Check out the lede of this David Morgan-penned Reuters piece, entitled “Bush Plans a Media Blitz on Social Security”:
President Bush will spearhead an election-style public relations campaign early next year to try to convince Americans that Social Security is in urgent need of change but will keep dollar and cent details deliberately vague, analysts and officials say. [Emphasis added.]
We were surprised when we read this — after all, though the Bush administration has shown something of an aversion to sales pitches grounded in hard numbers, it has never gone so far as to paint its own rhetoric as “deliberately vague.” So we read on, looking for evidence. And we didn’t find much.
Morgan does build a pretty good circumstantial case — he points out, for example, that Bush likely has a better chance to change the system if he talks about principles instead of specifics. But there’s just one quote supporting the lede, from Mike Tanner of the Cato Institute, who says “they don’t want a lot of details out there.” The “officials” referenced above are nowhere to be found.
The piece ultimately tells us that while “some analysts and congressional aides” expect Bush to lay out details of a Social Security plan in his State of the Union speech, others don’t. Seeing as how Morgan’s anonymous sources are contradicting themselves, readers are left wondering where, exactly, they might find support for his aggressive lede.
–Brian Montopoli
