Remapping Debate

Going beyond classic "he said, she said" reporting to deliver evidence that rates cut by Clinton and then Bush are yielding increasing income inequality. Evidence-based reporting debunks rationalizations for treating investment more favorably than earned income.

Might there be reasons independent of immediate job creation for the government to take advantage of historically low rates?

That wasn’t exactly the headline on Norimitsu Onishi’s excellent story published June 25 in The New York Times. Onishi’s reporting was presented under the headline, “‘Safety Myth’ Left Japan Ripe for Nuclear Crisis.” But the issues Onishi raised are begging to be probed in the U.S. context.

Governor Andrew Cuomo — who just played a historic role in securing marriage rights for gay and lesbian New Yorkers — is already being referred to as a presidential candidate for 2016, and is being touted as an "aggressive pragmatist" or "dynamic centrist." Why won’t the press pin him down on what specific outcome he sought in the battle pitting the need of millions of New Yorkers for affordable and secure housing against the desire of landlords and free market ideologues to continue to dismantle the rent regulation system?

A refreshing departure from the standard "he said, she said" model that assesses whether any evidence supports a new corporate tax holiday proposal. Reporter serves readers by standing outside the framework of corporate talking points, providing historical perspective.

No, not about private indiscretions. Just about what sort of leadership the widely-hailed governor is or is not exerting when it comes to the fate of the homes of more than a million families.

A front-page story in last Thursday’s New York Times purported to have uncovered an “odd alliance”: a non-profit group affiliated with the Tea Party running a PR campaign closely aligned with the interests of a gigantic Indonesian paper company. This confluence of “seemingly disparate interests,” the Times asserted, was surprising because “the Tea Party movement is as deeply skeptical of big business as it is of big government.” But while the story skillfully followed the money trail, it was an example of something all too common in American political journalism: an impressive display of fact-finding dropped into a confused conceptual frame. A more clear-eyed understanding of the relationship between the Tea Party and business interests points to a host of basic reporting tasks to which the Times and its peers could direct their impressive resources.

At a time when President Obama and others in Washington are calling for the top corporate tax rate to be reduced, David Kocieniewski's New York Times piece explains how "fierce lobbying for tax breaks" and "innovative accounting" have already helped companies bring the corporate share of tax receipts down to less than a quarter of what it was in the mid-1950s.

Will advances in artificial intelligence result in cheaper and more effective ways to hold back incriminating evidence?