Brendan Nyhan

Here’s some amusing outrage over an upcoming Fox reality show in which a swimsuit model hosts a local newscast in Texas:

“One of the last sacred grounds of integrity in local television is the local newsroom, so I guess I would say I’m disappointed to see a station, much less one in our own community, that has evidently sold its integrity,” said Brad Streit, vp and GM for KLTV-TV, the ABC affiliate in Tyler.

Yes, local news is “[o]ne of the last sacred grounds of integrity in local television” — if by “integrity” you mean exploiting fears of crime and running “video news releases” produced by corporations and the government as original content. Using the local news as a platform for a network reality show is just one more step down the road to oblivion.

While arguing for a pardon of Scooter Libby, the Wall Street Journal editorial page asserts that it would be “a two-day story”:

General Pace’s fate is one more example of Mr. Bush’s recent habit of abandoning those most closely identified with his Iraq policy. Paul Wolfowitz received only tepid support from Treasury while he was besieged at the World Bank, while I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby may soon go to jail because the President has refused to pardon him. With Mr. Libby, what is Mr. Bush afraid of–jeopardizing his 33% approval rating? A pardon would be a two-day story. His opponents can’t hate Mr. Bush more than they already do, and his supporters would cheer to see the President standing by the man who stood by him when others in his Administration cut and ran.

Pardoning a man who was convicted of lying to the FBI, has expressed no remorse, and served no jail time would be a two-day story? Really? Let’s just say that there are good reasons to think the WSJ is wrong:

If Bush were to decide to pardon Libby, he would have to short-circuit the normal process. Under Justice Department guidelines, Libby would not qualify for a pardon. The guidelines require applicants to wait at least five years after being released from prison. The review process after the submission of an application typically can take two years before a decision is made. During more than six years in office, Bush has pardoned just 113 people, nearly a modern low, and never anyone who had not yet completed his sentence. He has commuted three sentences.

But the president’s power to pardon federal crimes under Article II of the Constitution is essentially unrestricted, so he can ignore the guidelines. Other presidents who did so stirred furors, most prominently when Gerald R. Ford pardoned his Watergate-stained predecessor, Richard M. Nixon; when George H.W. Bush issued his Iran-contra pardons; and when Bill Clinton in his last hours in office pardoned financier Marc Rich, Whitewater figure Susan McDougal, his brother Roger Clinton and scores of others.

Also, while the WSJ sneers at the possibility, President Bush probably is scared of jeopardizing his 33% approval rating. He’s already approaching historic lows, and a Gallup poll in March found that only 21% of Americans think Libby should be pardoned. A Libby pardon might endear him to movement conservatives, but at a very high cost.

There’s something bizarre about reading the New York Times Magazine cover package on “The Inequality Economy” amidst with the usual blizzard of ads for luxury goods like multimillion dollar apartments, vacation homes, jewelry, perfume, etc.

The title page for the package (p. 51 in my print version) even appears directly opposite an ad for The Private Bank of the Bank of New York, which “created the nation’s first trust to provide for the wife and children of our founder, Alexander Hamilton” and has been “helping protect legacies ever since.”

Maybe there’s an upside, though — the juxtaposition certainly should make it easier to convince people that the gap between the top 1% and everyone else has gotten out of control.

A reader wrote to question this confusing passage from David Leonhardt’s profile of Larry Summers in the Times Magazine:

Summers’s favorite statistic these days is that, since 1979, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent of American households has risen by 7 percentage points, to 16 percent. Over the same span, the share of income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by 7 percentage points. It’s as if every household in that bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent.

It sounds like Leonhardt is mistakenly assuming that a change of seven percentage points in share of national income translates directly to $7,000 per household. I don’t think that’s what he means, though the passage is so opaque it’s hard to be sure. After some digging, I found that Summers mentioned these numbers in Senate testimony this year. His testimony included a table suggesting that the “net loss” in 2004 for the bottom 80% was $664 billion due to this 7 percentage point change in share of national income. If you divide that figure by the number of households in the US in the bottom 80% (approximately 90 million), you get approximately $7,000. I’ll email Leonhardt to see if this is correct.

In an article today, the New York Times quotes an economist from the Employment Policies Institute, describing it as “a nonprofit research group that studies issues of entry-level employment”:

The number of unemployed youths age 16 to 24 increased by 658,000 last summer, according to the Labor Department . And, the department’s monthly job report for May showed that the teenage unemployment rate was about three and a half times the national rate of 4.5 percent.

Some predict the situation will worsen with the passage of an increase to the federal minimum wage… “With the minimum wage hike, people who hire lower-skilled, entry-level workers are saying, ‘Hmmm, maybe I don’t hire that extra worker or maybe I hire someone in the job market a little longer,’ ” said Dr. Jill Jenkins, chief economist for the Employment Policies Institute, a nonprofit research group that studies issues of entry-level employment.

“You’re going to see fewer teens who are going to be employed when you bump up the wage rates. More people are going to come out looking for those jobs.”

The Times description is taken almost straight off the Employment Policy Institute’s website, which states that the group “focuses on issues that affect entry-level employment.” Sounds like a neutral source of expertise, right? Wrong. The Employment Policies Institute is actually an anti-minimum wage group set up by corporate firms to counter (and impersonate) the liberal Economic Policy Institute. Too bad the Times either (a) didn’t know this or (b) didn’t think it was important enough to tell their readers.

Good to see John Edwards speaking up on the important issues:

Even the presidential candidate John Edwards found himself drawn into the debate. When asked about Ms. Hilton’s release on Thursday he said, “Without regard to Paris Hilton, we have two Americas and I think what’s important is, it’s obvious that the problem exists.”

I bad-mouthed lame debate commentary earlier this week, but Paul Krugman is absolutely correct that major misrepresentations need to be fact-checked:

In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.

Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the “gaffe of the night”?

Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit.

You may not remember the presidential debate of Oct. 3, 2000, or how it was covered, but you should. It was one of the worst moments in an election marked by news media failure as serious, in its way, as the later failure to question Bush administration claims about Iraq.

Throughout that debate, George W. Bush made blatantly misleading statements, including some outright lies — for example, when he declared of his tax cut that “the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder.” That should have told us, right then and there, that he was not a man to be trusted.

But few news reports pointed out the lie. Instead, many news analysts chose to critique the candidates’ acting skills. Al Gore was declared the loser because he sighed and rolled his eyes — failing to conceal his justified disgust at Mr. Bush’s dishonesty. And that’s how Mr. Bush got within chad-and-butterfly range of the presidency.

Now fast forward to last Tuesday. Asked whether we should have invaded Iraq, Mr. Romney said that war could only have been avoided if Saddam “had opened up his country to I.A.E.A. inspectors, and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction.” He dismissed this as an “unreasonable hypothetical.”

Except that Saddam did, in fact, allow inspectors in. Remember Hans Blix? When those inspectors failed to find nonexistent W.M.D., Mr. Bush ordered them out so that he could invade. Mr. Romney’s remark should have been the central story in news reports about Tuesday’s debate. But it wasn’t…

Back to the debate coverage: as far as I can tell, no major news organization did any fact-checking of either debate. And post-debate analyses tended to be horse-race stuff mingled with theater criticism: assessments not of what the candidates said, but of how they “came across.”

Thus most analysts declared Mrs. Clinton the winner in her debate, because she did the best job of delivering sound bites…

Similarly, many analysts gave the G.O.P. debate to Rudy Giuliani not because he made sense — he didn’t — but because he sounded tough saying things like, “It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror.” (Why?)

Look, debates involving 10 people are, inevitably, short on extended discussion. But news organizations should fight the shallowness of the format by providing the facts — not embrace it by reporting on a presidential race as if it were a high-school popularity contest.

One problem, though, is that debate fact-checking often becomes trivial even to me. It’s important to focus on policy issues, not trivial biographical details (I’m not sure how much it matters, for instance, whether Al Gore went to a particular disaster with the FEMA director or his assistant, but the issue became a national controversy after a debate in 2000). Unfortunately, the big issues are precisely the ones on which the national news organizations are most reluctant to take a stand.

Fouad Ajami asks President Bush to pardon of Scooter Libby in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Here’s the best passage:

The men and women who entrusted you with the presidency, I dare say, are hard pressed to understand why former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who was the admitted leaker of Mrs. Wilson’s identity to columnist Robert Novak, has the comforts of home and freedom and privilege while Scooter Libby faces the dreaded prospect of imprisonment.

I’m not one of the people who “entrusted [Bush] with the presidency,” but let me take a stab in the dark — because Libby lied to the FBI and Armitage didn’t?

The most offensive aspect of the op-ed, though, is the title “Fallen Soldier: Mr. President, do not leave this man behind.” and the closing line:

Scooter Libby was there for the beginning of that campaign. He can’t be left behind as a casualty of a war our country had once proudly claimed as its own.

I imagine that the families of the real casualties of the war wouldn’t appreciate that kind of language. Libby is going to serve a few months in jail for lying to the FBI. There’s just no comparison.

My friend Ben Fritz reprints an inside-Hollywood email from “a relatively well known character actress” in which she offers to have Dennis Kucinich call her friends and acquaintances to discuss his candidacy. I know the man is at 1% in the polls, but if he has that much free time on his hands, shouldn’t he be, say, working for his constituents a little more?

Eric Alterman is the latest pundit to make the unproven claim that Fox News reduces the information levels of its viewers:

I've
got a new “Think Again,” called “Modest and Respectful No
More,” here, and the reason I idiotically went to New Hampshire in the first place, a Creative
Coalition panel on the debates I did not witness, is here on the invaluable fora.tv.

Note, by the way, how angry Frank Luntz gets when I note that Fox News cannot really be
considered a news source since studies by the University
of Maryland
and elsewhere demonstrate that its viewers are consistently misinformed about
the news by its ideologically slanted and frequently false reports.

But as I’ve noted before, the finding that Fox News viewers have lower information levels than, say, New York Times readers isn’t necessarily an indictment of Fox News. It could just be that people with lower levels of information tend to watch the channel.

To take a converse example, Weekly Standard readers probably have higher knowledge levels than, say, people who watch Good Morning America, but that doesn’t prove that the Weekly Standard is a superior news source.

Of course, there’s a good chance that Fox News misinforms its viewers, but to establish that claim, we’d have to randomly expose people to Fox News or another source, then compare what they learned.