Politics

Oregon legislator: “We get these benchmarks, great, but it’s not doing enough to inform our policy choices.” Can "benchmarks" and "indicators" be implemented in a way to have a real impact? A key question: do indicator systems work by attempting to “insulate” them from politics, or by attempting to have them do battle in the political arena?

Can "benchmarks" and "indicators" be implemented in a way to have a real impact on public policy?

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?

Cuomo left the trigger points at which apartments are deregulated worse for tenants than they were 14 years ago, when then-Governor George Pataki first orchestrated legislative changes designed to destroy rent regulation.

A majority of Senators supports a bill to end tax breaks for oil and gas companies and opposes a bill that would expand the areas open to oil and gas exploration. Is the presence or absence of majority support really irrelevant to the reporting of the stories? A continuation of our ongoing feature on limitations of the paper's reporting (the feature also includes examples of reporter opinions and assumptions getting tucked in to national political stories as though they were facts).

Even as reporter opinions and assumptions get neatly tucked in to national political stories as though they were facts, those stories are still being billed as hard news. For those not gripped by centrism-mania, it is clear how powerfully those reportorial assumptions warp and limit coverage. This edition presents the first entries in what, sadly, promises to be a continuing feature.

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.