I have a friend who regularly appears on MSNBC, CNN, NPR, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, and in the Times and the Wall Street Journal. He runs an economic think-tank and a small hedge fund. I'll call him Skipper, because I like that word, and I shouldn't write his name and it's annoying to keep writing My friend.
The other day, I met him before his work out, at a place called Joe’s, the science of coffee that sells very strong Coffee.
He began the conversation by saying that “the fourth estate (a.k.a. the press) is history.”
He was feeling cynical because he’d taken time to prepare for an interview about the latest jobs report and at the last minute the show had called it off because “there wasn’t enough ‘news’ in the report.”
He admitted that the number had not represented a dramatic shift, but said that beneath the surface there was actually newsworthy stuff, for example: the greatest number of jobs eliminated in the last month (some 50,000) were teaching jobs.
“So if a certain fact doesn’t fit into the ‘trend’ they were putting together as a narrative they don’t bother to report it,” he complained, gulping his coffee.
The next exhibit in his case against the integrity of journalism was his own father, a professor of physics. His father is from southern India, generally a democrat and tends towards the view that the global distribution of wealth is “not really fair.”
His father shocked him by saying “The other day I discovered that Clinton never really had budget surpluses… it was all accounting tricks.”
Skipper, who is acutely aware of Clinton’s budget surpluses, asked his father how he had come to this conclusion.
“Oh, I saw it on some news report,” his father had said.
Relaying the story, Skipper got really annoyed. “In a country that fires teachers to balance budgets, where a physicist who cares about politics, can’t even tell when a lie presented as news is false, what hope is there for a well informed public?” Skip wondered out loud.
“Clinton raised taxes very slightly, bought fewer aircraft carriers, happened to be in office during a rally in the stock market and was able to balance the budget. It isn’t rocket science to understand that, but somehow the press can’t manage to make a simple fact clear,” he vented and took another huge slurp of his Ethiopian-Sumatran blend.
Because he was frustrated, he didn’t realize at first that he was complaining as much about the people who watch the news as the people who report it.
Eventually, he modified his mild rant to target unsophisticated viewers and his point morphed into a sort of tree falling in the forest analogy.
“If economic reality is reported to a person who doesn’t understand economics (i.e. the average American voter) was it really reported?”
His frustration inspired him to continue asking absurd circular questions:
“If reality is complex, and America is busy firing teachers, what is the point of reporting reality?”
“If two journalist’s call each other liars and one is telling the truth, how does the average American tell the difference?”
Skipper was by now very amped on coffee. It’s a part of his workout regime to get his heart rate up. As he jogged off towards the gym he left me with following advise:
“Dude, why don’t you try this headline? Jobs report reveals- reality too complex. Americans unable to pay attention in class, fire 50,000 teachers last month.”
There is no point to this story, there is undoubtedly nothing that can change the fact that most Americans form opinions based on gut feeling and occasional TV watching.
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