Matt Yglesias

Post Reporter Says It’s Not His Job to Check the Accuracy of People He’s Quoting

You rarely see the kind of full-throated defense of journalism-as-stenography that The Washington Post’s Paul Kane offers up here:

New York, N.Y.: Paul, do you care to defend yourself against this criticism from Media Matters?

“In an April 9 article about Democrats’ legislative priorities, The Washington Post wrote, ‘Democrats are sure to incite Republicans if they adopt a shortcut that would allow them to pass major health-care and education bills with just 51 votes in the Senate, where Democrats are two seats shy of the filibuster-proof margin of 60 seats. The rule, known as ‘reconciliation,’ would fuel GOP charges that (President) Obama has ditched bipartisanship.’ The article, by Paul Kane and Shailagh Murray, then quoted Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) saying, ‘If they exercise that tool, it’s going to be infinitely more difficult to bridge the partisan divide.’ However, Kane and Murray did not mention that congressional Republicans — including Snowe herself — voted to allow the use of the budget reconciliation process to pass major Bush administration initiatives. Indeed, Murray herself noted in an April 1 article that ‘(a)dvocates defend reconciliation as a legitimate tool used more often by Republicans in recent years, most notably to pass President George W. Bush’s tax cuts.’ ”

Paul Kane: I’m sorry, what’s to defend?

Someone tell Media Matters to get over themselves and their overblown ego of righteousness. We reported what Olympia Snowe said. That’s what she said. That’s what Republicans are saying. I really don’t know what you want of us. We are not opinion writers whose job is to play some sorta gotcha game with lawmakers.

This is fairly simple. What we want is that if you’re going to quote someone saying something dishonest, you report the fact that they’re lying. Or if in this case you’re quoting someone who’s arguably being hypocritical, you inform readers of the broader context. Surely a person assessing the merits of a Republican argument that majority voting in the Senate is pernicious would want to know that when Republicans were in the majority they saw things differently. The crux of the “debate” over reconciliation is that whichever party happens to be in the majority at any given time is inclined to take an expansive view of the circumstances under which it should be used. It’s not possible for Post readers to understand what’s happening absent that context.

This isn’t a matter of “gotcha games,” it’s crucial. Otherwise, operating by Kane standards you could do an entire article that consisted of accurately quoting people who are lying, and wind up badly misinforming your readers.

Washington Post Claims, Without Evidence, That Public is “Outraged” by Obama Spending

My friend J.T. points out this passage in Lori Montgomery’s Washington Post coverage of the budget:

The moves come as Republicans are pounding Obama for proposing a rapid increase in government spending and taxpayers are voicing anxiety and outrage about the gargantuan sums that Washington is already pouring into the economy and banking system.

I certainly expect RNC press releases to just kind of run everything together like this. But while there’s clear evidence of outrage at the AIG bonuses, opinion on banking system rescue is more mixed, and opinion on fiscal stimulus and Obama’s general economic performance is strongly positive. This is the most recent polling on the big picture that I’ve been able to see:

What’s definitely true is that Obama’s political opponents aren’t acting the way you would expect a minority party that’s lost two elections in a row and is facing popular proposals from a popular president to act. Certainly when George W. Bush and his agenda were popular, Democrats didn’t come close to mounting uniform opposition to it. But one shouldn’t mistake the GOP’s tactical choice to oppose Obama even though he and his agenda are popular with a situation in which he’s failing to get massive congressional support for his agenda because the public doesn’t support him. I think it’s fine for the GOP to say “damn the polls, we’re sticking to our views” but that’s what’s happening.

Zakaria vs The Washington Post

Fareed Zakaria is making sense, and The Washington Post editorial page is not:

Consider the gambit with Russia. The Washington establishment is united in the view that Iran’s nuclear program poses the greatest challenge for the new administration. Many were skeptical that Obama would take the problem seriously. But he has done so, maintaining the push for more effective sanctions, seeing if there is anything to be gained by talking to the Iranians, and starting conversations with the Russians. The only outside power that has any significant leverage over Tehran is Russia, which is building Iran’s nuclear reactor and supplying it with uranium. Exploring whether Moscow might press the Iranians would be useful, right?

Wrong. The Washington Post reacted by worrying that Obama might be capitulating to Russian power. His sin was to point out in a letter to the Russian president that were Moscow to help in blunting the threat of missile attacks from Tehran, the United States would not feel as pressed to position missile defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic—since those defenses were meant to protect against Iranian missiles. This is elementary logic. It also strikes me as a very good trade since right now the technology for an effective missile shield against Iran is, in the words of one expert cited by the Financial Times’s Gideon Rachman: “a system that won’t work, against a threat that doesn’t exist, paid for with money that we don’t have.”

As Zakaria observes, the problems of the Bush years were not just the personal failings of George W. Bush; they reflected the pathologies of an establishment “that has gotten comfortable with the exercise of American hegemony and treats compromise and negotiations as appeasement.” But to operate in the world and advance our key goals, we need to understand that other countries have interests and objectives of their own.

Leave George W. Bush Aloooooone

The country is in a terrible situation in economic, strategic, and budgetary terms and it’s overwhelmingly the fault of the team that was running the show before January 20th. Naturally, the team that’s been running the show since January 20th wants people to understand the baseline conditions against which they should be judged. The Washington Post is mightily displeased. Apparently we’re just supposed to pretend that this all happened by coincidence.

Jackson Diehl and “Allowing”

People usually attribute the badness of The Washington Post’s editorial page content to Fred Hiatt, since he’s the man in charge, but judging by this column, Hiatt’s number two man probably lacks the intelligence required to dress himself in the morning so it must be hard out there for the boss. Diehl’s theme is that Obama is just like Bush. And his evidence is that if you, like Diehl, don’t have a functioning central nervous system or any understanding of public policy issues, then things that normal people recognize as different are actually the same. You can go elsewhere (Steve Benen, etc.) for critiques of most of Diehl’s main points, but I thought this particular twitch showed just how pathetic this column was:

We know from the Clinton administration that any attempt to create a national health-care system will touch off an enormous domestic battle, inside and outside Congress. If anything, Obama has raised the stakes by proposing no funding source other than higher taxes on wealthy Americans, allowing Republicans to raise the cries of “socialism” and “class warfare.”

The problem with Obama’s health care plan is not the plan. Nor is it the proposed source of funding for the plan. Rather, it’s that the choice of proposed funding source, though Diehl doesn’t object to it on the merits, will “allow” Republicans to oppose it on the grounds of “socialism” and “class warfare.” Really? Obama should have somehow denied them permission to criticize his plan? His plan is not, after all, “socialism” and yet failure to propose socialism has not prevented Republicans from raising the cry of “socialism.” Nor has the fact that it’s not a proposal to tax small businesses prevented Republicans from raising the cry that Obama is raising taxes on small businesses. Surely it’s the responsibility of Obama’s opponents to avoid responding to his initiatives in a hysterical manner. And if Jackson Diehl doesn’t like the hysteria, he should consider blaming the hysterics.

Newt Gingrich Leading Insane Conservative Effort to Close Deficit By Reducing Revenues

If this Washington Post article is to be believed, I think some prominent Washington figures may need a course in remedial math:

And Republicans have made it clear that they intend to try to shift the economic debate toward concern about the federal deficit.

They are also preparing to use the ballooning deficit to renew their push for additional tax cuts. Groups including the Club for Growth and GOP leaders such as former House speaker Gingrich say such cuts would do more to improve the economy than the spending plan would.

The reporters on the piece, Michael D. Shear and Paul Kane, might have observed that a deficit is, by definition, a shortfall between revenue and spending. Thus, it’s extremely difficult to envision circumstances under which “additional tax cuts” would prevent the deficit from ballooning. As this handy chart indicates, ballooning deficits are strongly correlated with either fighting World War II or else governance dominated by a desire for “additional tax cuts”:

Unfortunately, Bush-era macroeconomic management has managed to produce much worse outcomes than we saw during the Reagan years so in the extremely short-term it’s not possible to turn this trend around. In the medium-term, however, the administration is proposing to tackle ballooning deficits by making the deficit smaller—higher revenues and lower expenditures. One possible conservative approach to this would be to argue for more aggressive deficit targets, achieved by more stringent spending restraint. Another would be to argue for higher deficits, achieved by more tax cuts. The idea encapsulated in the Post article, that Gingrich and the Club for Growth have a plan for smaller deficits achieved by more tax cuts is ridiculous. Fortunately, neither Gingrich nor the Club have any formal legislative authority and there’s nothing stopping those Republicans who, unlike Gingrich, weren’t hounded out of office a decade ago, from governing with common sense.

A Suggested Correction for George Will

As you can see at this suggested correction for George Will’s witless climate change column, the reason the Post can’t offer a correction is that absent the errors there’s basically nothing left. But to reiterate my earlier point, everyone who writes for the Post has a problem now. The Post is standing foresquare behind the errors, which makes it very difficult for any writing that appears in the Post under any byline to have credibility or be taken seriously.

Mark Kleiman’s Letter to Andy Alexander

I liked Mark Kleiman’s letter to Washington Post ombudsman Andy Alexander regarded George Will’s climate change misrepresentations and the Post’s odd defense of it very much. I think it’s important that people concerned about this issue do likewise and write in to Alexander and to anyone else they may happen to know at the Post.

Washington Post Stands By Climate Change Denialism

For those who are late to the party, recently George Will wrote a column claiming, most broadly, that in the 1970s there was a scientific consensus that the world was suffering from “global cooling” that was as firm as the current consensus about global warming. This is false. Will also made a number of additional, subsidiary factual errors that have been documented elsewhere. Yesterday, the Post finally responded to complaints about the column, sending a reply to my colleague Brad Johnson that stands foresquare behind Will, citing the existence of a “multi-layered” process to check the facts in the article. As for why it’s okay for Will to write stuff that isn’t true, the Post didn’t have much of substance to say. They picked one of debunked subsidiary claims, and said they think Will is right, though they acknowledge that the very organization Will was citing as an authority says Will is wrong. One could say that on this subsidiary point, Will perhaps made an honest mistake that the Arctic Climate Research Center has since corrected. But the Post instead says that Will is right and the Arctic Climate Research Center wrong about what the ACRC’s own research says. Meanwhile, they have nothing whatsoever to say about the other problems with the column.

These problems, it should be said, include Will’s overarching thesis. Will wrote, and is trying to get readers of The Washington Post to believe, that there was a scientific consensus about global cooling in the 1970s. This is false. Post readers are being deceived. And the Post is standing by the deceivers.

This started as a problem for Will, his direct supervisors, and the Post’s ombudsman. But now that the Post as a paper is standing behind Will’s deceptions, I think it’s a problem for all the other people who work at the Post. Some of those people do bad work, which is too bad. And some of those people do good work. And unfortunately, that’s worse. It means that when good work appears in the Post it bolsters the reputation of the Post as an institution. And the Post, as an institution, has taken a stand that says it’s okay to claim that up is down. It’s okay to claim that day is night. It’s okay to claim that hot is cold. It’s okay to claim that a consensus existed when it didn’t. It’s okay to claim that George Will is a better source of authority on interpreting the ACRC’s scientific research than is the ACRC. Everyone who works at the Post, has, I think, a serious problem.

Fred Hiatt Won’t Correct Dishonest Climate Change Columns, Will Lecture Congress on How to Handle Climate Change

An excellent point from Dave Roberts:

The Washington Post editorial board, which just this weekend elected to run a column from George Will denying climate change entirely, now presumes to lecture Barbara Boxer on how to solve it.

The classic post-war American newspaper has been largely insulated from market pressure and competition. Typically, you’d have a city and the city would have a newspaper. People could choose to subscribe to the newspaper, or they could choose not to. But they couldn’t choose a different paper. You just had to decide, as a citizen and as an individual, if you wanted to be the sort of person who read his town’s broadsheet or else if you didn’t want to be that sort of person. Thus, the audience was guaranteed and, at the time, so was the advertising. Under the circumstances, papers were remarkably free to just do whatever they wanted to do with their actual content.

When you talk about this with working journalists and newspaper nostalgics, there’s a tendency to focus on the upsides of this insulation from market competition. You could dispatch some reporters to work on a Pulitzer-contending feature or major investigation and not really worry too much if the marginal increase in readership justified the cost. You could keep a Moscow bureau open just because you thought it was important. All good stuff. But it’s also bread this weird arrogance where nobody in the business seems to think that the deplorably low quality of the product plays any role whatsoever in the declining relevance of these institutions. But here’s a George Will column in my paper, lying to me about global warming. Here’s Will’s editor refusing to correct the record or say anything about why he decided it would be a good idea to run a column in which George Will lies about global warming. And now here’s the very same indifferent-to-the-truth editorial team writing about global warming. And I’m supposed to read the editorial why? What value to me, as a consumer of information, do inaccurate uncorrected George Will columns offer me? How will the addition of Bill Kristol to the roster increase the value of the newspaper to me as a consumer of information?

These issues don’t get considered, at all. These guys are Important Conservatives so it’s important that we pay them to lie to people.

George Will Loves Recycling

Brad Johnson notes that the core of George Will’s sloppy, error-ridden column on climate change is an almost exact repeat of a tendentious article he wrote in April of 2006. What he had back then was a very misleading account of the “global cooling” controversies of the 1970s. What he seems to have added since then is zero actual knowledge about the issue, but a couple of additional factual errors.

Fred Hiatt Can’t Add

This is just a staggeringly inept Washington Post editorial on the Senate version of the stimulus:

Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) worked to scrub some less plausibly stimulative stuff from the Senate bill. But that measure still contains some dubious provisions, especially on the tax side. A $15,000 tax credit for new home purchases this year, which would cost more than $35 billion, looks especially wasteful. The proposal, drafted by Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), is supposed to stimulate the moribund housing market. Actually, because it is not limited to first-time homebuyers, the credit would do little to reduce swollen inventories: Homeowners who used this tax break to get a new house would have to put their old one up for sale. The Senate bill would also create an $11 billion deduction for sales taxes on car purchases and auto loan interest, a proposal sponsored by Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.). It’s unclear how many people would be lured into the new-car market, already rich with dealer incentives, by this additional one. Given the modest probable benefits, Congress should cut these provisions and consider devoting at least some of the savings to spending that is likely to provide more immediate bang for the buck.
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The Senate bill also includes a $69 billion “patch” for the alternative minimum tax, without which many middle-income taxpayers would face a stiff tax increase. It was probably inevitable that Congress would enact this measure without paying for it this year. But, since the biggest benefits would go to relatively well-off taxpayers unlikely to increase spending, and since AMT relief was probably already factored into household plans for this year anyway, it’s hard to see how this belongs in an economic stimulus bill.

Here’s what’s true in these paragraphs. The Senate version eliminated some stuff from the House bill that maybe shouldn’t have been there. It’s also true that the Senate version includes these bad tax provisions. But the Post forgot to tell its readers that the bad tax stuff isn’t in the House bill. And the Post also forgot to tell its readers that the bad tax stuff is much larger in magnitude than the bad spending stuff they get rid of. The Post also forgot to tell its readers that the Senate also got rid of a bunch of good stuff from the tax bill. Over all, the Post is implying that the Senate bill is an imperfect improvement over the House bill. The fact that the Senate bill is more expensive doesn’t get mentioned. Nor does the fact that it’s less stimulative get mentioned. Because, hey, it’s a bipartisan compromise so by definition it must be better than Nancy Pelosi’s hippie stimulus.

WaPost: Bipartisanship is Good, Nevermind the Consequences

Washington Post editorial page offers up an excellent example of the highly ideological nature of Beltway pragmatism and centrism:

The gang of 20 or so moderate Democrats and Republicans, led by Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), heeded the president’s call for bipartisanship and hunkered down to produce the bill announced Friday night. Though the details of the package still need to be examined, the senators’ effort was an admirable one — one that aimed at providing the quick and large injection of funds into the economy experts say is necessary, while modifying or removing parts of the bill that were too long-range or complex for an emergency bill, or which blatantly served special interests.

As we see here, the cart of bipartisanship is straightforwardly put ahead of the horse of policy merits. They say the details of the package need to be examined, but don’t actually examine them before deciding that the effort deserves praise. But there’s no indication that the Collins-Nelson modifications actually do these things. Elements of the package such as special tax breaks for homebuyers or new car purchases that are ineffective stimulus but likely to benefit the prosperous and special interests were left in, while highly effective stimulative measures like fiscal aid to state governments and an expanded child tax credit were taken out.

Diversity, Hiatt-Style

Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt, shining star of your liberal media, says:

Post Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt called Kristol “very smart and very plugged in,” saying Kristol would be an influential voice in the coming debate over redefining the Republican Party. “It seems to me there were a lot of Times readers who felt the Times shouldn’t hire someone who supported the Iraq war,” said Hiatt, adding that he wants “a diverse range of opinions” on his page.

Even absent Kristol, the Times will have among its op-ed columnists Iraq War supporter David Brooks. And it will also have Iraq War supporter Thomas Friedman as its dedicated foreign affairs columnist. So it’s hardly as if Iraq War supporters have been purged from the NYT. Meanwhile, what kind of diversity has Hiatt really brought to the Post’s opinion section? His masthead editorials backed the war, as did all of his conservative columnists and most of the “liberal” columnists. A believer in diversity would be trying to get some company for poor E.J. Dionne and Harold Meyerson among the liberals.

The fascinating thing about this, though, is that Hiatt combines contempt for newspaper readers with contempt for the craft of journalism. He clearly thinks it was bad of the Times to cater to the desires of its readers. And he doesn’t say Kristol’s column is good! Doesn’t call it insightful, doesn’t call it informative, doesn’t call it well-written. He just says that Kristol is “plugged-in” and influential. Which no doubt he is. But as a consumer of media, I prefer to take in well-written informative commentary that’s entertaining or enlightening. Being deliberately misled by influence-peddlers or wannabe influence-peddlers doesn’t rank high on my priority list. But to Hiatt it’s the very model of a modern major political pundit.

Shocking News

Admittedly, it’s a slow news day. But seriously The Washington Post has broken the news that some conservatives think Obama’s advisers are too liberal. In other news, many liberals think the GOP congressional leadership is too conservative.

Cohen: Online News Reading is Undermining My Sexist Stereotypes

A colleague observes to me that someone needs to tell Richard Cohen that you can read newspapers on your BlackBerry:

A BlackBerry is of limited utility. You cannot have a hearty family breakfast with everyone gathered around the BlackBerry. But with a good newspaper, the president could read the hard-news section, the first lady could adhere to gender orthodoxy and read the softer sections, and the kids could chuckle at the comics. Just as in the old movies, papa could explain things, like what’s the purpose of NATO anymore. (I’m dying to know this myself.) Not all newspapers have comic sections, but even those that don’t usually have sports pages and business columns.

A high-quality newspaper is a repository of leaks. Presidents don’t care for leaks, but like awful-tasting medicine, leaks are good for presidents. Leaks are an important way that one part of the government can communicate with another. An assistant Cabinet secretary cannot pick up the phone and call the president. His boss won’t let him. His boss might block something the president should know. This is where leaks come in. The low-level guy leaks the information to a newspaper and the president reads about it at breakfast. This cannot happen with a BlackBerry.

If the case for newspapers is that they help bolster gender orthodoxy, I think it’s probably a good thing that print is doomed.

Shailagh Murray Advocates Collective Guilt

Stunning stuff from The Washington Post’s Shailagh Murray:

There isn’t a reasonable person around who thinks this scandal will taint Obama in any meaningful way, but at the very least, it reminds people of the political world from whence he came. This story could be a useful preamble to something bigger down the road.

So even though the scandal doesn’t taint Obama, it taints him anyway because it taints all 12.8 million people who live in Illinois?

Will Gets Fair

What a strange column from George Will:

If reactionary liberals, unsatisfied with dominating the mainstream media, academia and Hollywood, were competitive on talk radio, they would be uninterested in reviving the fairness doctrine. Having so sullied liberalism’s name that they have taken to calling themselves progressives, liberals are now ruining the reputation of reactionaries, which really is unfair.

Nobody is trying to revive the fairness doctrine. I’m not sure how many times this can be said.

Meanwhile, how dominant can liberals really be in the mainstream media if we can’t even stop George Will from just making stuff up about us in his widely syndicated Washington Post column?

Howell: No Matter How Bad McCain Is, Our Opinion Pages Must Pretend He’s Great

Washington Post ombudswoman Deborah Howell calls for less intellectual honesty on the Post’s opinion pages:

The op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on Sen. John McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces (58) about McCain than there were about Obama (32), and Obama got the editorial board’s endorsement. The Post has several conservative columnists, but not all were gung-ho about McCain.

This is pretty absurd. Some institutions try to put forward a fairly consistent ideological point of view. It’s clear that The Washington Post op-ed section tries to do no such thing. Instead, its columnists represent a range of views. And it’s surely to the Post’s credit that when George Will, one of their conservative columnists, found himself not-so-psyched about John McCain and his campaign that he said so. Similarly, Anne Applebaum is a Post columnist who’s hard to classify but might at one point have been thought likely to be enthusiastic about John McCain. But she didn’t like the direction he and his campaign took, so she wrote a column laying out her thinking:

Yesterday, while reading the latest polling data on John McCain, Sarah Palin and their appeal — or growing lack of it — to ” independent women voters” it suddenly dawned on me: I am one of these elusive independent female voters, and I have the credentials to prove it. For the past couple of decades, I’ve sometimes voted Democratic, sometimes Republican. I’m even a registered independent, though I did think of switching to vote for John McCain in 2000. But because the last political party I truly felt comfortable with was Thatcher’s Conservative Party (I lived in England in the 1980s and 1990s), I didn’t actually do it.

The larger point, though, is that if I’m not voting for McCain — and, after a long struggle, I’ve realized that I can’t — maybe it’s worth explaining why, for I suspect there are other independent voters who feel the same. Particularly because it’s not his campaign, disjointed though that has been, that finally repulses me: It’s his rapidly deteriorating, increasingly anti-intellectual, no longer even recognizably conservative Republican Party. His problems are not technical; they do not have to do with ads, fundraising or tactics, as some have suggested. They are institutional; they have to do with his colleagues, advisers and supporters.

Presumably, this sort of thing is what an ideologically diverse op-ed page is supposed to be doing. The fact that the Post’s liberals were more enthusiastic about Obama than the conservatives were about McCain reflected an enthusiasm gap that existed in the country. The fact that a centrist Post columnist like Applebaum had a lot of nice things to say about McCain the man and McCain the maverick but ultimately didn’t like the 2008 vintage McCain reflected the fact that McCain was extremely popular with independents and moderates at one time, but became less popular as he re-remade himself into a more orthodox conservative. Similarly, that a neocon like Charles Krauthemmer liked McCain more than did a traditionalist conservative like Will reflected reality on the ground.

What should the Post have done? Told Applebaum that to maintain balance she had to vote for McCain? Told Will he was going to get fired unless he joined Krauthammer in becoming a McCain enthusiast? That would have been bizarre