Admittedly this is pretty small on the scale of things but this type of thing bothers me and I think we should call out the MSM when we see it happen.
Washington Post: Obama Tax Plan Would Balloon Deficit, Analysis Finds
Follow me below the jump for an explanation of why this headline is misleading and the article is unfairly biased against the Obama camapaign.
Quick update: Rec list on my 2nd diary...thanks, everybody! I'm proud I was able to bring attention to this in a way that has resonated.
The main thrust of the article is that when the Obama campaign talks about the impact of his tax plans on the deficit, he is comparing his plan to projections assuming the Bush tax cuts are made permanent (as John McCain proposes). The author then argues that the real comparison should be based on current law, with the tax cuts expiring in 2010.
[I happen to disagree. Elections are about choices with real-world implications. There's Plan A and Plan B and you compare them to each other, not to some theoretical. And in this case, Obama is comparing the impact of his plan to the plan offered by his opponent. I don't see anything wrong with that.]
Anyway, I'm not here to argue about the analysis in the article or the conclusions. I'm upset about how that analysis is framed. They only present one side (unnecessarily using a negative tone, I might add) and then multiply the impact of that failure by using a clearly misleading headline.
Here are the two key figures in the article:
According to a recent analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, Obama's tax plan would add $3.4 trillion to the national debt, including interest, by 2018.
And then a little later
According to the Tax Policy Center, McCain's tax plans would increase the national debt by at least $5 trillion over the next 10 years
So to summarize, we have Obama'a plan that according to the article would add $3.4 trillion and we have McCain's plan that would add $5 trillion. Yet the article contains a single sentence about McCain's tax plan and instead goes out of its way to imply that Obama is misleading voters.
The way the headline is written also has an obvious anti-Obama, pro-McCain bias. Even though the headline doesn't mention McCain, saying one candidate's tax plan is bad news for the deficit implies that the other candidate's tax plan is not. And that is the only message that casual readers, who don't read the entire article carefully, will walk away with. I wish somebody could do a survey on Monday of Washington Post readers and ask them which candidate's tax plan would increase the deficit by more. How many do you think would correctly answer "John McCain?"
If this article was truly about tax plans and deficits, the headline would have (at a minimum) read "Both Obama and McCain Tax Plans Would Add to Deficit" and the article itself would have had a lot more focus on the plan that would increase the deficit by 47% more compared to his opponent's.
Misleading. Shameful.