Short of outright fabrication – say, the New York Times writer who concealed Stalin’s starvation murders of millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s – nothing undermines the craft of journalism quite like a supposedly impartial news outlet that takes sides.
Granted, some things are not matters of sane debate. (Memo to the Flat Earth Society and O.J. supporters.)
But when it comes to how Washington ought to handle the economic crisis, consensus has yet to put in an appearance on radar. Some economists think we need more federal “stimulus”; others, and most Americans, don’t buy it. Journalists ought to report the facts dispassionately and let readers hash out who’s right.
Yet the same New York Times proclaims, not only on its opinion pages but in its hypothetically objective news columns, that the question has been settled – in favor of more stimulus.
“(T)he proponents of additional stimulus got more ammunition on Friday with the government’s release of disappointing jobs numbers for June …,” the Times “reported.”
Let us pause for double takes, rubbernecking and jazz-tinged variations on the theme, “Say what?!”
In which solar system is weapons-grade deficit spending, when followed by higher unemployment, considered proof of the need for more deficit spending?
Sure, not all the money has been spent yet. The president announced $2 billion the other day for new solar plants that nobody seems to want to build unless government rigs the market by footing part of the bill. And in further duties that the Constitution doesn’t ascribe to the federal government, Washington is showering billions of dollars on high-speed Internet and other telecommunications upgrades.
Yet those are diminutive spuds in this $862 billion scheme to turn crippling public debt into rip-roarin’ economic growth, through some alchemy understood only by the president and the media. Tens of thousands of stimulus projects are already completed or under way, so whatever employment the stimulus is going to “create or save” should be visible by now – without use of a microscope.
Oh but it is, the administration assures us. “Recovery summer” is here, if only we’d stop believing our lying eyes and stop being so fussy about unemployment that has metastasized into the 10 percent range. For purposes of review, President Obama told us joblessness would max out at 8 percent if the stimulus passed. But official unemployment is now 9.5 percent, and that, if you can stomach it, is the silver lining around the dark cloud of an even uglier reality.
“All told, 14.6 million people were unemployed in June. An additional 11.2 million have given up their job searches or are working part-time but would prefer full-time work. That adds up to nearly 26 million Americans, and an ‘underemployment’ rate of 16.5 percent,” The Associated Press pointed out.
If numbers still have any meaning, the stimulus is remarkably counterproductive. Yet in some “news” outlets, skepticism is treated as irrational.
The rule seems to be, if you want to get the media to declare that your views are beyond question, make certain those views are eminently questionable. Think leech therapy cures heartburn? Be sure your patients slip into a coma. Confident that you’ve built a better mousetrap? Get video of mice using it to catapult into the marmalade. You’ll be well on the way to respectability.
If this all sounds familiar, you’ve been paying attention. Journalists have also put skepticism off limits on the “settled science” of catastrophic global warming. Meanwhile, ordinary people, who aren’t trying to unlearn weird J-school notions of what constitutes logic, take one look at the data manipulation and falsehoods in climate change reports and politely decline the invitation to panic.
The danger of the media’s premature “settling” of unsettled debates is that people will start doubting even those journalists who dismiss things entirely worthy of dismissal.
If you spurn with equal vigor the stimulus-doubting majority and the flat-Earth-believing minority, you may not get many folks to support more stimulus. But you may get a few to worry that they’ll fall off the planet if they drive beyond Cleveland.