NYT: two stories, false equivalence
May 19, 2011 — National political reporters for the New York Times may not drink as much Kool-Aid as executive editor Bill Keller (whose piece on the noble efforts of the “Gang of Six” — Senators working toward moving Congress “past paralysis and toward compromise” in respect to the deficit — ran in the May 1st edition of the Sunday Times Magazine under the headline “They Could Be Heroes”), but they can’t resist the lure of always seeing the political center as being “reasonable” and “practical.” And it impairs their work.
Remapping Debate has begun an effort to document the scope of the problem, with emphasis on the practice of having reporter opinions and assumptions neatly tucked into a story as though they were facts. As you’ll see when you mouse over the highlighted selections, there are other recurring problems that are hard to ignore: for example, refusing to characterize something directly for fear of being seen as “taking sides,” and presentation of false equivalences. There is also some classic he-said, she-said reporting — without regard to truth value. Finally, there is also an example of what might be described as miscellaneous “centrism-philia.”
Here are some selections. As you encounter others, please let us know.
(The initial entries in this feature were published on May 11, 2011.)
Key to annotations
Presenting as fact what is actually the reporter’s adoption of unsupported assumptions.
Refusing to characterize directly.
“He said, she said.”
False equivalence
Miscellaneous centrism-philia.
“Senate Rejects Republican Bill on Exploration for Oil and Gas”
Carl Hulse, May 19, 2011
…the Senate on Wednesday decisively rejected a Republican plan to allow more coastal oil and gas exploration and to speed the issuance of drilling permits to oil companies.
The 57-to-42 vote against the measure came a day after Republicans rejected a Democratic plan to end tax breaks for oil companies as both parties sought to gain political advantage with frustrated consumers contending with high prices at the pump…
Fifty Democrats, five Republicans and two independents opposed the measure; 42 Republicans backed it. Sixty votes were required to advance the bill, so it fell 18 short.
“Senate Refuses to End Tax Breaks for Big Oil”
Carl Hulse, May 18, 2011
The Senate on Tuesday blocked a Democratic proposal to strip the five leading oil companies of tax breaks that backers of the measure said were unfairly padding industry profits while consumers were struggling with high gas prices…falling eight votes short of the 60 needed to move ahead with the bill…
In the 52-to-48 vote, 3 Democrats joined 45 Republicans in opposing the bill, which was supported by the Obama administration and fiscal watchdog groups that saw the tax help for the oil industry as wasteful. Forty-eight Democrats, two independents and two Republicans backed it.
“GOP Rethinking Bid to Overhaul Medicare Rules”
Carl Hulse, Jackie Calmes, May 6, 2011
House Republicans signaled Thursday that they were backing away from the centerpiece of their budget plan — a proposal to overhaul Medicare — in a decision that underscored both the difficulties and political perils of addressing the nation’s long-term fiscal problems…
Republicans suggested that they would continue to press to rein in the growing costs of Medicare, even if not through the current proposal, which would transform the program into one in which the federal government subsidized the purchase of private health insurance coverage by Americans 65 and older.
“Struggle Looms on Controlling Deficit Spending”
Carl Hulse, May 2, 2011
Republicans see the vote over raising the debt limit as leverage for immediate and concrete progress in their efforts to cut spending and reduce the size and reach of the government. President Obama has called for a no-strings-attached increase in the debt limit but has also proposed a budget plan that would include broad spending reductions if the federal debt as a percentage of the total economy is still rising in 2014.
Reflecting the political potency of the issue, some Democrats in Congress are now signaling that they would accept linking some kind of automatic trigger to a debt-limit increase…
One proposal getting attention is a…bipartisan spending cap plan promoted by Senators Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, and Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri. Under that proposal, spending would be restricted to 20.6 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product within a decade, requiring cuts if the cap was breached.
The willingness of Congressional Democrats to examine such options reflects a recognition that lawmakers cannot credibly forge ahead with a vote on the debt limit without some accompanying antideficit steps to make the increase palatable to voters.
“House G.O.P. Members Face Voter Anger Over Budget”
Jennifer Steinhauer, Carl Hulse, Apr. 27, 2011
Under the Republican proposal, Medicare would be converted into a program that would subsidize health coverage for retirees rather than provide coverage directly, a change that many Democrats say would risk leaving the elderly with inadequate health care as costs rise over the long run.
The Republican budget would also transform Medicaid, which pays for nursing homes for low-income residents, into a grant program to states, raising the possibility that states, under budget pressure, would cut back on coverage.
Democrats face political pressure as well to show that they can bring spending under control and rein in the growth of the national debt, and there are fissures within the party about whether to back tax increases and raise the national debt ceiling without concrete steps to bring down the budget deficit.
The reporters make the assumption that the GOP proposal to privatize Medicare was an effort to address “the nation’s long-term fiscal problems,” ignoring evidence from the Congressional Budget Office and elsewhere that the plan simply sought to shift the financial burden to those needing medical care, not doing anything to improve care or control costs. This framing is only possible when the starting point is, “We all understand that Medicare recipients need to make do with less.”
People can and do disagree about whether privatizing Medicare makes any sense, but there is no disagreement about the fact that the proposal would privatize the system. The GOP learned several years ago — in its last attempt to privatize Social Security — that it was best to avoid the word “privatize.” But the fact that one side in a debate has made a tactical decision to avoid describing its plan accurately doesn’t mean that reporters should follow that lead.
One might think that there was overwhelming public demand that strong measures be taken to counterbalance an increase to the debt-limit. The reporter knows very well that this is not so, and should know that polling on this issue — as with highly general questions on spending — fail to engage respondents as to the consequences of the choices involved. Does the reference to the “potency of the issue” reflect the functioning of the Washington echo chamber, or simply a personal view that the issue should have potency?
This conceit — the proposal just popped up in my story; I exercised no agency, but only recognized that the proposal was demanding to be talked about — is a frequent one. Is there overwhelming support for it? There is no evidence of that, and, indeed, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee said he was “strongly opposed.” The key is that anything that has at least one Democratic and one Republican on board gets to be called “bipartisan,” the ticket to be treated as important given the mindset of the Washington Bureau.
Would the psychoanalysts describe this statement as projection or something else? It is entirely made up. There is simply no evidence that passing a clean increase in the debt ceiling — as has been effected many times in the past — would be “unpalatable” to voters. There are surely many Republican voters who might prefer cutting spending concurrently (and some Democrats and independents as well), but that is a far cry from presenting the satisfaction of that portion of the electorate as an unavoidable necessity of American political life. It might help if there were ever some recognition of circumstances where “balance” represented the wrong policy choice.
The unwillingness to say “privatize,” even though the word most succinctly describes the plan.
Why ignore evidence and just report this as though it were a partisan rhetoric that had no more or less truth value than any other political statement? By the time this article was reported, it was quite clear that the plan was set up so that in fact the amount that would go to seniors to purchase private insurance would not keep up with rising health care costs.
Poll after poll conducted by the Times itself has shown that debt reduction is far down on the list of public concerns; the issue is that elite opinion in Washington — which the reporters imbibe, reflect, and help shape — has decided that immediate debt reduction is important.
This is an accurate characterization.
Were the two votes really equivalent? See highlighted text below, and compare the highlighted sections of the previous day’s story (to the right).
Here’s the tip-off to the problem. The sixty votes refers to the number of votes under Senate rules required to cut-off debate. Without 60 votes, opponents of a measure can filibuster it, and, since the Democratic majority has been unwilling to put Republicans to the test of actually carrying out a real filibuster, 41 Senators are effectively able to filibuster by shorthand. What disappears in the story is what a majority of the body wishes to do. That is a relevant fact to readers and voters, not esoterica.
True, but not because a majority of Senators opposed the proposal.
The premise is that the only threshold to be reported on is whether cloture is achieved, and so bills with majority support are covered the same way as bills that do not.
Only here does it become plain that the proposal to end the tax breaks had an absolute majority (with a little room to spare), and that the proposal to expand oil and gas drilling not only fell 18 votes short of the cloture requirement, but eight votes short of having the support of a majority.