Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

Over at CJR, Steve Lovelady mourns the departure of Donald Barlett and James Steele from Time:

CJR Daily: Once There Were Giants: In a doleful shirt-tail, or footnote, to the New York Times story this morning on the appointment of a new managing editor at Time magazine, we learn this: "Donald Barlett and James Steele, two investigative reporters who have chronicled the vicissitudes of the American economy for Time magazine since 1997, have lost their jobs in a budget squeeze. The reporting duo, who together won two Pulitzer Prizes and two national magazine awards, were on the payroll of Time Inc. Their jobs were among about 650 that the company has eliminated in the last six months."

With that, there ended a chapter in American journalism the likes of which we may not see again. First at the Philadelphia Inquirer for 26 years and then at Time for nine years, Barlett and Steele came to be regarded by many as the premier investigative team in the business, and one that consistently met benchmarks to which others could only aspire. As Jim Warren of the Chicago Tribune has admiringly noted, in an age of singles hitters, Barlett and Steele swung for the fences every time, and seldom failed.

Their body of work is a testament to an exacting, relentless, painstaking and meticulous determination that other reporters could only shake their heads at as they admired it from afar. What they practiced was the opposite of "Gotcha!" journalism, or quick hits, or cheap shots. Rather, they burrowed in for months -- sometimes years -- at a time, and then returned with an examination of entire systems gone awry, whether it be an oil crisis, the nuclear waste dilemma, corporate welfare run rampant, the nation's ramshackle tax system, or the economy itself....

Ummm... No. I have a very different view of Barlett and Steele. My view was that they didn't know enough to write the stories they wrote--and were unwilling to learn. So whatever they produced was unreliable.

Examples? Sometime last decade I wrote, on some email list or other:

Email: Barlett and Steele, Who Pays the Taxes?: Examples of unreliability? Barlett and Steele's Who Pays the Taxes? has been dug out of the basement. Let me start on page 20, with "[Single parent] Jacques Cotton [paid] 19.8 percent of his income [of $33,500] in taxes. George and Barbara Bush's tax rate, remember, was 18.1 percent."

As I noted before, this is the only year of the Bush presidency during which the Bushes paid such a low average tax rate. The cause is that the denominator includes royalties from Millie's Book, which the Bushes declared as income, gave away, and took a charitable deduction for. Our tax system is not as progressive as I would like. But it is progressive. And Barlett and Steele are trying to mask the fact that it is progressive.

Page 21: "[The Federal Government] encourages people to secure an advanced education to qualify for jobs at companies that are not hiring or are paying wages that make the degree a poor economic investment."

In fact, the educational wage premium today is higher than at any time since the end of World War II: getting a college education is an extremely good economic investment.

Page 21: "[The Federal Government] talks of retraining the newly unemployed to fill high-tech jobs that don't exist."

Stagnant real wages are--according to Janet Yellen--the result not of the fact that new jobs are by and large bad, low-wage, low-skill jobs, but the result of declining real wages at old, already-existing jobs.

Page 23: "Squeezing the American Family--Part One"

No mention of the fact that the Earned Income Tax Credit more than makes up for the decline in the relative value of personal exemptions for a typical family making less than median income.

Page 25: "If you are a middle-income [California] family, you may pay nearly as much in real estate taxes as a wealthy family whose home has a market value ten to fifteen times what yours is worth."

No mention of the fact that this is a result of the overwhelmingly-popular Proposition 13: as long as you don't sell your house, your property taxes do not rise as your house's value appreciates. Proposition 13 was not the result (as Barlett and Steele imply) of nasty politicians in smoke filled rooms eager to give the rich a break while the rest of us aren't watching, but of a voter* *referendum.

Page 30: "Every so often Congress... extends a benefit reserved for the privileged to everyone. It never lasts. A case in point: retirement savings plans.... When the Tax Reform Act of 1986 was finally signed into law, the tax-deductible IRA disappeared for millions of workers."

Barlett and Steele don't seem to understand that the tax deductible IRA as it existed between 1981 and 1986 was a regressive piece of the tax code.

That's just ten pages. Once again, enough. Barlett and Steele are unreliable. They don't understand what they are talking about.

Brad DeLong

Comments

[Saam Barrager]

The first one sounded like a nitpick - the tax system is probably much, much less progressive than people think. (Don't really know what people think, actually - but they reliably think that taxes for the very rich apply to them.)

But the Prop-13 one is really irksome. Not just for being factually misleading, but because there is a great story there to be told. Tell it or don't bother.

I tried to wince my way through a Victor Davis Hanson book once but ran into enough woppers or sloppiness that I couldn't finish it. Silly stuff like citing "Nobel prize winning author Jorge Luis Borges" (Neruda won, Borges didn't) or his galling description of 16th century weapons manufacturers in Toledo as "capitalist".

[Phil Yost]

DeLong omits Lovelady's ending: "Now, a confession for readers of CJR Daily: As an editor, I worked with Don Barlett and Jim Steele for more than 20 years in Philadelphia and six at Time Inc."

Perhaps Lovelady was the editor at the Inquirer so woefully ignorant of economics (and basic journalistic fairness) who caused the paper to publish "America: What Went Wrong?'' in the early 1990s. It was a staggering popular success. But it was economically illiterate and journalistically biased.

In a book titled "News Values,'' Jack Fuller, a former publisher of the Chicago Tribune and Pulitzer Prize winner for editorial writing, noted that Barlett and Steele had written about airline deregulation without mentioning that air fares had fallen -- concentrating instead on the fact that some smaller cities had lost service. The series (later a book), Fuller said, "does not live up to the discipline of intellectual honesty in that it does not give voice to contrary facts and evidence.''

[save_the_rustbelt]

"Page 21: "[The Federal Government] talks of retraining the newly unemployed to fill high-tech jobs that don't exist."...."

This is absolutely correct, regardless of what any economists might say from the Ivory Tower.

I don't know Janet Yellen from Adam but all the statistics in the world cannot prove this wrong because it is happening.

Stagnanat real wages, whatever the cause, do not prove this to be untrue.

Listen to Dubya, Snow, Gutierrez, etc, when they are in the Rustbelt blowing smoke up our butts.

[ogmb]

No comment on the drying-up of the whole worlds only source for Fafblog?

[thesoapleft]

Our tax system is progressive? I'd like to see you expand on that.

It's clear to me that the nominal tax rates are higher for higher wages. But aren't capital gains and dividend income taxed at a lower rate?

Doesn't 10 million of capital gain and/or dividend income get taxed at a lower rate than 100,000 in wages?

Not to mention social security and medicare flat rates (with ss capped at around $90,000).

And....by definition capital gains are not income until realized....if ever.

So, nominally progressive? Yes. Really progressive? In certain ranges, yes. But overall?

[liberal]

"No mention of the fact that this is a result of the overwhelmingly-popular Proposition 13: as long as you don't sell your house, your property taxes do not rise as your house's value appreciates. Proposition 13 was not the result (as Barlett and Steele imply) of nasty politicians in smoke filled rooms eager to give the rich a break while the rest of us aren't watching, but of a voter* *referendum."

But who financed the drive to _make_ it a voter referendum?

And who was providing information to voters on the impact of Proposition 13?

[fair]

These guys didn't understand economics very well, and they wrote on economics. Not good.

But journalists have to write on stuff they don't understand all the time. Some do it badly, some do it worse (and then there's Judy Miller).

If I want to know whether these two deserve praise as exceptionally good journalists, what I want to know is:

Given that they were journalists (i.e. ignorant about nearly everything they write about), were they better than most?

Sure, I'd like to raise the whole background level--that's why I'm glad you're doing that course on training journalists in how to write about economics.

But the background for meaningful comparison still has to be: what's the background reliability rate for *journalists*? Not economists.

[kharris]

To second Fair's comment, unless the people who decided to sack Pulitzer prize winning economics reporters knew that they were stinkers when it came to economics, the world has not been well served. If they were the best of the lot, the loss of their efforts lowers the average, and the spectacle of their departure does little to encourage other reporters to lift themselves from abysmal to bad.

[Jonathan King]

I think there are two broad points here.

1) Bartlett and Steele *were* unreliable. In "America: who pays the taxes", I think they did do a good job of telling the story of how tax legislation gets made, and in some cases made solely to benefit tiny interest groups. But a lot of the book is just bluster, and in many places, misleading and inaccurate. My take on it was that they were pretty good at sniffing out some situations where the story was in what people did to change the system for their benefit, but they were really bad at understanding the overall system. Well, maybe with a few exceptions. From memory, they came down very hard on the nonsense that surrounds corporate income taxes, and realized (I think correctly) that the current system is just really pretty broken, so we might as well just do away with it, which would then silence (in a different way) the people who claim double taxation on things like stock dividends.

2) Whatever the failings of Bartlett and Steele, it's not as if there are dozens of other reporters out there even bothering to write about any of this stuff. To be honest, I've always wondered why not many (any?) of the thousands of smart, economics PhDs who cannot or do not enter academia have ever landed in journalism. The world for them would be almost completely wide open, and, if they wrote even a bit decently, I'm sure their stuff would be well-read. I'm guessing the reason this happens is that a non-academic Econ PhD can probably just earn way more money than the average reporter doing something else. Oh well...

[lee]

It is disingenous to say "your property taxes do not rise as your house apprenticates." True--they do not rise nearly as much, but they do rise 2% a year. Prop 13 was passed in 1979 but rolled assessments back to 1975 and allowed a 2% a year rise. That's a 62% increase. Not so much as to force you out of your house(which was Prop13's point) but not "do not rise" either.

[Charles]

Like Fair and kharris, I think Brad is being unfair.

Consider *other* economic journalists. People like, oh, say Donald Luskin.

James K. Glassman.

The wince-inducing list goes on.

By the standards of the profession, Bartlett and Steele are in the upper quintile. They are not David Cay Johnston. They are not Robert Pear.

They succeeded in conveying the broad strokes of tax and finance to people who would otherwise be learning at the knee of Donald Luskin.

I do regret distortions like selecting one year where Poppy and the Red Queen were able to get a low tax rate by making a charitable donation to suggest that they don't pay substantial taxes ever. Assuming the premise, that's demagogy, not journalism.

But the general point is correct. If you have enough money, you pay as much tax as you are willing to pay. There are so many ways to game the system.

[stewart]

It's about narrative. Bartlett & Steele have a generally coherent narrative that accords with the biases of many of their readers, and most of the readers of this blog. Narratives are great for organizing information, but don't lead you to the truth. Our host is aware of gaps or contradictions in data that don't fit their narrative. Which journalists have a more comprehensive narrative? Hey, that's why it's called a story.

[Mark York]

Even rent controlled mobilehome spaces in LA rise 2 percent a year under prop 13.