Washington Post Death Spiral Watch Watch: Tax Policy John-McCain-Wusses-Out 110% Edition

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

I have an email in my inbox from that practitioner of worthless "he said, she said" journalism, Jonathan Weisman of the Washington Post. Jonathan writes:

From: weismanj@washpost.com
Subject: Hello Prof. DeLong
Date: April 29, 2008 6:56:56 AM PDT To: delong@econ.Berkeley.EDU

Haven't spoken to you in awhile, but I was compelled to write, seeing that you read an entire front page story on John McCain's curiously changed positions on tax policy, and out of all that, you fixated on a single word.

I find that remarkable, but I did want to thank you for reading so attentively.

Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post congressional writer
weismanj@washpost.com
(202)334-7745
(202)689-9134 (cell)

What's Weisman talking about? Weisman had written:

McCain Offers Tax Policies He Once Opposed: To supporters, McCain has simply seen the light and now understands.... Said J.D. Foster, a former Bush White House and Treasury tax policy expert, now at the Heritage Foundation: "It's logical that he wouldn't be repeating the arguments he made then. We all learn from experience"...

Upon which I had snickered, commenting:

Jonathan Weisman Strikes Again!: Ah. Page A1 of the [Washington] Post. The [Washington Post's] death spiral continues.... First time I have ever seen anybody describe J.D. Foster as a tax policy "expert." Lobbyist, yes. Apparatchik, yes. Ideologue, yes. But expert? Never seen that before...

Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?

I note that Jonathan Weisman does not say a word defending his claim that the statement J.D. Foster is in any sense the view of tax policy "experts" who support McCain.

The natural questions for Weisman--that he has never tried to answer--are two:

• If Weisman isn't willing to defend what he writes, why write it in the first place?
• Why not go do something useful?

The natural questions for the Post management are three:

• Why does it retain and promote a reporter who doesn't even try to tell it straight?
• Who does it think will be reading it in five years if it doesn't try a lot harder than it is to regain its lost credibility as a news source?
• How stupid does it think its readers are?

If Weisman felt himself allowed to say what he really believes, and said it on the record, he would presumably say something like the following about how he and his fellow reporters at the Washington Post view their jobs:

Look, I know that the overwhelming opinion of McCain-supporting tax-policy experts--people like Greg Mankiw, Andrew Samwick, and Doug Holtz-Eakin--is that tax cuts don't raise revenue, that unfunded tax cuts are bad public policy, that McCain has caved to the ideological tax-cut lobby for the duration of the campaign, and that the tax-policy experts hope to recoup the ground they have given up and restore fiscal-policy sanity to the McCain operation after the election. I know that very well. I know that McCain has wussed out 110%. But I can't report it. I can't find McCain tax-policy expert supporters willing to say it on the record. And Len Downie won't allow me to print the story without a quote high up in the article making McCain look good.

Calling J.D. Foster a tax-policy "expert," and implying that the view that McCain has seen the light is a respectable view among the broader community of tax-policy experts is misleading, but only in a very minor way. I got a lot of good stuff out in that article, and I couldn't have gotten the article printed on page A1 without calling J.D. Foster a tax-policy expert. It was a very small price to pay.

But Weisman won't say anything like that on the record. The closest thing about the culture of reporting at the Washington Post was said by Weisman's colleague Mike Allen, who once traveled to Virginia Beach to say, as Matthew Yglesias reported:

Matthew Yglesias: He Said / She Said: I went down to Norfolk to be on a panel discussion with The Washington Post's Mike Allen.... Mike had something to say on the topic of "he said, she said" journalism that provided me with some valuable perspective.... Somebody from the audience asked a question which seemed to take as its premise that there was a strict dichotomy between "factual" writing, which is what you see on news pages, and "opinion" writing, which is what you see on editorial pages.... I took some issue with that characterization. News pages, I said, aren't so much giving a "just the facts, ma'am" approach to reporting. Rather, they're trying to act as neutral arbiters between contending parties. Oftentimes this means there will be political controversy about a basically factual subject ("what's the effect of X on the deficit?") that goes unresolved by a news writer. Instead of giving us the facts, the news writer gives us a set of meta-facts -- "Joe says 'X' but Same says 'Y.'"...

People... become partisans in large part because they think the facts are partisan. When I say that the Bush Social Security plan involves a huge quantity of transition debt that risks provoking a fiscal crisis, I'm trying to state some facts, as I see them. Others who disagree are likewise trying to argue facts. We're not offering "opinions" as such....

Allen took issue with that characterization of what news writers are doing. He said that news writers are trying to present both sides' points-of-view, hence the "he said, she said" quality to it, but that they're trying to present these points-of-view in such a way so that a discerning reader can tell who's right based on reading the story.

I tried then to revise my statement of the situation. A good news reporter, on my revised view, tries to "lead a horse to water."... He seemed happier with that restatement...

On my view, misleading "he said, she said"-lead-a-horse-to-water journalism--where what is really going on is apparent only to discerning readers willing to pay a lot of time and attention and who already know a lot about the issue--is not something that any reporter should be craven enough to practice or any reader willing to pay for. Jonathan Weisman and his bosses think differently.

What I don't understand is why Jonathan Weisman thinks that what he does has some right to my approval. I don't understand that at all.

Comments

[piotr]

tax policy expert, now at the Heritage Foundation: "It's logical that he wouldn't be repeating the arguments he made then. We all learn from experience"

One highly misleading type of writing is to refer to outfits like "Heritage Foundation" as "a think tank", while "a hack herd" would be much more accurate.

Apart from that, McCain surely learned from experience. He learned what spares him politically needless controversies in Republican primaries. One can make a long list.

"And Brutus is an honorable man."

[cedichou]

I'd say: please redact that phone number out.

[Ken Houghton]

Unfortunately, cedichou has a point.

One way that would make he said-she said more clearly "leading" would be if the point that was more solid were listed first.

Or maybe Weisman really is enough of a fool to believe that "business tax relief" (combined with all the other deficit increasings) will solve the budget problems.

The piece is more another nail in the reputation of Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who appeared until recently to be the one official to come out of the 43rd with his reputation intact.

[bmz]

Well said.

[bmz]

Well said.

[DB]

just for fun

JD Foster, PhD

http://www.heritage.org/about/staff/JDFoster.cfm

Papers by JD Foster, PhD

http://www.heritage.org/about/staff/JDFosterpapers.cfm

[Bruce Bartlett]

I think J.D. has as much right to be called a tax expert as most of the "experts" quoted in the Post. The problem, I think, is that the Heritage Foundation is left unidentified. It should have been labeled as the de facto research arm of the Republican National Committee.

[Eli Rabett]

1. Weisman cares.
2. Use the leverage.

[Bloix]

I really hate the "lead a horse to water" style, in which the reporter pretends to be objective but slants the quotes to favor his preferred side. You get a couple of quotes for one side high up in the article (before the break if there is one), then some downplayed stuff introduced with weak verbs and unflattering adjectives from the other side in the middle, then a killer quote or a deadpan fact as a punchline at the end. Bah-dum-bum! No attempt at genuine analysis or weighing of evidence, just the same rhetorical game played out over and over again.

[Bloix]

I really hate the "lead a horse to water" style, in which the reporter pretends to be objective but slants the quotes to favor his preferred side. You get a couple of quotes for one side high up in the article (before the break if there is one), then some downplayed stuff introduced with weak verbs and unflattering adjectives from the other side in the middle, then a killer quote or a deadpan fact as a punchline at the end. Bah-dum-bum! No attempt at genuine analysis or weighing of evidence, just the same rhetorical game played out over and over again.

[Grendel]

Let's play the "Fixate on A Single Word" game.

Jonathan Weismann is a dedicated *professional*.
Jonathan Weismann is a dedicated *incompetent*.
Jonathan Weismann is a dedicated *goat blower*.

The terminally shrill will complain that the last consists of a *two word* change. Such arguments trivialize our public discourse and are decidedly unserious.

[bigTom]

Doesn't Johnathan's pleadings that he had to include the objectional stuff just another indication of the fact that the "bad guys" are close to obtaining information dominance. I seem to recall the theory of information dominance was that you didn't need to achieve complete control over the sources of information, but just enough direct and indirect influence that opposing points of view are irrelevant to achieving the policy objective. It seems to me that we are are struggling at a severe disadvantage when most of the popular forms of information transfer to the masses have been so corrupted. It is mainly intellectuals who have learned to bypass the nightly news and dig up less biased information sources. But we lack the numbers to have enough of an influence on elections.

[christofay]

The RNC does not have a research arm. The org runs something like this:

profit extraction from the Federal government wing: the elite of the RNC, cover org Halliburton

militant wing of the RNC (the IRA, Hamas, have one so the RNC definitely needs one): Blackwater

propaganda / idealogical purity wing: Heritage Foundation and other 4th column organizations. Better Red than Expert

Unless they are researching whether the world was formed whole by God exactly 5,000 years ago, or is it 10,000 years ago, the RNC does not engage in research.

More Prayer Meetings

[christofay]

The RNC just like Hamas & Hezbollah have a charity wing too. It's called the Federal Reserve, and it's doing some great work. It just saved the former CEO of Bear Sterns from penury and seeing the rest of his life tied up in court.

[christofay]

Goat blowing? We're trying to have a serious discussion here on information dominance, thanks Big Tom, and you bring up Skull n Bones?

Grendel, you're a monster for diverting our attention with weekend activities

[Oblong1]

Say what you like about the man, putting his cell-phone number up on the web like that is low.

[Bloix]

Brian from elsewhere - there are legions of actual tax experts, some of whom do support McCain, who know that what he's saying now is false. So why does Weisman go to a hack to tell us a lie? Because he doesn't want to report what the real experts are saying. He wants to suck up to the campaign by reporting the lie as if it's the truth. That's the point, not whether Foster qualifies as an expert according to some absolute scale. When a newspaper reporter goes out of his way to find a source that will tell him a lie that he can then report as the truth, that's something to be shrill about.

[Joe]

Weismann is not evil. He wrote better tax articles when he first started, before the swamp fumes of bipartisanship addled his brain, but he does care, and can be encouraged and pushed to write articles that are better at the margins.

This is one of those examples of where we are tempted to come down most harshly on those who have the potential to do good, but don't meet their promise, rather than saving our harshest criticism for the outright failures who will never manage to write a decent tax article in their lives.

[PaulC]

In other words:

I gave you a whole big bag of chocolate chips and you seem obsessed with the fact that one of them is really a rat turd.

or maybe:

I sent you a fifty page proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, and all you seemed to notice was the line where I wrote 2+2=5.

[JK]

Prof. DeLong,

Is Mr Weisman's email and phone no. public? If not, perhaps
you shouldn't be publishing them.

[Maynard Handley]

"He said that news writers are trying to present both sides' points-of-view, hence the "he said, she said" quality to it, but that they're trying to present these points-of-view in such a way so that a discerning reader can tell who's right based on reading the story.
"

I call this the UK crossword puzzle style of writing. Sure, maybe you can figure out what it means if you have plenty of free time.
The question Allen should ponder, however, is, and this is merely rephrasing Brad's point differently, who the hell does he think his audience is? I am not interested in reading about who said what, I am interested in reading about WHO IS RIGHT. And I don't have the time or interest in applying philological semiotics to an article to try to extract that information.

When the choice is between an NY Times or a Washington Post, say, who give me the "he said, she said" version, and an Yglesias, or a Drum, or a Kleiman, or a DeLong who will actually tell me who of the two is wrong and why, well it's obvious which source is more useful.

[Bloix]

Brian from elsewhere says, "There could have been no other 'experts' available before deadline."

Look, the whole point of hacks is that they are available any time day or night for quick quotes. Real experts have real jobs. They can't walk out of a class or a meeting to take a reporter's call and they have their own deadlines to meet. Hacks like Foster have pretend jobs at pretend think tanks and they do no real work. Their entire reason for being is to provide reporters a good quote on deadline. Journalists quickly learn that the hacks respond to calls promptly, provide a pithy quote quickly, and get off the phone without trying to provide any wearisome explanations of complexities and nuances. So the journalists quickly come to prefer the hacks to the real experts.

As for the merits of Weisman's use of Foster - the idea that tax cuts pay for themselves is not something that fell out of the sky yesterday. It's a theme that's been pushed by Republican office-holders and their paid shills for years. All the genuine studies show it's false. No genuine economist professes to believe it. Every reporter who covers tax policy must know this. Yet Weisman quoted one tax "expert," and one only, who says that to believe it is to see the light. There are two possibilities here: Weisman is a fool or he is a villain. There's no middle ground.

[albrt]

Brian provides us with an insight that is just as important as Mr. Allen's horse. Most journalists see themselves as the guys in the old movies, just plain-spoken, beer-an-a-bump guys like Hillary Clinton, doing the best they can in a uniquely tough situation that nobody else understands.

The rest of us think that journalists seek truth. The journalists are right and we are wrong. Journalists really are just plain-spoken, beer-an-a-bump guys like Hillary Clinton.

The solution to this, of course, is to make it clear to everybody that journalists have no special claim on truth or anything else. Which means the end of American-style news media some time in the near future. Which is pretty close to Brad's goal of encouraging Post reporters to find useful work. Means, meet ends.

[The Fool]

Weisman is a media whore and a coward. D.C. journalists have no real expertise other than what they learned in journalism school. What they are experts at is divining and parroting the conventional Village wisdom -- that and being comically self-righteous about inisting they weren't wrong when they obviously were.

Fuck'em. I used to want to be a journalist. I edited a paper in college. I used to resepect journalists. Now I despise them. No other profession has fallen further in my lifetime -- not even close.

[Shirley]

Obama for president 2008! HRC is done for, why is she still wasting her time running in the election? its time for her to back out. Get in tune with Obama and download his campaign song at http://www.obamarocks08.com
you can also register to vote there!

[Shirley]

Obama for president 2008! HRC is done for, why is she still wasting her time running in the election? its time for her to back out. Get in tune with Obama and download his campaign song at http://www.obamarocks08.com
you can also register to vote there!

[Shirley]

Obama for president 2008! HRC is done for, why is she still wasting her time running in the election? its time for her to back out. Get in tune with Obama and download his campaign song at http://www.obamarocks08.com
you can also register to vote there!