.

New York Times' Matt Bai leads off with examples from "both sides," and in so doing equates one of the most prominent national figures in the Republican Party (and a regular contributor to the GOP house organ Fox News Channel) with some unnamed diarist from Arizona who didn't support a recent Gifford vote:

Within minutes of the first reports Saturday that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, and a score of people with her had been shot in Tucson, pages began disappearing from the Web. One was Sarah Palin's infamous "cross hairs" map from last year, which showed a series of contested Congressional districts, including Ms. Giffords', with gun targets trained on them. Another was from Daily Kos, the liberal blog, where one of the congresswoman's apparently liberal constituents declared her "dead to me" after Ms. Giffords voted against Nancy Pelosi in House leadership elections last week.

To his credit, Bai spends significant time recounting violent rhetoric from Republican and conservative leaders--likely because there is just a lot more of that to write about. But he offers an excuse for their behavior:

It’s not that such leaders are necessarily trying to incite violence or hysteria; in fact, they're not. It’s more that they are so caught up in a culture of hyperbole, so amused with their own verbal flourishes and the ensuing applause, that--like the bloggers and TV hosts to which they cater--they seem to lose their hold on the power of words.

Bai adds:

None of this began last year, or even with Mr. Obama or with the Tea Party; there were constant intimations during George W. Bush's presidency that he was a modern Hitler or the devious designer of an attack on the World Trade Center, a man whose very existence threatened the most cherished American ideals.

Yes, there are people who called Bush a "modern Hitler," or believed he had some role in the 9/11 attacks. Those people are generally not given talkshows, and cannot be found in positions of power in the Democratic Party.

New York Times reporter Matt Bai has tried to argue that the public is really worried about the budget deficit. He's tried to find polling evidence to show the public favors some form of budget-cutting austerity, which usually leads him to focus on numbers that support his argument while ignoring those that run counter to his political preference.

He's back at it today (11/5/10), in a piece warning Republicans to not confuse their midterm for some sort of mandate. He tries to make a case that the voters were really with the Tea Party on some key issues:

All of this implies that Republicans think the voters are with their most ardent activists on the economic issues of the day. And there is a persuasive case to be made that they're right about this, at least as far as the conservative critique of federal spending is concerned.

In exit polling in November, 56 percent of voters said government was doing too much that should be left to the private sector and individuals, compared with 38 percent who thought it should be doing more.

It's important to remember that this is a poll of 2010 midterm voters--a subset of the total voting population, and one that would skew Republican, given the electoral outcome. It's hard to draw many conclusions from such a vague idea anyway, but Bai has better evidence:

In a Pew poll from December, 70 percent of voters said they saw the federal deficit as a major problem that needed to be addressed now--a powerful show of support for the Tea Party argument.

Huh. When  I clicked on that link--which is a different Pew poll--I saw that when people were asked what was more important, jobs or the deficit, jobs won 45-22. And the other Pew poll--an exit poll of voters--showed "cutting spending to reduce the deficit" running neck and neck with "spending to create jobs." I don't see any of that supporting "the Tea Party argument," as best I can understand what that argument might be.

Looking at other polls doesn't much help--if you scan some of the summaries at PollingReport.com, for instance, you see surveys like a recent CBS poll where voters express far more concern about jobs (56 percent) than the deficit (4 percent).

Bai's reporting style seems reminiscent of John Stossel. He starts with a premise--some Tea Party ideas are popular, people want to attack the deficit-- and cherrypicks evidence to support that conclusion. So he can write things like "voters endorsed the Tea Party ideal of a radically more parsimonious federal government" and point to evidence that maybe--if you squint really hard--supports that conclusion, while rejecting substantial evidence to the contrary.

As Peter Hart noted earlier, New York Times political reporter Matt Bai has a piece today (12/1/10) critical of Barack Obama for being "loath to publicly disown his base." Bai writes of Obama: "Since he isn't willing to break publicly with liberals, independent and conservative voters tend to see him as a tool of the left."

You know, when your chief of staff refers to progressives as "fucking retarded," your press secretary denounces the "professional left" and your senior adviser says that such critics are "insane";  when your vice president tells the left to "stop whining" and you yourself urge them to "wake up"--I'd say you've broken rather publicly with liberals.

Presumably all this hippie-bashing is mainly done for the benefit of journalists like Matt Bai.  It's a shame he wasn't paying attention.

New York Times reporter Matt Bai uses the debt commission (12/1/10) to ask whether Barack Obama will finally stand up to the liberal base of the Democratic party. As the headline puts it, "Debt-Busting Issue May Force Obama Off Fence."

You see, in Bai's world, Obama was never much of a Clinton-style "triangulator," which is a big problem:

Part of the contrast Mr. Obama sought to draw with Hillary Rodham Clinton during the 2008 campaign was that you would never catch him triangulating against his friends for political gain. It was a point of pride for Mr. Obama that he would have no so-called Sister Souljah moments, even when he vehemently disagreed with liberals.

The problem with this stance, two years into his presidency, is that it seems to have put Mr. Obama in something of a box. Since he isn't willing to break publicly with liberals, independent and conservative voters tend to see him as a tool of the left. And since he generally won't do exactly what the left wants him to do, he ends up with very little gratitude from his own party.

Yes, except for escalating the Afghan War, blinking on the tax cut debate, doing nothing on card check or immigration, announcing a pay freeze for federal workers, taking a weak position on climate change, failing to close Guantanamo, leaving intact most of Bush's "war on terror" policies and junking the public option, Bai is right--Obama has never really told the party base to stuff it.

And because this is a Matt Bai article, he feels obligated to write this:

The national debt is near the top of any list of voter concerns at the moment.

ANY poll? The first one I found, from CBS News (11/11/10), found 4 percent of respondents thought the debt was the first order of business for the next Congress--leading Times columnist Paul Krugman to write a blog post (11/14/10) headlined, "No, Really--Nobody Cares About the Deficit."

And as we pointed out a few months ago, the Times news section arrived at a different conclusion on September 16:

The economy and jobs are increasingly and overwhelmingly cited by Americans as the most important problems facing the country, while the deficit barely registers as a topic of concern when survey respondents were asked to volunteer their worries.

Are Times factcheckers allowed to skip Matt Bai's articles?

New York Times reporter Matt Bai apparently really, really cares about the budget deficit-- so much so that he's done reporting suggesting that the rest of us care about it as much as he does. He's also demonstrated his concern by writing an outrageously misleading article about Social Security and the deficit (the Times had to correct one of the article's more misleading assertions; Bai falsely claimed that a Democratic congressmember called the Social Security trust fund "make-believe money").

Today (11/24/10)  Bai is tackling the furor over TSA airport screening, which is apparently proof that Americans in the age of Obama distrust Big Government. You see, liberals interpreted the elections of 2006 and 2008 as proof that Americans are "ready to embrace a more expansive government." I don't recall that being anyone's rallying cry, but never mind. Bai's point is that even in liberal circles there is an understanding that Americans prefer small government, deficit-cutting:

Consider a survey last month conducted by the Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg for the liberal Campaign for America’s Future, which the group has cited to buttress its case that voters are prone to accept liberal arguments. Even in this poll, 76 percent of voters agreed that the top priority in Washington should be to "reduce the size of government and the deficit." And a plurality of voters (50 percent) said they were more worried about government spending and taxes than they were about government failing to invest in job creation.

Bai could be referring to this poll from October, but it's more likely that he is referring to this one, which was released this month. Neither one really delivers the message as clearly as Bai is claiming.

Did an overwhelming majority of Americans really think that cutting spending and attacking the deficit should be the top priority? Not really. In the poll, respondents were asked to react to three very leading statements.  76 percent agreed with this:

Politicians have spent the country into bankruptcy, with federal deficits going through the ceiling. This debt held by China weakens the country and the economy. Priority number one is to reduce the size of government and the deficit. We have to balance the budget by making major cuts in big spending programs now, not later. That will free up our citizens and bring America back.

But when the same people were asked whether we need to "put the middle class first," 84 percent agreed. And 80 percent agreed with this: "To get America back, we need a government that works for middle class Americans -- fostering good jobs and education." It's hard to draw many conclusions from those results, especially since the deficit does not emerge as voters' top priority when they're asked to rank their priorities in other polls.

And if panic over the deficit was a top priority, then why is there this headline in the poll report : "Mandate: fighting for middle class/jobs wins over spending/deficits."  That was how the pollsters labeled their finding that 52 percent of voters wanted politicians in Washington fighting special interests and corporations and working to create jobs. 42 percent wanted someone to rein in spending. A question about whether the government should "do more" or is "doing too much" was basically a wash. And more voters favored rebuilding infrastructure over cutting the deficit (52-42).

Of course, Matt Bai can use the TSA controversy to make any argument he wants. But you shouldn't cite a poll to make your point when that poll offers ample evidence that undermines your argument.

Matt Bai (New York Times, 11/9/10), as a standard-issue corporate media political analyst, sees the Democrats being moved to the right as an upside to their disastrous showing in the '10 midterms. But he's worried that the party isn't learning the obvious lesson.

If there was any sliver of hope for moderate Democrats on a catastrophic midterm election night, it was their assumption that now, at least, the party’s leaders would have to focus on recapturing the political center.... A lot of Democrats took it for granted that these defeats marked a repudiation of the speaker and of the party’s liberal agenda....

That is not, however, how Ms. [Nancy] Pelosi's liberal supporters see it. Even before the votes were cast, a counterargument was already taking hold — that it was the centrist Democrats, and not the liberals in Congress, who had imperiled the party’s majority....

The theory here, embraced by a lot of the most prominent liberal bloggers and activists, is that centrist Democrats doomed the party when they blocked liberals in Congress from making good on President Obama's promise of bold change. Specifically, they refused to adopt a more populist stance toward business and opposed greater stimulus spending and a government-run healthcare plan. As a result, the thinking goes, frustrated voters rejected the party for its timidity.

There are a few strange things about this argument, even beyond the contention that American voters--41 percent of whom described themselves as "conservative" this year, compared with 32 percent in 2006--somehow deem Congress to be insufficiently liberal.

Aside from the fact that "American voters" are not the same people from one election to the next, and the policies pursued by the party in power influence who those voters are, Bai misses a key point: The goal of a bigger stimulus bill would not be to make voters say, "A big stimulus bill? That sounds like something that accords with my philosophy of government.  I'll vote for that party!" The goal of a bigger stimulus bill, rather, would be to boost the economy, which history indicates is good for the party in power.

Likewise, the goal of a single-payer healthcare system or a robust public option is to deliver cheaper healthcare to more people--it's the effective delivery of healthcare, not the ideology behind the system that delivers it, that would be rewarded by voters.

New York Times political analyst Matt Bai writes in a post-election piece (11/4/10):

A powerful force in the party, Ms. [Sarah] Palin represents an aggrieved, anti-elitist strain of conservatism that goes back to Richard M. Nixon’s Silent Majority. It is a rural conservative impulse, rooted most firmly in the South and West, that equates liberal government with tyranny and anti-Americanism.

Matt Bai was born in 1968--perhaps not coincidentally, the year Nixon was elected president, and a year before he gave his "Silent Majority" speech that Palin's politics "go back to." But angry right-wing populism has been a major strand in American politics even before Bai was born--or before Nixon was born, for that matter--linking together the Know Nothings of the pre-Civil War era and the Ku Klux Klan in the war's aftermath, the followers of Father Coughlin in the Great Depression, Joe McCarthy in the era that bears his name and the John Birch Society soon after.

Not that all of this needs to be mentioned in an article speculating about Sarah Palin's response to the '10 midterms--but it would be nice if you got the sense that New York Times political analysts understood that history started before they were born.

New York Times reporter Matt Bai had a long piece Sunday (10/31/10) that argued that Tea Partiers are really the right-wing version of Bush-era MoveOn activists and bloggers (the "netroots"). Bai writes of "the larger forces that unify many self-styled activists on both the left and right," and suggests that "the recent uprisings on both ends of the ideological spectrum shouldn't be viewed as opposing trends, but rather as points on the same cultural continuum."

The only way to pull this off with a straight face is to decide that political beliefs that motivate both groups are not worth inspecting or critiquing. Thus  activists who coalesced around opposing the war in Iraq are basically no different than Tea Party activists who believe Barack Obama is a socialist. (As the Tea Party activist Bai profiles puts it: "He's a socialist.... There's no question. He's a statist.")

In a more rational media system, one would point out that one group was motivated by an actual policy decision--one that  killed hundreds of thousands of people and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. The other group believes Barack Obama adheres to a political philosophy that he most certainly does not.

The ability to see these two political movements as being roughly comparable requires the suspension of critical judgment--an example of media "false balance" of the most extreme variety.  At one point Bai writes: "Ideology, of course, presents an unbridgeable chasm between the progressives and Tea Partiers." So does reality. Journalism that seeks to muddy up this inescapable truth does a great disservice.

The New York Times (9/16/10) points out in a write-up of its new poll :

The economy and jobs are increasingly and overwhelmingly cited by Americans as the most important problems facing the country, while the deficit barely registers as a topic of concern when survey respondents were asked to volunteer their worries.

Huh. The New York Times has spent a lot of time telling readers that the public cared very deeply about this, as FAIR noted in a June 24 Action Alert, which asked the paper to provide evidence for assertions like Times reporter Matt Bai's suggestion (6/17/10) that "the federal deficit has emerged as a chief concern for voters," or for the Times' report (6/18/10) that the Senate's failure to pass a spending bill was evidence that lawmakers, "reacting to rising public concern, have grown reluctant to vote for measures that add to federal red ink."

Matt Bai has a piece in the New York Times today (9/9/10) explaining how Barack Obama squandered an opportunity to make fundamental changes to the American economy. One claim in the piece jumps out; after explaining that large infrastructure projects--rail lines, broadband, etc.-- are "things that only an active government could realistically do," Bai claims:

Getting such projects done justified some tolerable level of public debt, proponents argued, just as a family might consider a steep mortgage on a home in a high-quality school district to be an investment in the children's success.

And yet, little was achieved by way of investing in 21st-century infrastructure, largely because the public never seemed open to the idea of huge new spending.

The public doesn't like the idea of spending more on infrastructure? Really? Bloomberg (12/10/09) had a poll on this last year, and its write-up led with this finding:

Americans want their government to create jobs through spending on public works, investments in alternative energy or skills training for the jobless.

And later:

Two-thirds of Americans back boosting spending on infrastructure. Six of 10 also support more spending on alternative energy to stimulate job growth, another measure Obama announced.

"The best thing we could do is take some public money to rebuild our infrastructure and improve it," says poll respondent Richard Kellaway, 75, a Unitarian Universalist minister who lives in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Unemployed people "could be put to work in a matter of days."

But maybe Bai knows about a national referendum that was conducted that we somehow didn't hear about.

New York Times reporter Matt Bai writes a piece today (8/26/10) singling out a Democratic congressmember who talks about cuts to the federal budget. This is presumably an unusual, newsworthy thing worth writing about--hence the headline, "One Liberal Voice Dares to Say, Cut the Budget." It's worth pointing out that other Democrats have proposed ideas like cutting military spending without getting points for bravery.

The point of the piece is to attack Social Security. Bai cheers on the White House deficit commission, which he argues has been unfairly attacked by liberals who are "mobilizing to discredit the panel's work" and "pre-emptively oppose the panel's findings." These critics don't get much time to explain themselves, because Bai needs space to malign their ideas as an attack on bipartisanship. As Bai quips: "In other words, the two parties might actually work together on something. They must be stopped!"

Then Bai goes on to explain how Social Security actually works--and turns in a remarkably misleading explanation:

The coalition bases its case on the idea that Social Security is actually in fine fiscal shape, since it has amassed a pile of Treasury Bills--often referred to as IOUs--in a dedicated trust fund. This is true enough, except that the only way for the government to actually make good on these IOUs is to issue mountains of new debt or to take the money from elsewhere in the federal budget, or perhaps impose significant tax increases--none of which seem like especially practical options for the long term. So this is sort of like saying that you're rich because your friend has promised to give you 10 million bucks just as soon as he wins the lottery.

Getting the government to pay out benefits from the money it has collected from citizens is like wishing your friend wins the lottery?

Economist Dean Baker points out that that Treasury bills are not "often referred to as IOUs." Some in the media and some Republicans do that, yes, but it is actually unusual to speak of Treasury bonds this way.

So a New York Times reporter thinks expecting Social Security benefits is like believing you'll win the lottery, because the trust fund is really a "pile" of "IOUs." And he's writing this in the news section.

In his New York Times column on Monday (8/9/10), headlined "The Flimflam Man," Paul Krugman took aim at Republican Rep. Paul Ryan, who has emerged as the GOP's big thinker on budgets:

One depressing aspect of American politics is the susceptibility of the political and media establishment to charlatans. You might have thought, given past experience, that D.C. insiders would be on their guard against conservatives with grandiose plans. But no: As long as someone on the right claims to have bold new proposals, he’s hailed as an innovative thinker. And nobody checks his arithmetic.

Krugman explains that Ryan's plan--big tax cuts, big cuts in spending--would actually not slash the deficit at all; it would make it bigger. And his tax "cuts" would really be tax hikes for everyone but the most well-off.

Krugman slammed "self-styled centrists" who "want to pretend, in the teeth of overwhelming evidence, that there are still people in the G.O.P. making sense.... The Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future."

Now turn to today's Times, and a piece from Matt Bai. The subject is the very same Paul Ryan, whom Bai calls the "Republican star of the moment" thanks to his budget blueprint, which is termed "unusually austere."

Bai references Krugman's criticism, but then tells readers:

Let's leave aside for now the debate over the viability of the road map, which, as a practical matter, doesn't stand a chance of being enacted as is, anyway. The more pertinent question is whether Mr. Ryan is the kind of guy who just wants to make a point--or whether his road map represents the starting point in what could be a serious negotiation about entitlements and spending.

Well, why is that the pertinent question? The roadmap is presented as Ryan's ideas about what the government should do. Why would you ignore what it says and pretend that it represents a possible "starting point" for doing something different?

Because apparently Obama needs a " useful nemesis on the right," Ryan's not "blindly partisan," he's friendly with some Democrats--and, perhaps most importantly:

Mr. Ryan appears to be the rare kind of guy who actually dreams of making Social Security solvent, rather than of using the issue to bludgeon opponents or get himself on television. While his own proposal for private investment accounts might be a deal-breaker for the White House, he identifies Social Security as an area where there is "clearly room for compromise" and says of his road map generally, "I'm trying to get the discussion to an adult level."

As Tim Fernholz pointed out at Tapped (8/12/10), though, Ryan's plan would do nothing to improve Social Security's financial outlook:

This Center for Budget and Policy Priorities analysis notes that "because the plan would divert large sums from Social Security to private accounts, it would leave the program facing insolvency in about 30 years, just as under current law." A warning, then, to Bai: Appearances can be deceiving.

Krugman took to his Times blog to critique this Times piece, which is worth a read.

The lesson of the Shirley Sherrod story would seem to be a simple one: A conservative blogger with a history of promoting inaccurate, racially charged stories published another one, and people in the media (not to mention the White House) fell for it--again.

But New York Times reporter Matt Bai wrote a piece in the paper's Week in Review section (7/25/10) that sought to make things a lot more complicated. Under the headline, "Race: Still Too Hot to Touch," Bai laments that the country is still not having a meaningful discussion about race:

In many ways, Ms. Sherrod's ordeal followed a depressingly familiar pattern in American life, in which anyone who even tries to talk about race risks public outrage and humiliation.

We might have hoped that the election of a black president would somehow make the subject less sensitive and volatile, in the way that John F. Kennedy's election seemed to allay the last, lingering tension between American Catholics and the country’s Protestant establishment. But as the week's events made clear, Mr. Obama's presence alone isn't going to deliver us from a racial dialogue characterized by cable-TV conflagration--and it may even complicate the conversation.

It's hard to square Bai's story with reality. It seemed to me that the consensus view of her speech after Breitbart's lie was exposed was that it was a thoughtful examination of some potentially uncomfortable ideas. Even people like Bob Schieffer and Andersen Cooper--hardly ones to court controversy or throw elbows--were criticizing Breitbart's stunt.

The real lesson to be drawn is about a gullible corporate media--not some grand lesson about the problems in "American life." Perhaps that's why some writers try too hard to make it into something else.

Thankfully, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne does a good job today:

The traditional media are so petrified of being called "liberal" that they are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment editors.

And Dionne points to the manufactured "controversy" over the New Black Panther Party (which the Post's ombud believed deserved more media coverage): "It was aimed at doing what the doctored video Breitbart posted set out to do: convince Americans that the Obama administration favors blacks over whites."

That's the real story here--that right-wing outlets are eager to push these tall tales, and that centrist outlets often give them additional coverage for fear of being considered too left-wing.

Senate Democrats are having trouble passing a spending bill that would, among other things, extend unemployment benefits and deliver much-needed financial aid to cash-starved states. Today the New York Times (6/18/10) explained the legislative logjam this way:

The spending and tax measure has become caught up in intensifying politics around deficit spending as members of both parties, reacting to rising public concern, have grown reluctant to vote for measures that add to federal red ink.

Reacting to public concern? As we've noted before, there is far more public concern that the government is not doing enough to stimulate job growth. Concern for the deficit comes much further down, when citizens are asked to rank them. (See some of those polls here.) So where reporters are getting this idea is somewhat mysterious (and let's not forget that no one should ascribe politicians' votes as evidence that they're "reacting" to public sentiment).

A similar idea was expressed in yesterday's Times (6/17/10) by Matt Bai, who argued that anti-corporate populism ("the oppressed are the poor, and the oppressors are the corporate interests who exploit them") is out of fashion, a quaint worldview that "made sense 75 years ago."

These days it's Tea Party populism that has taken hold: "This new American populism is why the federal deficit has emerged as a chief concern for voters."

Again, arguments like this would make a lot more sense if there was more evidence that the deficit is a "chief concern for voters."