The fact that Paul Krugman writes columns for the New York Times means that the paper's readers are occasionally treated to a good media criticism--like today (2/5/10). He writes:

These days it's hard to pick up a newspaper or turn on a news program without encountering stern warnings about the federal budget deficit. The deficit threatens economic recovery, we’re told; it puts American economic stability at risk; it will undermine our influence in the world. These claims generally aren’t stated as opinions, as views held by some analysts but disputed by others. Instead, they’re reported as if they were facts, plain and simple.

And the reality:

Let's talk for a moment about budget reality. Contrary to what you often hear, the large deficit the federal government is running right now isn’t the result of runaway spending growth. Instead, well more than half of the deficit was caused by the ongoing economic crisis, which has led to a plunge in tax receipts, required federal bailouts of financial institutions, and been met--appropriately--with temporary measures to stimulate growth and support employment.

This is important--especially when compared to news stories that tell you things like this:

--"Independent voters in particular are uneasy about a tide of red ink in the wake of the billion-dollar packages for Wall Street, automakers and stimulus spending." (USA Today, 2/3/10)

--"Deficit spending, in turn, has caused the nation's accumulated debt to swell to dangerous levels." (Washington Post, 1/20/10)

Or the ABC World News report (2/1/10) that attempted to explain the deficit by focusing on the meaning of a billion: "And when we start tossing around a billion, it's a huge number. Just think, a billion hours ago, we were in the Stone Age." Well, that clarifies things.

For more media criticism on the deficit, see Extra!: "The Deficit Distraction: Media Push Spending Cuts Over Stimulus" (9/09) by Veronica Cassidy.

It's to self-described "establishment" journalist Evan Thomas' credit that he calls attention (Newsweek, 4/6/09) to economist Paul Krugman's progressive criticism of the Obama administration's financial bailout plan; corporate media generally pay much more attention to critics from the right.

But the same shallowness that renders most media policy discussions virtually useless infects Thomas' article, which seems more interested in analyzing Krugman's personality than his economics. "A lot of what he says is wrong and not considered," asserts George Mason economist Daniel Klein. Such as? Thomas doesn't say (nor does he allude to Klein's right-wing politics). "In areas outside his expertise he sometimes gets his facts wrong," Thomas asserts--without offering examples.

In a rare glimpse of substance, Thomas cites some unnamed administration officials' specific criticisms of Krugman's bank-nationalization proposals. Thomas' summary of the economist's counter-argument: "Krugman swats away these arguments, though he acknowledges he's not a 'detail' man."

One suspects that Krugman had more to say than that, and including his response might have helped readers determine whose policies might better address the economic crisis. But Thomas needed to save room to describe his subject's "lovely custom-built wood, stone and glass house by a brook in bucolic Princeton."

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman helpfully debunks (1/26/09) some of the more tendentious and misleading criticisms of the White House's economic stimulus package. Here's one such trope:

First, there’s the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years, creating millions of jobs each year, and dividing it by the jobs created in just one of those years.

It’s as if an opponent of the school lunch program were to take an estimate of the cost of that program over the next five years, then divide it by the number of lunches provided in just one of those years, and assert that the program was hugely wasteful, because it cost $13 per lunch. (The actual cost of a free school lunch, by the way, is $2.57.)

The true cost per job of the Obama plan will probably be closer to $100,000 than $275,000--and the net cost will be as little as $60,000 once you take into account the fact that a stronger economy means higher tax receipts.

Well, that's refreshing; one only wishes that news articles in the same paper would challenge such spin instead of merely passing it along, as they did yesterday (courtesy of GOP Congressmember John Boehner):

Mr. Boehner cited numbers to counter Mr. Obama's, saying the House Democratic plan included $600 million for the federal government to buy new cars, $650 million for digital television coupons and $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts. "All told," he said, "the plan would spend a whopping $275,000 in taxpayer dollars for every new job it aims to create."

Leave it to Forbes to get someone from the Hoover Institution to do an "in-depth" feature on "The 25 Most Influential Liberals in the U.S. Media" (1/22/09).

The results are about as bogus as you might imagine, including a number of people who are not only not liberals, but who are actively loathed by the actual left end of the media spectrum--and the feeling is generally mutual: folks like Fred Hiatt, Thomas Friedman, Fareed Zakaria, Christopher Hitchens (did their Nation sub lapse in 1998?), Maureen Dowd, Chris Matthews and Andrew Sullivan.

Then there are some corporate journalists whose "liberalism" seems entirely resume-based: Kurt Andersen founded Spy and does a culture show on NPR! David Shipley wrote speeches for Bill Clinton and works at the New York Times! Gerald Seib works at the Wall Street Journal but doesn't write for the editorial page! Andersen is the kind of "liberal" who writes about "the Democrats' 'mommy party' M.O. of naivete, mollycoddling, and profligacy," Seib does pieces like "Bipartisanship Could Help Victorious Democrats," while Shipley's Times op-ed page has been the object of repeated complaints from FAIR for its right-slanted choices.

There's a couple of people on the list--Jon Stewart and Oprah Winfrey--who are indeed influential liberals who are "in U.S. media"...but if by "media" they don't mean journalism, why not include Steven Spielberg or Bruce Springsteen?  They're "in U.S. media" too.

Then there's the bloggers, who largely define themselves as not being part of the "MSM": Arianna Huffington, Kevin Drum, Glenn Greenwald, Ezra Klein, Matthew Yglesias, Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and Joshua Micah Marshall.

That leaves six people on the list of 25 who actually are liberal journalists with a regular platform in traditional U.S. media: the New Yorker's Hendrick Hertzberg; the Atlantic's James Fallows; Michael Pollan, a freelance writer for the New York Times; Times op-ed writer Paul Krugman; MSNBC's Rachel Maddow; and PBS's Bill Moyers. What does this say about the myth of the liberal media? Maybe the Hoover Institution can study that.

What would a real list of the most important progressive media figures look like? Feel free to leave suggestions in comments.