Hot Off the Wire

If you’re a reporter for a wire service — the AP and Reuters are really the only big ones left, though Bloomberg also distributes some content — you have to be pretty satisfied when papers across your country pick up your article. That’s doubly true if said article is about something as dull as government regulation; after all, the Pittsburgh Courier  or the Fresno Bee could have gone with the latest dancing cat or celebrity breakup. But how does it feel to have your story splashed across the home pages of more partisan outlets that, despite forking over the same fee for AP content as the legacy print publications, have a far sketchier relationship with truth?

AP: Happy Obama

Case in point: a comprehensive look by the AP at Obama’s second-term regulatory agenda snagged prime real estate at Newsmax and the Washington Examiner, two right-wing websites that, when they aren’t peddling stories about the president’s ties to radical Communists, regularly run wire pieces under misleading headlines that distort the otherwise neutral content.What appeared on the AP’s own site as “How Obama Is Wielding Power in Second Term” morphed into “Regulatory Revolution” on the Newsmax home page, and earned even more dramatic billing — “Obama’s Commandments” — above the article itself. The Examiner kept the AP headline, giving it half the screen alongside an editorial blasting the president for “ignoring Medicare warnings” and a link to a story about the the GOP’s trumped-up crusade to derail Chuck Hagel’s Defense Department nomination. Most mainstream news sites stuck with the AP head as well, though a couple exercised creative license, opting instead for things like “President Obama’s Been Busy in Second Term.” The article is also given a shout-out by Wall Street Journal crass provocateur-in-chief James Taranto, who provides a link under the snarky headline referring to an insurance-company surcharge as “an ObamaCare innovation” and “a premium idea.”

The Examiner: Bad Obama

The photo the Examiner chose to accompany the AP story is particularly telling, featuring a finger-wagging Obama caught in mid-speech, as if ready to swallow a fly, and Vice President Biden glowering in the background. The AP’s choice of photo? A smiling president waving as he crosses the White House lawn.

It’s enough to make you wonder what the journalists responsible for the AP story are thinking. If they’re embarrassed to see partisan outlets latching onto their reporting to reinforce the stereotype of Obama as a big-government, red-tape-happy socialist, they can at least find relief in the fact that neither the Examiner nor Newsmax bothered to credit authors Calvin Woodward and Richard Lardner by name, instead attributing the piece to “AP Staff Writer.” Newsmax doesn’t even acknowledge the source until the end of the article, when the wire service appears in parentheses. That the reader doesn’t know until the end of the story whether it was written by an ostensibly neutral party or one of Newsmax’s own “journalists,” who churn out gems about death panels and creeping shariah law, demonstrates, at least to me, what the conservative publications saw in the AP article. A recent Newsmax op-ed says it all: “The Coming Regulatory Recession.” Though the AP supposedly strives to be free of bias, its content is often heavily moralistic: see, for example, its in-depth series about the nation’s aging nuclear plants, which tipped heavily toward the anti-nuclear-power stance. Its slant is not consistently liberal or conservative, changing with whatever point it happens to be pushing in a given article, but in its crusade to write pieces “relevant” to its readers’ lives, it often slides into advocacy and agenda-pushing.

Woodward and Lardner’s article on regulation is an interesting case. It’s easy to see why it appealed to Newsmax; even the most fair-minded piece on the subject would make conservative mouths water, as anything that discusses new regulations fits comfortably into its Tea Party worldview. The mere existence of regulation irritates right-wingers, who follow in Rick Perry’s footsteps in wanting to do away with entire rule-making cabinet agencies (goodbye Commerce, Education . . . and what’s that other one?),  so even the most unbiased article detailing new laws is worthy of a 60-point headline. The AP story doesn’t drop any major bombs; it’s not much different from any number of other mainstream media pieces on Obama’s use of executive power in his second term, from the Post (“Obama Weighs Executive Action to Counter Congress“) to Bloomberg (“Obama Poised to Skirt Congress to Seal Legacy”).

The Post suggests that “Obama is likely to rely heavily on executive powers to set domestic policy in his second term,” and details many of the same EPA rules and Federal Housing Administration policies outlined in the AP article. But while the strongest language in the Post article is an observation of the president’s “increasingly aggressive use of executive authority,” the Woodward/Lardner piece is sprinkled with buzzwords that undoubtedly caught the eye of the editors at Newsmax. Given a choice between the AP article and a dry discussion from Reuters or Bloomberg about the ins and outs of the EPA’s new rules for coal-fired power plants, any conservative worth his copy of Atlas Shrugged would opt for the AP. Qualifiers like “To be sure, Obama says he still prefers legislation when possible, recognizing that it gives his agenda deeper legal roots,” found in the Bloomberg piece, won’t make anyone’s blood boil. Here are a few of the AP’s more inflammatory passages, starting with the lede itself, which could be construed as mocking the president’s campaign slogan:

This is what “Forward” looks like. Fast forward, even. President Barack Obama’s campaign slogan is springing to life in a surge of executive directives and agency rule-making that touch many of the affairs of government.

It’s probably a stretch to see the invocation of “Forward” as a slight; in all likelihood, it’s just a catchy opener. But I can also see the stereotypical Newsmax reader sneering at the word (Yeah, “forward” off a cliff!) and recalling Mitt Romney’s twist on the tagline (“I think forewarned is a better term”).

Woodward and Lardner posit that the administration deliberately delayed issuing controversial regulations prior to the election in hopes of avoiding accusations of “killing coal” and executive overreach. Whether this is true is debatable; the new year has indeed seen a surge of regulations, though its unclear how much is politically motivated — only an idiot would conclude that the election had zero influence on Obama’s policies — and how much is the simple result of legislation passed in his first term finally working its way through the system. The AP seems to take it at face value that some of the delays were due to politics, writing that “the administration had tried to stall until the campaign ended but released the proposed rules in June when a judge ordered more haste.” The judge’s decision is fact, but the notion that “the administration had tried to stall” is an assumption, not a foregone conclusion, and the authors should have either written “may have tried to stall” or prefaced the entire thing with “some argue that . . .” Strangely, on the Affordable Care Act, the authors take the opposite position, pointing out that “the law is far-reaching and its most consequential deadlines are fast approaching.” Still, the phrasing in this sentence is provocative, with the clause “whatever the merits” leaving open the possibility that regulatory “commandments” aren’t all they’re cracked up to be:

Whatever the merits of any particular commandment from the president or his agencies, the perception of a government expanding its reach and hitting business with job-killing mandates was sure to set off fireworks before November.

Yes, the authors preface “job-killing mandates” with the word “perception,” but is it necessary to include a Frank Luntz-tested buzzword like “job-killing” in the first place? The epithet least deserves scare quotes, much in the same way that phrases like “tax cuts for millionaires” and “death tax” should not be used in a straight sentence. Such constructions are inventions of one party or the other, designed to sway opinion, and should be acknowledged as such.

In the next paragraph:

Since Obama’s re-election, regulations giving force and detail to his health care law have gushed out by the hundreds of pages.

Gushed — just a hint of melodrama there. And the water metaphor fits nicely with the standard conservative trope of the “regulatory wave.”

Detailing the law’s provisions, Woodward and Lardner highlight the negative ones, like the “leeway for insurers to charge smokers thousands of dollars more for coverage” and the “$63 per-head fee on insurance plans” that will “probably will be passed on to policyholders.” Unmentioned are the law’s popular mandates, like the ones that prevent insurance companies from denying people coverage, or the recent agreements made with states looking to set up their own health care exchanges. In case you don’t get the point, the authors include this punchy summation of the new rules:

In short, sticker shock.

Well, at least Newsmax readers won’t be surprised. For years now, the site has been hawking a book called “The ObamaCare Survival Guide,” which “explains how readers can protect themselves against ObamaCare’s harmful side effects” and has earned the endorsement of Donald Trump. (Special offer — it’s just $4.95!)

This is perhaps the worst passage in the entire article:

Regulations give teeth and specificity to laws are essential to their functioning even as they create bureaucratic bloat.

Talk about buying into the Republican narrative: bureaucratic bloat? Are food safety rules that protect diners from salmonella an example of “bloat”? How about rules ensuring that insurance companies can’t gouge customers with premium hikes? The size of the federal workforce has actually held steady over the last four years, despite what the GOP would have you believe, and the ostensible “tsunami” of regulation can be challenged by studies showing that Obama has issued fewer regulations than many of his predecessors. (The cost of such regulations may be higher, but the financial benefits may be higher as well.) Mitt Romney’s election-season citation of a Heritage Foundation study claiming that “the rate of regulations quadrupled under this president” was deemed “false” by PolitiFact.

The AP also writes about the presidential memoranda Obama has issued on the subject on gun control. The authors get credit for not referring to the 23 actions as “executive orders,” a mischaracterization that has popped up in stories by media outlets as varied as CNN and NPR. (Memoranda, despite the Fox News hand-wringing about Obama’s supposed slew of unilateral demands, are more akin to policy directives, and included benign provisions like “Nominate an ATF director” and “Launch a national dialogue on mental health.”) At any rate, here are Woodward and Lardner:

The steps include renewing federal gun research despite a law that has been interpreted as barring such research since 1996.

This is accurate, as far as it goes, but by not explaining that the law bars funding on research on gun control, not necessarily research on gun violence in general, the authors play into the conservative fantasy that the president is running an endgame around Congress and the Constitution. Sites like Newsmax are already rife with stories about Obama’s “gun grab” and speechifying by Republicans like Rand Paul who think an assault weapons ban violates the Second Amendment (it doesn’t). The AP should specify that the lack of federal funding for gun research stems as much from the feds’ wariness of running afoul of a confusing mandate and raising conservative ire than with the actual text of the law itself.

Woodward and Lardner return to the GOP-approved description of regulations as “killers”:

The agency also probably will press ahead on rules for existing power plants, despite protests from industry and Republicans that such rules would raise electricity prices and kill off coal, the dominant U.S. energy source.

Unless a loaded word like “kill” is part of a direct quotation — and there are plenty of those from any number of Republicans, so there’s little excuse for not finding one — it shouldn’t have a place in a straight news story, even if it is couched as a paraphrase of industry “protests.”

To be fair, the AP article also includes a lot of language that the average Newsmax reader will overlook or ignore, as it suggests a restraint by the administration that doesn’t comport with the GOP’s picture of Obama as an EPA-enabled dictator. “The Labor Department approved new rules in January that could help save lives at dangerous mines with a pattern of safety violations,” Woodward and Lardner write in a sentence that plays into the liberal perspective. Many free-market champions would argue that such rules don’t save lives at all, and that mining companies are fully capable of policing themselves. And a characterization of Obama’s detractors — “And the political opposition howls” — doesn’t exactly paint Republicans in a favorable light.

Of course, stories reported by the mainstream press have been cited by partisan outlets since Matt Drudge and Arianna Huffington first started attaching giant banner headlines to content scraped from the Times. Articles written with perfect innocence spark right-wing fury and end up as the subject of a thousand blog posts. A Post article on the Italian mafia gets gleeful attention from National Review simply because it touches on corruption in the renewable energy industry. Look, conservative publications scream, even the lapdog lamestream media admits that solar power is a farce! Anything that confirms longstanding biases is fair game; a recent piece from the Times was quoted extensively across conservative media — including not only the Examiner but the Weekly Standard and a conservative Washington Post op-ed — because it denigrated the Tesla electric car, a favorite GOP bugaboo. Under the gloating headline “NYT writer test drives an electric car — ends up stranded,” the Examiner observes that the car costs a cool $100,000, further proving to its readers that green energy is just one money-wasting debacle after another.

To some degree, the Times thrives on such coverage; there is no better driver of web traffic than a few links on a popular blog or a photo that goes viral on Twitter. But I would imagine individual journalists, who may not share the ideology of everyone who finds an attractive angle in their stories, often have mixed feelings about seeing their work used to advance a political argument. Striving for neutrality doesn’t help; the Times would be the last outlet to paint Obama in a negative light simply out of spite, but it can’t prevent its work from being repurposed in either a positive fashion (say, via links) or a negative one (as in this indignant takedown of story on modern parenthood by NR’s outraged Catholic-in-residence). It’s embarrassingly easy to predict what will trigger right-wing schadenfreude. My predictions for tomorrow: A Times story about waste in a federal program to expand high-speed Internet access, and a Wall Street Journal “investigation” into fraud in phone subsidies for low-income people, the subject of an astoundingly racist “ObamaPhone” meme pushed by the Drudge Report and the Examiner itself during the election. (Was I right? Update: Yup, here it is, courtesy of the Examiner’s morning roundup.)

The difference between the Times’ Tesla story and the AP’s exploration of the regulatory burden is that the latter actually licenses the whole of its content to places like the Examiner. Bloggers can snark about a Post or Times article until the cows come home, but they can’t reprint the entire article without getting slapped with a lawsuit. The AP, on the other hand, loses control of its work as soon as it goes out on the wires. Subscribers are free to use the articles however they wish, and the wire service is powerless to disassociate its even-handed stories from headlines that imply President Obama is playing God his job-killing regulatory power. That is the danger inherent in what the AP does: It can end up seeming to endorse a position on which it officially takes no sides. Its work ends up next to op-eds that denounce even the most sensible of regulations (WSJ: “Parents thinking of expanding their families must take into consideration financial matters like paying for government-mandated car seats”) and articles claiming that “Obama EPA regulations kill 15 power plants, 480 jobs in Georgia.”

Writing fair pieces can help — the Woodward/Lardner article does seem to tip the scale toward the regulation-is-evil crowd — but that only goes so far. Newsmax would reprint a story from the Daily Kos if it said something nasty about the president. And who knows. Maybe Woodward, Lardner and their colleagues at the AP are perfectly happy to see their pieces serving partisan ends. Maybe they’re just happy to grow their audience, whether that audience comprises right-wing conspiracy theorists or small-town Iowans who rely on wire services for their national news. For all I know, Woodward and Lardner are staunch Republicans who completely agree with the Newsmax worldview. Either way, you could argue that what they think is largely irrelevant. They work for a wire service, and that’s the nature of the beast. Besides, all a person can do is his best — if an article is fair, what a reader takes away from it is not the responsibility of the author.

Of course, I could be overthinking things. Both Woodward and Lardner seem to be long-time fixtures on the political beat. They’re professionals accustomed to releasing their words into the wild. And given the red ink swamping the newspaper industry these days, they’re probably just happy to have jobs.