Looks scary, doesn’t he?
* Actually, it was a cockroach, but who’s going to read a story about roaches in New York? Even bedbugs are hardly newsworthy these days. But the headline got your attention, right?
That seems to be the goal of a recent Reuters piece headlined “Romney Gains Toehold in Silicon Valley.” The premise of the article seems to be that, while Obama was “the darling of the technology world” in 2008, he is facing headwinds in 2012. Mitt Romney “is making inroads to a key source of cash for Obama, who some tech leaders view as anti-business because of uncertainty that they blame on the Dodd-Frank financial regulation reform and the healthcare overhaul.” Unfortunately, the reporter spends the rest of the article undermining the lede, demonstrating that a nice hook — the Fundraiser-in-Chief is being trounced in the money game! — doesn’t guarantee a substantial follow-up.
Pressed by the relentless 24-hour news cycle to churn out more content than ever, even venerable media outlets like Reuters are apt to turn mountains into molehills. Framing every political development as a make-or-break moment drives clicks and adds urgency to a routine horserace story. Mitt Romney’s latest gaffe — from “corporations are people” to “I’m not concerned about the very poor” — morphs from a slip of the tongue into an outright disaster, a revelation about the candidate’s plutocratic tendency that threatens to derail his campaign. Despite evidence that such breathless coverage barely moves the needle in polls and in fact reaches less than half of voters (SOURCE), news organizations continue to overplay their hands. They assume, perhaps correctly, that no one wants to read about Obama’s so-so monthly haul from the Zuckerberg crowd. But imply that Obama’s techie donors are deserting his socialist policies in droves, and suddenly you have a story that might float to the top of Google news.
In the hands of certain “journalists” — most of the folks at Fox News, anyone associated with one of Breitbart’s sites — the manufactured drama would not have been limited to the headline. Instead, the entire article would have been filled with derisive comments from Peter Thiel and distorted statistics purporting to demonstrate that the president is in the danger zone. Reuters, whatever its faults, still has integrity. Its lede may be overblown and undercut by facile reporting, but its journalists are at least honest enough to add caveats to their more stretched assertions. Indeed, they back off so many of the statements made so boldly in previous paragraphs that the reader starts to suffer from whiplash. Punching holes in the so-called logic behind the article’s Death in Silicon Valley premise is so easy that the piece reads like something from The Onion.
Let’s take Reuters’ dubious assertions one by one:
He lags behind his 2008 campaign in donations from workers at Internet, computer and telecom equipment powerhouses such as Google, IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Cisco . . . . The Obama campaign has raised $1.44 million through May from employees of 15 top tech companies, as compared to $1.6 million donated by the same companies’ staff four years ago.
Four years ago, Obama was engaged in one of the most competitive (and expensive) Democratic primaries in history. Hillary Clinton didn’t officially concede the nomination until June; in May, the candidates were still furiously raising money to duke it out in individual states. Obviously, this year Obama is the uncontested Democratic nominee. Of course he’s not raking in as much money. In its increasingly frequent, plaintive fundraising e-mails to supporters, the Obama campaign has made much of the fact that all donations — not just those from tech employees — are down dramatically from comparative months in 2008. There’s nothing unique about the drop-off in money from Silicon Valley. The New York Times observes that “nearly every major industry,” has given less in 2012. “From Wall Street to Hollywood, from doctors and lawyers,” donors are reluctant to open their wallets without a high-profile primary battle. The upshot: “Mr. Obama’s campaign raised about $196 million through March, compared with $235 million at the same point in 2008.”
Romney, a former private equity executive, is making inroads to a key source of cash for Obama . . . . Romney has raised almost $340,000 during this election campaign from the 15 tech companies’ employees, far behind his opponent but already ahead of the roughly $240,000 that Republican presidential candidate John McCain picked up through May 2008.
Romney raises less than 25% of Obama’s haul from the tech world, and that qualifies as making inroads? That’s like saying Romney is making inroads with Jewish voters because he’s polling at 29% instead of 23%. Sure, it’s technically true, but it’s also such a marginal difference that only some serious hyping by the Fox News talking heads can turn it into a newsworthy “crisis” for Obama. Put another way, at my last job, I made about $20,000. If my salary had jumped to $28,000, I would have been thrilled. But to claim that my raise meant I was gaining on my supervisor — who pulled down a cool $130,000 a year — would have provoked laughter. However, those numbers are roughly proportional to Romney’s tech fundraising vis-a-vis McCain and Obama.
While the numbers are small, Romney did slip past his rival among one group that is vital to the tech world. He has raised $392,300 through April from venture capitalists, some $20,000 more than Obama, according to federal disclosures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics.
This nugget is not so surprising when you consider Romney has been billing himself as a venture capitalist for years, despite some serious questions, raised even by conservatives, as to whether Bain can really be characterized as a venture capital firm. (In in its earliest days, Bain indeed invested money in eventually successful start-ups like Staples, but the bulk of the company’s business and wealth were derived from private equity deals, in which Bain bought struggling companies with borrowed money and attempted to extract maximum profits before reselling those companies.) Is it such a shocker that venture capitalists are amenable to donating to someone they regard as a fellow venture capitalist? If Romney were raising boatloads of cash from a less likely group — say, former University of Chicago constitutional law professors — well, that might be significant.
“People creating jobs in Silicon Valley are very entrepreneurial, very much geared to be capitalists, and the current administration, frankly, is more of the socialist bent,” said Daniel Dumezich, a Chicago-based tax attorney and major Romney fundraiser.
Without even addressing the “socialist” accusation, which is lobbed with dismal regularity by the conservative community (really, ask all those left-wing proponents of single-payer health care how Obama is doing on the socialist front), the inclusion of this quotation is slightly bizarre. What does a tax attorney have to do with the tech world? Does Dumezich work for Facebook or Google? Who knows; the Reuters story doesn’t say. The job description — “a Chicago-based tax attorney” is priceless for another reason: Since when is Silicon Valley located in Illinois? Reuters has not only found a conspiracy theorist; it’s found a conspiracy theorist who lives 1800 miles from the tech capital of the U.S.
Federal financial disclosures show that together with his Super PAC (political action committee) allies, Romney has received thousands from Texas Pacific Group partner Dick Boyce, Cisco CEO John Chambers and Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman – who made a fortune as CEO of eBay during its big years of growth and who lost the 2010 California governor’s race.
Yes, Meg Whitman — the Republican candidate in the 2010 California governor’s race. When Jerry Brown starts throwing money at conservative super PACs, get back to me. That would be news.
Finally, more than halfway into the piece, we get the actual bottom line. This isn’t a case of burying the lede; it’s more akin to drilling an oil well at the bottom of the Marianas Trench and tossing the lede down the bore hole:
“There is no doubt that, in terms of money and votes, Silicon Valley will be Obama territory,” said Steve Westly, a venture capitalist and major Obama fundraiser in California.
To be clear, I’m not necessarily jumping on Reuters for tilting its coverage in favor of Romney. I don’t think that’s the issue here. Even if the tech world remains a reliable source of Democratic donations, the president has every reason to be worried about the money race. His campaign was out-raised in June by a nearly 2-to-1 margin ($105 million to $70 million), and the amount of cash flowing into conservative super PACs like American Crossroads and affiliated non-profits like Crossroads GPS is immense.
The real problem is that, by hyping every blip and bleep in the race, the news service contributes to the low-information, high-drama atmosphere that has permeated Election 2012 from the beginning of the Republican primaries. With so much noise, it’s no wonder that readers and viewers find it difficult to separate the important aspects of the campaign — say, what each candidate would actually do with four years in the Oval Office — from the hyberbole-infused distractions (Romney’s house has a car elevator! Obama ate dog!).
Reuters itself isn’t even the biggest offender. Picking up the story from the wires, CNBC slaps on an even more egregious headline: Is Mitt Romney the New Darling of Silicon Valley? Outrageous questions are used as click-bait by every news site out there (see: “Did a Tick Bite Really Bring Down JPMorgan?“), but isn’t the financial press supposed to target a savvy, educated audience? Of course, perhaps I should give the audience more credit. Even the most cursory reading of the article supplies an easy answer to CNBC’s inquiry. Is Mitt Romney the new darling of Silicon Valley? Uh, no. Is he “making inroads” into Obama’s Facebook/Twitter/Square territory? Not particularly.
Not for the first time, I echo economist Brad DeLong, whose blog tends to be more enlightening (though slightly more comma-challenged) than Reuters and CNBC put together: Why oh why can’t we have a better press corps?
. . . So Well Read. . . 