Deficit Hawks Nest in D.C. Media

The Washington Post is a notorious deficit scold. In its editorials as well as in its straight news articles, it regularly paints America’s fiscal situation in dire, Republican-friendly terms. Liberal economists, particularly CEPR’s Dean Baker, keep a running commentary of the paper’s front-page editorializing on the dangers of the national debt, which is apparently a problem that outweighs unemployment, crumbling infrastructure and essentially any other dilemma the country faces. Baker calls the Post “Fox on 15th Street,” accusing it of “ignoring journalistic standards” in its ideologically driven “deficit reduction jihad.” It’s true that the Post engages in some serious fear-mongering on what it sees as the feds’ unrestrained borrowing. No matter that the U.S. is mired in the worst slowdown since the Great Depression; there’s no time like the present to cut the national debt. One might wonder whether the paper, and specifically business-section reporter Lori Montgomery, who is often behind the anti-spending screeds, is an arm of the Pete Peterson “Fix the Debt” claque.

Today, in a “news” article about the CBO’s budget projections, Montgomery makes the factual case that deficit spending, while declining to less than $1 trillion in 2013 for the first time in years, will resume its steady march upward by the end of the decade. The national debt — our total debt, which is different from the yearly gap between revenues and expenditures — is still increasing, and represents a greater portion of GDP today (77 percent) than any time since World War II. It’s true, of course, that the U.S. borrows approximately 40 cents of every dollar it spends. That’s a lot. But whether such borrowing is deliberate — a response to a fiscal crisis and perhaps even a savvy move given that super-low interest rates mean investors are essentially paying to lend the government money — or “out of control” is not a fact but a value judgment. Just because Eric Cantor and John Boehner say something doesn’t make it true. (And Cantor sure says it, ad nauseam. Just today: “There is no greater moral imperative than to reduce the mountain of debt.”)

But Montgomery goes beyond the facts. She could have chosen to stick to the text of the CBO report, which expresses sufficient concern about borrowing:

The report lists several reasons for additional action to restrain borrowing: First, the debt is “very high by historical standards,” larger as a percentage of the economy than at any time in the nation’s history except for World War II, which “poses an increased risk of precipitating a fiscal crisis.”

Reporting on the actual document wasn’t enough, though. One word in this sentence especially stuck in my craw:

The national debt would stabilize to around 77 percent of the economy after years of rampant borrowing to fight the worst recession since the 1930s, the CBO said.

Well, no. The CBO never said “rampant,” a word so heavy with judgment that it could have been plucked from a GOP press release. Adam Lanza went on a “rampage” at Newtown. Corruption is often described as “rampant” in backroom politics. Criminals “run rampant” in lawless cities. So when you use the same word to define government borrowing, you’re putting a pretty forceful thumb on the moral scales. Given the parlous state of the economy in 2008 and the possibility of a financial-system meltdown, have the past few years of borrowing really so disproportionate to the problem? With unemployment hovering around 8 percent, is it really a bad thing for the federal government to go into debt to keep people out of poverty? Borrowing to fund unemployment insurance and Social Security payments (illusory trust fund “lockbox” notwithstanding) ameliorates significant social problems.

Plenty of smart people on the left, from Paul Krugman to Peter Orszag, are of the opinion that the national debt, while undoubtedly a long-term dilemma, is not something we should deal with in the short term. Year-to-year deficits represent increased spending on counter-recessionary measures like the one-time stimulus package and higher unemployment benefits that will eventually disappear. Furthermore, the time to tackle the deficit is after GDP growth returns to pre-recession levels, not before. Slate’s Matt Yglesias even writes that “there’s genuinely no good reason to be balancing the budget or worrying about the deficit right now,” despite the unrealized (for over five years now!) concerns about non-existent inflation and hypothetical “bond vigilantes” who will punish the nation for its fiscal looseness. Furthermore, there is a certain uselessness to curbing the amount the government borrows simply by cutting spending when the real driving force behind the need to borrow — rising health care costs — represents an as-yet-unsolved quandary. “The noncrazy worry about large projected long-term deficits has nothing to do with deficits and instead is about the fact that buying health care services for all these old people is likely to be very expensive,” Yglesias adds. Former OMB director Orszag admits that the long-term debt is problematic, but also writes that “stimulus spending, even when the economy is very weak, isn’t free. Nevertheless, it’s still a very good idea.” Stimulus spending, it should be noted, would likely be funded with borrowed cash. The Post, for its part, editorializes against such deficit doves, branding them the “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” caucus and opining that stabilizing (rather than reducing) the national debt would be a “paltry achievement.”

“Rampant,” then, is not the word I would expect from the Post’s editorial page, not from a front-page article. And it’s certainly not a word I would choose to describe U.S. borrowing. “High” is fine, “increased” is fine — both express mathematical realities. But “rampant” implies that borrowing is somehow wrong, sinful and unrestrained. It buys into the Republican fantasy of President Obama grabbing wildly at piles of Treasury cash and ignores the fact that every dime of borrowed money has been spent on a program authorized — quite deliberately, if not necessarily wisely — by Congress. Ironically, at the same time it demonizes deficit spending, the Post regularly rails against the sequester-imposed spending cuts that would . . . reduce the need to deficit spend, running editorials titled “Defense cuts that need to be avoided.” All politics are local at the Post, and God forbid curbing borrowing involve pain for northern Virginia’s defense contractors and Pentagon suppliers.

In a sharp contrast to the Post article, a piece from Politico at least acknowledges the tension between slashing borrowing and boosting the economy:

The numbers underscore the persistent tension between reducing the deficit and helping along the economic recovery. Indeed, if the cuts were to go into effect on top of tax increases already enacted, it will cost the economy about one percent of GDP in 2013.

Meanwhile, Republicans are reacting in standard Republican fashion, pushing legislation that would require the president to submit a plan specifying the year in which the budget will balance. “We know, and the American people agree, spending is the problem,” John Boehner intoned, ignoring the fact that maybe, uh, a depressed economy and historically low tax rates are the problem. Alabama Representative Mo Brooks has proposed a Constitutional amendment that would make failing to balance the budget an impeachable offense. (No word on whether representatives who voted for said spending could also be removed from office.) Paul Ryan, the erstwhile GOP vice-presidential candidate, issued a predictable statement in reaction the budget office’s projections:

The CBO’s report is yet another warning that we need to get spending under control. The deficit is still unsustainable.

It’s a press release that could have been penned by the Washington Post.

Journalism 101 for Media Critics

Dean Baker, who blogs about media coverage of economics at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, should stick to his day job. Baker is a respected economist, but he gets journalism all wrong. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, considering he named his blog “Beat the Press,” to see him taking to task the New York Times’ Gina Bellafante for what he calls her “reporting” on the Occupy Wall Street protests. Even if you think the protests are some noble attempt to hold the financial sector accountable for the country’s economic meltdown (which I don’t), Baker’s criticism is totally off the mark. In a post titled “NYT Decides to Mock Wall Street Critics,” he writes:

The NYT used its news section to mock critics of Wall Street. It presented the comments of some of the people protesting Wall Street. While the people quoted in this article do appear to be confused about the role of the financial industry in the economy, the paper would have no difficulty finding articulate critics of the financial industry.

For example, it could present the views of Nobel prize winning economist Joe Stiglitz. Or, it could present the views of Nobel prize winning economist, and NYT columnist, Paul Krugman. Or could interview Simon Johnson, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.

It is not clear what news the NYT conveyed to its readers by presenting the views of people who do not appear to be knowledgeable about the economy. This would be comparable to presenting the opinions of some of the more extreme people at a Tea Party rally as representative of the business community’s arguments for lower taxes. This has not been done in the NYT or elsewhere.

For starters, it’s not really clear that any of the protesters (who are what the article is about) would recognize Joseph Stiglitz if they tripped over him on the street. More importantly, however, is the basic premise of Baker’s complaint: that the Times used its news section to mock critics of Wall Street. In fact, the Times did no such thing. Its “news section” carried several pieces of straightforward reporting on the protests (see here and here), including an article about the NYPD’s possible overreaction to a protest that turned out to be “relatively harmless” and less organized than the London-esque riots for which it was prepared.

So where did the supposed “mocking” occur? Well, not in the news section. Baker’s beef is with Gina Bellafante, who is a columnist at the Times. She recently took over the “Big City” column, where she made the following observations about the Wall Street protesters, many of whom denounced corporations and capitalism while posting to Twitter from their iPhones and Apple laptops:

The group was clamoring for nothing in particular to happen right away — not the implementation of the Buffett rule or the increased regulation of the financial industry . . . . Some said they were fighting the legal doctrine of corporate personhood; others, not fully understanding what that meant, believed it meant corporations paid no taxes whatsoever. Others came to voice concerns about the death penalty, the drug war, the environment.

“I want to get rid of the combustion engine,” John McKibben, an activist from Vermont, declared as his primary ambition.

“I want to create spectacles,” Becky Wartell, a recent graduate of the College of the Atlantic in Maine, said.

The group’s lack of cohesion and its apparent wish to pantomime progressivism rather than practice it knowledgeably is unsettling in the face of the challenges so many of its generation face — finding work, repaying student loans, figuring out ways to finish college when money has run out.

Ironically, Bellafante’s first piece for “Big City” was about as anti-Wall Street as they come. Her debut column, about an intersection in New York that divides a wealthy enclave from its poorer environs, wonders aloud “whether a visit to this corner ought to be mandated for tourists; few spots so profoundly render the truths of New York’s economic extremism.” Like the paper’s national columnists (see Maureen Dowd’s snarky commentary about “W.” and “Vice”), Bellafante writes in first person, delivering opinions unfettered by the fair-and-accurate rules of the news section. If her first column is any barometer, Bellafante is no apologist for Goldman Sachs or Bank of America. She writes of her disgust, as a teenager, for the city’s economic inequality: “I felt a call to fierce and equalizing justice, ready, suddenly, for Latin American guerrilla work and the Red Brigades.” When she began writing “Big City,” even the media reporter at Gawker, who lives to tweak the Times’ bourgeois pretensions, called her promotion “so god damn heartening,” a “firm declaration of CLASS WAR” that would “single-handedly balance out the entire Rich Person Trend Story docket” of the Style section.

In short, Bellafante is not someone you’d expect to write a column that inspire 120-plus comments, mostly critical, from the left wing of the Times’ readership. Sample complaint: “I am extremely disappointed in the way the Times and other media outlets have been first ignoring and then belittling this movement.” Another representative grievance: “Way to go, write an article focusing on one lone half-naked nut to explain this demonstration.” But what the peanut gallery refers to as “poor reporting” is nothing of the sort. Bellafante is not trying to report objectively on the protests; she is offering her personal take on the movement, and by doing so points out a very real fact — that a lot of the protesters are clueless Trustafarian types more interested in posing for nude pictures than affecting political change — that a straight news story might gloss over.

While Bellafante comes off as sympathetic to the protesters’ cause, she calls out Occupy Wall Street for the same “incongruities and hypocrisies that so easily attach to life in this city” that she promised to address in her debut column. Readers, including Dean Baker, were apparently OK with that when Bellafante restricted her criticism to the hypocrisies of the ruling class; apply the same standard to a group whose cause, “in specific terms, was virtually impossible to decipher,” and the populists are up in arms.

Not one of Bellafante’s detractors seems to notice that she is a columnist, not a reporter. She’s not attempting to spin her opinions as fact in the way that other, less reputable (cough*FoxNews*cough) media outlets allow. It’s notable that Baker’s outrage at the Times’ ostensibly biased coverage has gotten no traction among media watchdogs such as Columbia Journalism Review or Media Matters, neither of which are shy about taking to task major newspapers. (See Media Matters’ disembowelment of the Washington Post’s ridiculous “Five Myths About Millionaires” piece.) Perhaps the Times deserves some criticism for poor labeling; especially online, it is not always as clear as it should be which stories are news and which are opinion. Still, Bellafante’s picture is conspicuously placed in the “Metro Columnists” box on the front of the New York Region section. The “Big City” tag appended to all of her headlines identifies her as a columnist, though the Times could perhaps be more explicit in communicating that “Big City” is a product of the opinion section. But while I can forgive a casual reader for not knowing the difference between opinion and news, I can’t do the same for Dean Baker. As co-director of a major think tank — and, more importantly, as someone whose bills himself as an expert on economic reporting — he should know better.