Like virtually every paper in the country, the Times hit rock bottom during the Bush years when it fell in line with the propaganda campaign orchestrated by Dick Cheney that led us to a ruinous war in Iraq without cause. Under the dubious reporting of Judith Miller who would later join Fox News, the Times embraced “fair and balanced” reporting, offering up press releases by the White House as a substitute for actual journalism.
It is against this backdrop that the hiring last spring of Pulitzer-Prize winning Wall Street Journal columnist and climate denialist Bret Stephens by Editorial Page Editor James Bennet raised a red flag, coming fresh on the heels of the entire Times editorial board excoriating Trump’s own denialism as “ignorance” portending grave consequences.
Bennet tried to dismiss criticism as “unfair”, emphasizing the need to hear other points of view, and arguing that the opinion side was handled very differently from the news side. Of course none of those concerns invalidate the fundamental need for a newspaper to embrace established science and empirical facts.
But underlying the hire, and something that Bennet kept coming back to was the stated need to open the Times up to differing points of view, apparently without regard to their veracity. To those of us with memories of journalistic failures during the Bush years this sounds ominously like “fair and balanced” reporting rearing its ugly head once again at the senior levels of the Times — but only in the opinion pages, right?
In a front page story today in the Times titled “With Red Tape Losing Its Grip, Firms Ante Up”, “Spending Is on the Rise as Confidence Grows”, the Times argues that it is the loosening of regulations that is driving current economic growth — even though it isn’t really, and the true cause is the perfect storm of growing markets all across the globe, including our own, conspiring to boost confidence at home. Huh?
Again and again, the article states that it is the draw-down in regulations that are inspiring business confidence while immediately prefacing that with the observation that it is not really having any measurable effect. Instead, the article simply asserts:
business executives say the Trump administration deserves credit
But why? And who are these executives? One is Texas home builder Granger MacDonald who makes the compelling observation:
We’re not seeing any savings, but we’re not seeing any increases.
The decision by Comcast to invest $50 billion in infrastructure is cited as well, but no evidence tying the two things together is provided. And even if that were the case, what does that say about how the loss of net neutrality will impact an open internet? Should we be welcoming this kind of an “investment” in the first place?
The article doubles down on this topsy-turvy reasoning by citing the “potential” for increased spending by utilities on fossil fuel plants, together with a surging financial sector beaming at the demise of the CFPB and Dodd-Frank. This time Jamie Dimon with the slam dunk:
It’s just hard to do a direct correlation. It doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
Wow, how can you argue with that?
The article goes on to offer corroboration from business lobbying groups such as The Business Roundtable and The National Association of Manufacturers. We can take their word on it, right?
But the real revelation of this article comes at the very end when the chairman of the WH Council of Economic Advisors, Kevin Hassett, argues that (emphasis mine):
Though he cautioned that it could take years of research to pin down the magnitude of the effects, deregulation was the “the most plausible story” to explain why economic growth in 2017 had outstripped most forecasts.
"Our view is, the ‘no new regulations’ piece has to be more powerful than we thought.”
DKos Diaries have been written recently warning that Trump was gearing up to take credit for the economic recovery. And now we see a front page Times article, full of contradictions, ambiguity and lazy reporting, that makes no sense at all unless viewed through the lens of how the Trump White House wants us to view the economy. Indeed, it appears to have motivated the Trump team to double down on their baseless theories and in the days to come will doubtless provide “evidence” for it.
Because the news side is handled totally differently than the opinion side?