Last week, Washington Post reporter Dan Balz explained that Newt Gingrich was "an idea-spewing machine" and a "one-man think tank"--even warning that "a keen intellect can also translate into the appearance of intellectual superiority." Well OK.

A few days in Balz's paper, readers learned that in a recent speech Gingrich called Barack Obama a "food stamp president." Which I think must be some wonky think tank rhetoric.

Matthew Yglesias also noted that in the same appearance, Gingrich advocated a return to Jim Crow-era voting laws, saying: "But maybe we should also have a voting standard that says to vote, as a native born American, you should have to learn American history."

Well, he's definitely spewing something.

New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie is the object of intense devotion among some on the right (Glenn Beck in particular). No surprise, then, that he'd get a lot of attention for going to Washington and delivering a stern lecture about how to fix the deficit. And no surprise that he'd talk about Social Security. It has nothing to do with the deficit, but that's another matter.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank was on hand to cheer on Christie's message (2/16/11). Christie pokes fun at his weight, which apparently makes his truth-telling even more appealing:

But his physique also works to his advantage by reinforcing Christie's appeal as something other than the blow-dried politician who says whatever the voters want to hear. Christie isn't pretty, and he tells ugly truths.

And what was this ugly truth? The need to cut Social Security benefits. As Milbank put it, Christie is brave enough to "to scold both parties in Washington for their failure to talk about what must be done to solve the debt crisis. " He writes:

Christie, however, is talking about it. "You're going to have to raise the retirement age for Social Security," he said. "Whoa-ho! I just said it, and I'm still standing here. I did not vaporize into the carpeting, and I said it."

Now for this to be any kind of truth--ugly or not--it has to be, well, true. As Matthew Yglesias pointed out:

Closing the projected actuarial gap in Social Security requires some combination of more immigration, higher taxes and lower benefits. Relative to higher taxes, lower benefits tend to be preferred by richer people. And of all the different ways to reduce benefits, raising the retirement age is the one that does the most to punish the poor and demands the least sacrifice from the rich.

Robert Reich, who was once a Social Security trustee, wrote a column laying out a much easier fix--raising the cap on income subject to the Social Security tax, which in 1983 was designed to hit 90 percent of income. It no longer does that, because rich people have gotten substantially richer. Reich writes:

If we want to go back to 90 percent, the ceiling on income subject to the Social Security tax would need to be raised to $180,000.

Presto. Social Security's long-term (beyond 26 years from now) problem would be solved.

So there's no reason even to consider reducing Social Security benefits or raising the age of eligibility. The logical response to the increasing concentration of income at the top is simply to raise the ceiling.

If Christie's "ugly truth" isn't true, why does Milbank think it is? It might be because he has a record of Social Security scaremongering, writing a column in 2007 warning that Social Security was going to be "insolvent" due to the retirement of the Baby Boomers.  His response to FAIR's criticism was that he was writing about the combined effects of Social Security and Medicare--which is problematic on an entirely different level.

Chris Christie wasn't speaking the truth. But he was sending the same kind of message that people like Milbank want to hear: that workers should get benefit cuts in order to preserve tax cuts for the wealthy. It's ugly, but it's not the truth.

Reuters editor-in-chief David Schlesinger sent a memo to staffers on July 8 with the subject line "How Social Media Impacts Your Professional Life," suggesting new rules for journalists' private expressions of opinion. So far, the memo seems to have only been discussed on a German language media blog (Ruhr Barone, 7/22/10).

Jumping off from the cases of Dave Weigel and Octavia Nasr, who had to leave jobs at  WashingtonPost.com and CNN, respectively, after their online communication became controversial,  Schlesinger declares that " in a linked and searchable world, your online persona can reflect on how or even whether you can do your job." The editor writes: "If you give people cause or reason to doubt your ability to be a fair and objective journalist, that will necessarily impact on our ability to give you assignments or allow you on the file."

He then lays down in a series of bullet points "some lines we can draw"--and most of them are more or less common sense. Like, "Don't start or get involved in flame wars"--does anyone think that journalists hurling insults online is a good idea?  Or, "Remember that the published word lasts forever"--that's self-evident. And "be prepared to stand behind what you say" is good advice for anyone.

One of the bulleted points seems rather broad, however: "Don't compromise your objectivity privately if you still want to use it professionally." What does it mean to "compromise your objectivity"--expressing any opinion on a subject that you cover? That would seem to be a rather draconian prohibition. But if that's not what it means, what kind of guidance is being offered here?

The memo's emphasis on "objectivity" reminds me that Matthew Yglesias has written some insightful posts on the subject lately, reminding us that this journalistic convention arose primarily a business strategy, and it's one that depends on some fairly odd ethical principles:

Something that pops up every time old/new media tensions emerge is the view--which I find, frankly, bizarre--common in the newspaper world that pretending to not have opinions makes your work better. One underlying presumption here is the odd notion that the ideal reporter would be someone who actually doesn’t have opinions, as if "the facts" were purely transparent and could be merely observed, processed and then regurgitated into inverted pyramid form without passing through the muck of "judgment" or "thoughts about the world."

Then the secondary presumption is that you can somehow make things real by pretending. Like if you want to express judgments about politicians in conversations with your friends, that’s fine, but you have to never publish them.... Somehow keeping the views secret is supposed to be a close substitute for not having them. But of course having a secret is totally different from having nothing. The conceit that make-believe is just as good as the real thing only arises because the real thing is impossible to achieve. That should make you rethink why you would deem it desirable, but instead leads to the odd conclusion that the best journalist is a consistently dishonest one.

Here's the full text of the Reuters memo:

All –

Two recent incidents in the United States have shown how hard it is to keep our social media personae separate from our professional lives.

First David Weigel had to resign from the Washington Post after inflammatory comments he made on a supposedly closed journalists' mailing list were made public. Then, CNN fired its senior editor for Middle Eastern Affairs, Octavia Nasr, after she tweeted "Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah... One of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot", a comment that immediately called into question her ability to cover her subject objectively.

Now I don’t want to get involved in other organisations' personnel issues. But I've repeatedly said and believe very strongly that in a linked and searchable world, your online persona can reflect on how or even whether you can do your job.

If you give people cause or reason to doubt your ability to be a fair and objective journalist, that will necessarily impact on our ability to give you assignments or allow you on the file.

We are in the early days of social media and there is no question that the journalistic landscape is changing. But there are some lines we can draw:

* Don't start or get involved in flame wars--arguments using heated language and personal attacks. As a journalist, rely on facts and reasoned arguments, not on invective. I don't care how angry you might be at a person or a company or even a country; just don't do it.

* Don't compromise your objectivity privately if you still want to use it professionally.

* Remember that the published word lasts forever and can go everywhere. A tweet by a journalist is simply not the same as a joke shared over the dinner table.

* Anything that can be forwarded probably will be at some point, so be prepared to stand behind what you say--its content and its tone.

Thanks/das

David Schlesinger
Editor In Chief, Reuters

Reading Wall Street Journal reporter Gary Fields' "point that a family making slightly over $250,000 doesn’t necessarily feel all that 'rich' when it comes to facing a tax hike from Barack Obama," Matthew Yglesias (Think Progress, 4/17/09) dubs his story "The Not-So-Compelling Plight of the Somewhat Rich" and notes that "what the story doesn't do is put this issue in the appropriate context of what an increase in the marginal rate really implies":

If you raise taxes on "people making over $250,000," that means an increase only in the 250,001st dollar and onward. It's not, in other words, as if a guy earning $249,999 and a guy earning $250,001 will be paying radically different amounts of taxes. In other words, though if you're earning $5 million a year, Obama's plan really will saddle you with a big tax increase, a person who's earning $260,000 and feels that he's facing a basically middle-class economic situation is only going to be facing a very small tax increase. And however much our $260,000 a year guy may feel not so rich, surely he can agree that $260,000 is a lot more than $130,000 or $65,000 so it's hardly absurd that he might pay a slightly higher rate.

After writing that, "even if you grant the premise of the story there's no actual problem here," Yglesias goes on to suggest ideas no career-minded corporate reporter would dare print:

That said, I wouldn't have a problem with launching a new, slightly higher rate, starting at $500,000 and a higher one starting at $1 million and another at $2 million another at $4 million another at $8 million and another at $16 million. I don’t see any reason to think that the progressivity of the scale should max out at $250,000 when obviously there's a huge difference between someone earning that much money and someone earning 10 times that amount.

While big media generally are terrified at the thought of such policies, a Gallup poll from this April 6-9 has 60 percent of respondents considering that "upper-income people" are "paying too little" federal taxes. (Fully 67 percent said the same of "Corporations.")

For more on corporate media having difficulty with the concept of marginal tax rates, see FAIR Action Alert: "CBS Cheats on Tax Coverage" (9/22/08).

Washington Post reporter Paul Kane proffered what blogger Matthew Yglesias aptly called a "full-throated defense of journalism-as-stenography." Kane had been criticized by Media Matters that he had quoted Sen. Olympia Snowe (R.-Maine) as saying that Barack Obama's use of the filibuster-avoiding budget reconciliation tool would make it "infinitely more difficult to bridge the partisan divide" without noting that Snowe had backed budget reconciliation when it was used by George W. Bush. Asked in a WashingtonPost.com chat to defend himself against this criticism, Kane responded:

I'm sorry, what’s to defend?

Someone tell Media Matters to get over themselves and their overblown ego of righteousness. We reported what Olympia Snowe said. That’s what she said. That’s what Republicans are saying. I really don’t know what you want of us. We are not opinion writers whose job is to play some sorta gotcha game with lawmakers.

It's a little dismaying that we have to explain this to professional journalists, but what we want them to do is to examine official claims and put them in context. It's not clear why society would need the kind of institution that Kane thinks he works for; if we want to find out what Olympia Snowe said, we can sign up for her RSS feed.

See Extra!: "Meet the Stenographers: Press Shirks Duty to Scrutinize Official Claims" (11-12/04), by Steve Rendall.

Think Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias (2/25/09) hits the Washington Post for "standing behind the claim that up is down if George Will says that is"--and then spreads some of the blame around:

Meanwhile, one of the Post's main competitors in the world of papers with potential to attract a national audience is the New York Times. So faced with a humiliating abrogation of basic responsibilities by its competitor, does the Times take the opportunity to pour some salt in the wounds? No! Instead, out comes Andrew Revkin with a false-equivalence article painting Will with the same brush as Al Gore. Will's sin is to say that the world is not getting warmer when, in fact, it is. Gore's sin was to say that warming is happening (it is) and to illustrate the problems with this trend by referring to a chart that Revkin deems unduly alarmist but that Gore found in the New York Times. Hm.

See Extra!: "Journalistic Balance as Global Warming Bias" (11-12/04) by Jules Boykoff and Maxwell Boykoff.