A couple more questions in this vein, and I appreciate you indulging me and playing press critic. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the performance of the Times, or the D.C. press corps more broadly, on the economic policy debates of the last few years. Are there particular episodes where you think the press would have been better served by taking some of the advice your offering?
I think we at the Times did a good job covering the housing bubble, but I’ll also offer a critique there. When major policy-makers at the head of large government institutions were saying there was no housing bubble and there couldn’t be one, and when huge lobbying groups like the National Association of Realtors were saying the same thing, we insisted that there could be—in all kinds of ways, in reported stories on the front page, in columns by people like Floyd Norris, in big takeouts for our real estate section. We said again and again: Look, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but relative to any measure you have, it sure looks like housing prices are really high. And we were at times fairly viciously criticized for that.
What’s interesting is that, in retrospect, we weren’t skeptical enough. We went a lot further than a lot of other people did, but anyone who reads our coverage now, or reads my own coverage now, would conclude that we didn’t go far enough. We were still too affected by the conventional wisdom that even if housing prices fall they probably won’t fall by much, and they probably won’t cause a recession.
The personal lesson I take from that is we can’t just go forth bullheaded, say “We’re on a good story and we’re going to pursue it no matter what.” But we also need to ask ourselves whether we are being overly affected by the conventional wisdom. I do think there are times when that happens, when it seems like everyone smart or everyone in power thinks one thing, and we need to say to ourselves, is there a chance that it’s wrong? When I look back on my 11 years as an economics reporter, I have this weird mix of feelings about my coverage of the housing bubble as one of the things I’m proudest of and also the source of one of my biggest regrets.
Most of that coverage would have been prior to 2008. What’s your assessment of the coverage of the budget fights we’ve seen since then—going back to the stimulus, and certainly since the 2010 election?
This is so general as to probably qualify as ducking, but I think on the whole our coverage has been quite good, yet I have no doubt there are ways we could do it better. I realize that’s unsatisfying, because it’s too general, but I feel like I’m not at the point of being able to get into specifics and being confident that two weeks from now I’ll still agree with the specifics that I said today.
That’s fair enough. I have one more question in that vein, and it’s specifically about the debt ceiling debate, not the broader budget fights. One of my colleagues, Ryan Chittum, recently got some attention for a post in which he wrote, “if you’re not reporting that the Republicans are ultimately to blame for the crisis here, then you’re not reporting the truth.” Would you agree?
This is a good interview with thoughtful questions. What might seem to leap out for the reader is that The New York Times is operating with a silo model when that format is obsolete.
It will slow reaction to IT changes, for example. The Telegraph in the UK has produced a must-read live news phone-hacking blog beautifully incorporating Twitter, even if The Guardian's blog is better at breaking news. The NYT, which might have been able to buy Twitter in the past, is stuck with about.com. (Twitter is now apparently worth $8B.)
Major news stories in The NYT are often great reads. But the silo method means that large areas of experience go unreported. For example, there is nothing in this interview about the need for America to engage in a formal audit of practices in education, especially for colleges. By studying course descriptions online, we can easily see that colleges can't orient quickly enough to tools in Modernism, the brilliant iPad App for "The Waste Land," and the Yale annotations to same.
Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are happy to be obsolete. There is no way to get traction on this issue. The federal government is non-existent in this area. If The NYT had a formal Higher Education section, as The Australian does, it could cover these matters from a Washington perspective. Instead, it has "Education Life." Spare me.
#1 Posted by Clayton Burns, CJR on Wed 3 Aug 2011 at 11:57 AM
Though Mr. Leonhardt is a clever rhetorician, the following contradiction can not be glossed over.
Here, he lays out the NYT's m.o.: "We do not say the way to solve it is X or Y. But we start from a base that the Congressional Budget Office and the vast majority of economists ... are correct."
Later, he regrets blindly trusting those same folks: "[W]e weren’t skeptical enough. ... We were still too affected by the conventional wisdom ... I do think there are times when that happens, when it seems like everyone smart or everyone in power thinks one thing, and we need to say to ourselves, is there a chance that it’s wrong?"
(No, David. You should always ask that.)
The NYT will wiggle, swerve, sidestep, backtrack: whatever it takes to appear independent of the State. But, more so every day, shrewd observers are seeing the Old Grey Lady for the economic- and military-war cheer leader she is and always has been.
#2 Posted by Dan A., CJR on Wed 3 Aug 2011 at 01:38 PM
Not a single question about climate change. Guess it doesn't matter.
#3 Posted by Sam Penrose, CJR on Thu 4 Aug 2011 at 10:06 AM
"I wouldn’t agree, because, in part, I don’t think assigning blame is what our job is."
If your job is to report the facts and to give your audience the best representation of reality that you can manage based on those facts, then your job is to assign the blame if that is the conclusion revealed by the facts (and your economics reporting has done well in this regard in the past when it came to the origins of the deficit).
"For example, we cover the deficit as if the notion that the U.S. is on an unsustainable fiscal path is an objective truth. There are some people who essentially reject that truth, but we don’t let the existence of that opinion sway us from covering the deficit story in a way that acknowledges that we have long-term unsustainability problem."
Again there is large agreement on the US being on an unsustainable fiscal path, but there is large disagreements on the cause of that unsustainability and the required policy responses at the present time.
What are the facts of the cause? What are the facts about appropriate policy responses?If the facts point to a large segment of the body politic and punditry being horribly wrong, then the journalists job is not to sustain a true conclusion (the deficit is a problem) based on false reasoning (government spending is too high. We should lower taxes to increase revenues).
The facts are from your own reporting:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/business/economy/10leonhardt.html
And from CBO reports. Taxes are too low. The recession is killing revenues and increasing safety net costs. A giant demographic shift towards the old is about to occur. The American health care industry, both private and public, has costs way out of alignment with outcomes and those costs are going to skyrocket. The wind down of the financial crisis has been protracted and needlessly expensive and the new regulatory measures are not adequate to prevent further crashes. Federal spending salvaged the collapsing state economies at the cost of a worsened federal deficit. Measures to control costs that affect the benefits of private entities - be they regulations on credit, subsidizes for oil companies, cost effectiveness studies for medical procedures, the closing of foreign tax shelters used by American corporations are going to be fought every step of the way by conservative democrats and dirty republicans.
Cutting government spending now is wrong. Cutting taxes is wrong. Ignoring decaying infrastructure while surpluses of cheap capital and unemployed labor are available is wrong. The, "It's not our job," sounds a bit too much like "It's not our role" for my comfort. Please, I've admired your work up until this point, please do not let yourself become another David Gregory:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/01/20/david_gregory
#4 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Thu 4 Aug 2011 at 01:24 PM