Brendan Nyhan

The Armstrong Williams fiasco has drawn important attention to inappropriate government payments to journalists. But Bruce Bartlett notes that very little has been said about reporters, anchors and commentators who routinely accept massive corporate speaking fees:

[M]ainstream journalists who routinely speak before corporations, trade associations and interest groups hoping to influence news coverage practice the greatest double standard. Virtually every major television anchor is listed with one or more speakers’ bureaus, which charge tens of thousands of dollars per appearance. But of course, this also gives business executives plenty of opportunity to explain why their industry or their products are really good for the American people.

In other cases, journalists work for the very businesses they report on. Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post’s media reporter, has a show on CNN. Critics like Slate’s Mickey Kaus have charged that this consistently causes Mr. Kurtz to underplay negative news relating to CNN.

Yet journalists are still quick to assume every politician who takes a $1,000 campaign contribution from a lobbyist has been bought, while self-righteously proclaiming that $100,000 speaking fees cannot buy them. At least the officials have to disclose it, while no one knows how much the journalists make or whom they have been bought by ” sorry, I mean by whom they were paid to speak. If what the journalists are doing is justifiable, why don’t they give government officials the same consideration? The answer is pure hypocrisy, nothing more.

This is not meant as a defense of conservative columnists who got government contracts. They should have enough sense to know there is a double standard and avoid the appearance of impropriety. But mainstream journalists, in effect selling themselves to the biggest corporate bidder, are a much greater scandal that will be ignored because so many are on the take.

Unlike Williams, these journalists generally don’t promise to promote a point of view in return for money, but that doesn’t mean they should escape scrutiny.

Paul Krugman makes two important points today. First, the evidence that Alan Greenspan is a partisan is just undeniable. After pressuring the Clinton administration to focus on debt reduction, he endorsed Bush’s tax cuts and then backed private accounts in Social Security this week even though the President has presided over a massive deterioration in the nation’s finances. This is a betrayal of the public trust — Greenspan wields vast power as an unelected official, and he should not use his position to promote his personal political objectives.

Second, Krugman has a good description of a Bush administration rhetorical maneuver that’s key to how they’re promoting private accounts:

The way privatizers link the long-run financing of Social Security with the case for private accounts parallels the three-card-monte technique the Bush administration used to link terrorism to the Iraq war. Speeches about Iraq invariably included references to 9/11, leading much of the public to believe that invading Iraq somehow meant taking the war to the terrorists. When pressed, war supporters would admit they lacked evidence of any significant links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, let alone any Iraqi role in 9/11 – yet in their next sentence it would be 9/11 and Saddam, together again.

Similarly, calls for privatization invariably begin with ominous warnings about Social Security’s financial future. When pressed, administration officials admit that private accounts would do nothing to improve that financial future. Yet in the next sentence, they once again link privatization to the problem posed by an aging population.

Here’s an example of how this works from Dick Cheney’s speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference yesterday. He first introduced private accounts as a way to help younger workers. “[A]s we fix Social Security, we must make the system a better deal for younger workers,” Cheney said, “and the best way to reach that goal is through voluntary personal retirement accounts.” But by the time he concluded his discussion of private accounts, the Vice President was implying that they help resolve the Social Security system’s funding shortfall, saying, “Personal accounts are part of a comprehensive solution to help the nation resolve the long-term challenges to Social Security in a way that is fair to future generations.”

Is President Bush suggesting that he wants to phase out traditional Social Security entirely? From the New York Times today:

In the interview on Tuesday, Mr. Bush suggested that he foresees the plan to divert 4 percent of earnings into private accounts as a first step toward a longer range transformation of Social Security.

“The relevant question there is how best to afford the transition from one system to another,” he told reporters from The Orange County Register, The New Haven Register, The Birmingham News, The Tennessean of Nashville and The South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “It’s a feasible place to start to enable us to introduce a novel concept into a Social Security system that needs to be reformed.”

It’s worth reviewing where we are in the Social Security debate. President Bush has proposed a big initiative at great political risk to himself, confident that he can sway public opinion in his favor as he did with Iraq. But he’s about to find out that domestic politics plays by a different set of rules.

Two political science books are instructive here. Politicians Don’t Pander, a book by Lawrence Jacobs and Robert Shapiro, criticizes the way that politicians pursue their own preferences rather than responding to public opinion, creating a cycle of partisan conflict and alienation. Jacobs and Shapiro analyze Clinton’s health care defeat in 1993-1994 and the attempt by the Gingrich Congress to reshape the federal government in 1995-1996. In both cases, the proponents of change were full of ideological conviction that they could shape public opinion, but when their opponents emphasized how risky and uncertain the outcomes could be, the public turned decisively against them. Similarly, in On Deaf Ears, George C. Edwards III, finds that the hype about the “bully pulpit” is wrong — most presidents are not able to move public opinion in their favor.

We’re starting to see these dynamics play out with Bush’s Social Security proposal. As Josh Marshall notes, here’s the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll:

The survey of 1,008 adults, conducted Feb. 10-14, found that 51% Americans consider it “a bad idea” to change Social Security by allowing workers to invest payroll taxes in the stock market, while 40% think it’s a “good idea.” That is essentially unchanged since January, despite Mr. Bush’s attempt to drum up support for the idea in the State of the Union address and a cross-country tour. The margin of error is 3.1 percentage points.

In a further sign of trouble for Mr. Bush, 60% of those who consider private Social Security investments a bad idea describe their position as “completely firm.” By contrast, just 31% of proponents describe themselves that way; 68% say they could yet change their minds.

Members of Congress aren’t going to risk their seats with numbers like this — Bush isn’t converting people into private accounts supporters. In fact, as Marshall points out, a question in the full poll (PDF) shows an even worse trend for the president:

Please tell me which of the following approaches to dealing with Social Security you would prefer––(A) making some adjustments but leaving the Social Security system basically as is and running the risk that the system will fall short of money as more people retire and become eligible for benefits, OR (B)
changing the Social Security system by allowing people to invest some of their Social Security taxes in
private accounts–like IRA’s or 401k’s–and running the risk that some people will lose money in their
private accounts due to drops in the stock market?

The monthly trend between December 2004 and February 2005 for keeping the system intact is 39->44->50. Meanwhile, support for private accounts goes from 45->46->40. (Note: The margin of error is +/- 3.1%.)

In short, President Bush is dead in the water right now. Most people don’t realize it yet, as Marshall points out. But it’ll start to sink in soon enough.

With Spinsanity shut down, I try to avoid reading as much political vitriol, but here’s a list of three people who need to be called out.

First, New York state Republican chairman Stephen Minarik said after Howard Dean’s election as DNC chair that “now [Democrats] can be accurately called the party of Barbara Boxer, Lynne Stewart and Howard Dean.” Stewart is a lawyer who was convicted of aiding her client, the radical Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel Rahman, pass messages to his followers from prison. The attempt to suggest that Democrats aid terrorists — a popular post-9/11 tactic — was so reprehensible that even New York’s Republican governor, George Pataki, denounced it.

On the well-known Powerline blog, “Hindrocket,” aka John H. Hindraker, directly accused former President Jimmy Carter, a naval veteran, of treason, writing (in the context of the war in Iraq) “Jimmy Carter isn’t just misguided or ill-informed. He’s on the other side.” His only evidence is a Washington Times article in which the Carter Center didn’t offer an opinion on the legitimacy of the Iraqi elections. The article also quotes Carter as saying in September that he didn’t think the elections would happen. That’s it.

And finally, former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, who wrote two books under the pseudonym “Anonymous,” is quoted
in the Weekly Standard defending his accusation that Israel controls US foreign policy through clandestine activities:

Well, the clandestine aspect is that, clearly, the ability to influence the Congress–that’s a clandestine activity,
a covert activity. You know to some extent, the idea that the Holocaust Museum here in our country is another great ability to somehow make people feel guilty about being the people who did the most to try to end the Holocaust. I find–I just find the whole debate in the United States unbearably restricted with the inability to factually discuss what goes on between our two countries.

The Holocaust Museum is part of Israel’s clandestine activities to influence the United States? It’s here “to somehow make people feel guilty?” These is unsavory rhetoric, to say the least. Scheuer may not have meant it the way it came out, but he’ll get no sympathy here.

It’s amusing that Howard Dean, who furiously denounced the cronyism of the Bush administration, has installed his brother as placeholder chair of Democracy for America now that he’s DNC chair. Jim Dean has no obvious qualifications other than being Howard’s brother. Jim’s only function is to ensure that Howard retains control of the organization while he is running the party (even though he’s supposed to stay out of such matters while he’s chair).

Obviously this isn’t the same as no-bid contracts and the like, but it shows Dean is hedging his bets. And who wouldn’t? He could be out of there in six months. Dean’s already made this ill-advised and stereotypical comment to a meeting of the Democratic black caucus —
“You think the Republican National Committee could get this many people of color in a single room? Only if they had the hotel staff in here.” And there are all the highlights of the oppo files that will be rehashed in the months to come, plus Karl Rove is bragging about tape he has of a second Dean scream.

Just to review public opinion on Dean, who I thought was a terrible choice for DNC chair, the latest polling numbers are from CNN/USA Today/Gallup (2/4-2/6): 31% favorable, 38% unfavorable. The same poll found that the supposedly polarizing Dick Cheney was viewed favorably by 51% of Americans, and unfavorably by 41%. So don’t unpack, Howard. Your tenure could be short.

The Jane Meyer New Yorker article on the rendition of suspected terrorists mentioned below has another noteworthy passage in which former Bush Justice Department official John C. Yoo defends his legal advice to the President justifying the use of torture:

Yoo also argued that the Constitution granted the President plenary powers to override the U.N. Convention Against Torture when he is acting in the nation’s defense—a position that has drawn dissent from many scholars. As Yoo saw it, Congress doesn’t have the power to “tie the President’s hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique.” He continued, “It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. They can’t prevent the President from ordering torture.” If the President were to abuse his powers as Commander-in-Chief, Yoo said, the constitutional remedy was impeachment. He went on to suggest that President Bush’s victory in the 2004 election, along with the relatively mild challenge to Gonzales mounted by the Democrats in Congress, was “proof that the debate is over.” He said, “The issue is dying out. The public has had its referendum.”

Regardless of your opinion of the administration’s interrogation practices or their legal justification, this is a clear attempt to suggest that Bush’s re-election somehow takes the issue off the table, which is anti-democratic nonsense. First of all, Bush’s narrow victory was hardly a mandate, as I’ve shown at great length. Also, US interrogation policy was not exactly a central issue in the presidential campaign, let alone the subject of “a referendum.” And even if it had been a key issue and Bush had won in a landslide, that wouldn’t immunize the White House from questioning for the next four years.

(Note: All the President’s Spin has a relevant chapter on the administration’s attempts to suppress dissent in the wake of Sept. 11.)

Is the public catching up to Social Security spin?

In a Washington Post poll last week, the brouhaha about “private” versus “personal” accounts seemed not to matter:

Americans seem not to change their views when the president’s plan is characterized as a “private” rather than a “personal” investment account — a change from earlier studies, in which the use of “private accounts” or “privatization” drove down support. Either way, a modest majority favored the proposal, the survey found.

But another semantic distinction – between cuts and reductions in guaranteed benefits – proved important:

Far more sensitive was the characterization of the way a restructuring would include a provision to recalculate initial benefits for retirees. Opposition rose from 68 percent when this change was characterized as “reducing the rate of growth in benefits” to 86 percent when described as “cutting guaranteed benefits.” Both phrases accurately describe what would happen.

And the public did pretty well on factual questions, with large majorities knowing that private accounts wouldn’t solve Social Security’s problems and that they would only apply to future retirees. Only 37% knew about the large transition costs that would have to be paid, but given that the debate is still in its early stages, the poll as a whole has to be taken as an encouraging sign.

About a month ago, I pointed out that the Washington Post and other publications have published contradicting definitions of the interrogation tactic known as “waterboarding,” which is either strapping someone to a board and submerging them under water until they think they are about to drown, or placing a wet towel over their face and dripping water into their nose until they think they are about to drown. While both tactics are brutal, the first seems especially horrific, at least to me.

So what is the right answer? When I contacted Post reporter R. Jeffrey Smith, he claimed that he was sure that the towel definition was correct based on his reporting. But New Yorker writer Jane Mayer uses the submerging definition in an article in the latest issue of the magazine:

According to the [New York] Times, a secret memo issued by Administration lawyers authorized the C.I.A. to use novel interrogation methods—including “water-boarding,” in which a suspect is bound and immersed in water until he nearly drowns. Dr. Allen Keller, the director of the Bellevue/N.Y.U. Program for Survivors of Torture, told me that he had treated a number of people who had been subjected to such forms of near-asphyxiation, and he argued that it was indeed torture. Some victims were still traumatized years later, he said. One patient couldn’t take showers, and panicked when it rained. “The fear of being killed is a terrifying experience,” he said.

The New Yorker is a carefully fact-checked magazine. It’s possible Mayer is depending on the Times reporting, which uses the submersion definition, but it’s hard to believe that wouldn’t have been independently verified. Once again, what’s the right definition? The mainstream media is continuing to fail to precisely define a key term in the debate over US interrogation practices.

MoveOn.org is back with its second misleading attack on President Bush’s proposal to create private accounts in Social Security (for part 1, see this post).

The best part is that the group’s criticism of Bush’s plan ends up promoting the same confusion as the White House by suggesting that private accounts and calculating benefits using “price indexing” are necessarily related. The truth is that they are two separate issues. Yet MoveOn makes the following highly suspect claim in an email to supporters:

Social Security privatization requires diverting taxes used to pay current benefits into private accounts. Without that money, Social Security benefits will inevitably be cut — up to 46 percent for future retirees. Even under rosy projections the private accounts don’t make up the difference. The deepest benefit cuts are for young people. Somebody in their twenties today would see benefit cuts as high as 30 percent. Should we really have to pay for Bush’s risky private accounts with our guaranteed benefits?

The claim that private accounts “inevitably” lead to benefit cuts of up to 46 percent is ridiculous. The 46 percent figure refers to someone receiving benefits in 2075 if those benefits have been calculated according to what is called “price indexing”. We could switch to price indexing whether or not private accounts are created, and private accounts would not necessarily require such deep benefit cuts if other sources of revenue were found.

MoveOn also buys into Bush’s spin when it writes that, “[e]ven under rosy projections, the private accounts don’t make up the difference.” Private accounts don’t “make up the difference” at all; despite occasional suggestions to the contrary, even the White House has admitted that they do nothing to improve the financial state of the Social Security system.

Here’s yet more nonsense:

Social Security is not going bankrupt, contrary to the president’s claims. That is a deception perpetrated in order to create the urgency for radical changes. Under conservative forecasts, the long-term challenges in Social Security do not manifest themselves until 2042. Even then Social Security has 70 percent of needed funds.

In fact, the “long-term challenges in Social Security” manifest themselves long before 2042. Bush’s claims of an impending crisis, bankruptcy, etc. are exaggerated, but the system will be running large deficits that will strain the federal budget for years before the trust fund is completely exhausted.

Finally, MoveOn makes tendentious claims about Bush’s motives:

So who does benefit? George Bush’s base. Giant financial services firms have been salivating for decades over the prospect of taking over Social Security. They’d make billions in new fees — essentially a new tax — off of our Social Security payments.

As I pointed out before, if Bush wanted to maximize the fees received by Wall Street firms, he would hardly be pushing to model the system on the federal Thrift Savings Plan, which offers only five low-expense index funds. Talk about partisan hackery.