April 14, 2011
In its article covering President Obama’s speech on the budget yesterday the Washington Post told readers that:
“Obama acknowledged that the debt must be tackled faster than he has previously proposed.”
It is only possible to “acknowledge” something which is true. The Post obviously believes it is true that “the debt must be tackled faster than he has previously proposed,” but that does not make it so. This is the Post’s opinion. A real newspaper would have reported that President Obama “said that the debt must be tackled faster than he has previously proposed.” It would not have implied that its view of the world is the unquestioned reality, especially in a front page news story.
Remarkably, the coverage of the President’s speech in both the Post and the NYT included no mention of the recession. The main reason that the deficit has soared in the last three years is because of the economic collapse that followed the crash of the housing bubble.
If the deficit is reduced substantially before the economy has gotten back to near full employment levels of output the main effect will be to slow growth and throw more people out of work. This fact was never mentioned in either piece even though President Obama proposes to have his deficit reduction targets to become binding in fiscal year 2014, a point at which the unemployment rate is still projected to be 7.2 percent. By contrast, the first stimulus package was put into law under President George W. Bush when the unemployment rate was just 4.7 percent.
Both articles made reference to the deficit reduction plan from the President’s deficit commission. This is wrong. There was no plan from the commission. The co-chairs of the commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, never put their plan up for a vote because they knew they lacked the majority needed for passage. The plan referred to in these articles is only the proposal of the two co-chairs. It is not the plan of the commission.
This should be a simple point for a major newspaper to get right.
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