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.
. . . So Well Read. . . 