Media

Eric Alterman has a column up over at the Center of American Progress's site about the media's bad coverage of poverty. Stories don't generally get into the structural issues behind poverty, and the right-wingers explicitly blame the poor for their situation. This may not be an original point, but it is worth repeating.

Also, the column makes the media the central villain. But should they take all the blame for the way they represent poverty? They don't operate in a vacuum, and the basic reporting pattern resembles how anti-poverty advocates and researchers tend to make their case.

The sound bites used to illustrate the lives of the poor are often interchangeable and stereotypical—and most importantly, what they're allowed to speak about is severely limited. FAIR, in its study, observed that "in story after story, poor people were included to tell generic stories of suffering, before turning to 'experts' who discussed what policies should be pursued to address the situation."

This the old "sympathy for the poor" frame- tell some sad stories about "those people," tug some heartstrings, and offer up a few policies. Most likely, advocates are working with the media to help them develop the stories. Reporters probably aren't doing this on their own.

So the media's a great whipping boy- who doesn't hate the media?- but the problem runs much deeper.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the impact that the decline in media coverage of state issues poses for progressive advocates. A new study by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism sheds additional light on those challenges.

Pew found that 61 percent of the 259 newspaper it surveyed had decreased the amount of physical space available for news stories over the last three years. To accommodate the smaller newshole, papers generally reduced their coverage of foreign affairs, national news, business, and the arts. The mix of coverage also shifted heavily towards "ultra-local" topics.

Additionally, Pew found that many newspapers have reduced staffing over the past three years. Remaining staff members are being asked not only to cover an increasing number of topics, but also to cover those topics in a wider array of formats. This is because papers now need to feed both print and online platforms.

At least two lessons relevant to progressive state advocates can be drawn from the Pew study. First, the shift towards "ultra-local" coverage means that the stories most apt to attract attention are those that can be linked directly to particular communities and local issues. Second, the move to "converge" the printed and online versions of the papers means that stories that lend themselves to a rich multi-media presentation are more apt to get coverage.

The Washington Post kicked off a series on low-wage work with a front-page story in yesterday's paper:

The two major presidential candidates and members of Congress have largely turned their attention to middle-class Americans, whose anxiety is rising as the national economy falters on falling housing prices, tightening credit and rising inflation.

"A lot of issues that have long confronted low-wage workers are now increasingly facing middle-income workers," who more than ever face the prospect of jarring income declines, and the lack of health care and pensions to support them, said Beth Shulman, a scholar with the Russell Sage Foundation's Future of Work Project.

If those growing concerns translate into political action to bolster the social safety net, she said, it would disproportionately help low-wage workers. "I don't think we want to live in a country where people are working and doing what they are supposed to do but yet they can't get the basics," Shulman said.

For many low-wage workers, financial struggles persist and anxiety is high even when the economy is humming. Most of them occupy an uneasy and often overlooked place on the nation's economic spectrum, hovering above poverty but still grasping for the relative comfort of the middle class.

Over the coming weeks, the Washington Post will examine the lives of low-wage Americans. The stories will explore how they juggle their finances and bolster their spirits to cope with their economic struggles; how they adapt when the dream of a middle-class life fades; the factors that propel the optimism of others in the face of increasingly tall odds, and why, more often than not, they believe their fortunes are unaffected by the policies crafted by politicians in Washington.

The reporters do a good job of summarizing the structural problems facing workers in low-wage jobs:

Low-income workers have been hit hardest by the economic trends that have come to define the modern economy. Their wages have stagnated as a greater share of work's rewards go to the best-educated and best-paid workers, widening income disparities to levels not seen since the 1920s.

Globalization has thrust many firms and their employees into a new, more intense competition to perform more efficiently. Many computer-based jobs can now be done anywhere in the world. Similarly, lower trade barriers have allowed markets for manufactured goods, raw materials and capital to span the globe. And even when factories stay in the United States, technology has made it possible for them to produce more with fewer workers. Meanwhile, unionization has declined to single-digit percentages among private-sector workers, further eroding the leverage of employees. All of this has been a drag on salaries.

As the nation endures its first sustained downturn since welfare reform a dozen years ago, low-income workers find themselves increasingly on their own. Many low-wage workers are straining to pay for life's necessities and say they feel little impact from government programs designed to help.

In a separate post, I'll highlight some of the more interesting findings from the survey.

The current issue of Dissent is full of great stuff, little of it available online currently (so subscribe, only $19.68 for a year!). Highlights include Timothy Canova on the Clinton bubble, Lew Daly on how conservatives appropriated and twisted Jeffersonian ideas into their case for upward redistribution, Robert Taylor on the future of European social democracy, and a debate about The Wire.

Each of these deserve separate posts, so for now, I want to highlight part of the fantastic exchange on "The Wire" between John Atlas/Peter Dreier and Anmol Chaddha/William Julius Wilson/Sudhir Venkates. Atlas and Dreier argue:

the show's version of reality was only partly right. The Wire reinforced white middle-class stereotypes of inner-city life. ... Viewers may have thought they were seeing the whole picture, but the show's unrelentingly bleak portrayal missed what's hopeful in Baltimore and, indeed, in other major cities. In that way, it did the opposite of what its creator, David Simon, said he wanted the show to do: spur the country to end the plight of the poor and minorities who live in America's inner-cities.

Anmol Chaddha, William Julius Wilson, and Sudhir Venkatesh, respond:

The portrayals in The Wire are anything but shallow caricatures of the urban poor. .... white, middle-class stereotypes of inner-city blacks often reflect the American belief system regarding poverty and welfare, namely, that people fail to succeed in life because of personal inadequacies.

Atlas/Drier:

.... But the few heroes depicted in The Wire and mentioned by our critics are individualist renegades and gadflies, not those who sought to change institutions and public policy. One person alone can't save a school system, create jobs, or make a neighborhood safer.

I've come late to The Wire—Zoe and I are only halfway into the first season—so I'll withhold judgment for now, but I'm fairly sympathetic to the Atlas/Drier case.

Via Dean Baker, I learn that the Washington Post published an op-ed over the weekend that debunks the Pete-Peterson-financed, crisis-mongering party line about Social Security the Post faithfully hews to. One wonders how long whether this particular Prague Spring will last before Premier Peterson and General Walker roll in the tanks. (Although the guy who wrote the op-ed is a deputy assistant secretary of the Navy, so he has some reinforcements of his own he can call in).

Following the media coverage of the housing mortgage crisis gives me a headache. It's difficult to make sense of what's actually happening. But without a doubt there's one clear causal factor emerging from the media fog: subprime mortgages. A quick scroll through Dean Baker's blog shows just how often the media pins the crisis on subprime loans. Yet Baker, who was one of the few economists who saw all this coming, makes it clear that the subprime mortgages are just a chapter in a larger story about how housing prices got so out of line with their historical value. Why have they reduced such a complex story to this particular factor?

It's probably because "subprime" is code for minorities and poor people, always an easy target. What do you think the public hears when folks say "subprime?" You can almost see the thoughts taking shape in the public mind: "you know, if those poor people hadn't been so irresponsible with their money, we wouldn't be in this mess. They should have known better than to take out those loans." Personal responsibility being so powerful a cultural trope, it's probably trumping the narrative that places blame on Wall Street bankers.

Am I being paranoid here? I know there isn't much evidence, but in a circular way, that's the point of speaking in code. I'm open to contradictory evidence, though.

In recent years, progressives have devoted considerable attention to a consideration of how best to communicate their values, issues and policies. This process generally has focused on questions of substance, messaging and framing, such as how to communicate about poverty. Yet these discussions often overlook a communications-related development particularly relevant to state advocates; namely, the disappearance of state-level media outlets capable of covering policy issues. After all, what good is a well-honed message if there are few effective channels for spreading the word?

At its core, this is a question about daily newspapers, as local broadcast outlets long ago stopped covering all but the most sensational state issues. And there is no doubt that daily newspapers have experienced intense pressures in recent years. While national newspapers have struggled (see, for instance, a recent Atlantic Monthly article about The Wall Street Journal and Rupert “Fair and Balanced” Murdoch), state papers have been pummeled. Yesterday, for instance, the McClatchy Company, which owns 30 daily newspapers in such large cities and state capitals as Miami, Fort Worth, Charlotte, Raleigh, Sacramento and Columbia, S.C. announced a major round of layoffs.

In response to financial pressures, state newspapers have eliminated beats, reduced coverage of state issues (especially the "dull but important" ones like budgeting), eliminated locally-produced copy in favor of wire service report and have lost the ability to connect local issues to larger national trends – a problem especially acute for economic reporting. Moreover, many papers have reduced the amount of space in the opinion pages for submissions focused on state issues. In North Carolina only two of the state’s five large dailies regularly accept op-ed contributions related to statewide issues.

The decline in state-level outlets able to cover state issues is a serious problem for progressive advocates. To be effective, progressives need to reach decision makers, influential citizens and opinion leaders – the kinds of people still apt to get their news from daily papers. Although new media outlets like blogs contain tremendous potential, the fact that the most active voters and political leaders skew to the older end of the age distribution may limit the effectiveness of on-line mechanisms. It is unlikely, for instance, that the typical North Carolina legislator (average age of 59) is opting for You Tube or Twitter over the morning paper.

While the communications and messaging work is important for progressives, the discussion can’t be limited just to content and instead needs to focus on distribution channels. Otherwise, the only people who hear well-crafted and well-tailored progressive messages will be progressives themselves.

Brad DeLong adds on to the critique of Perry Bacon Jr's abysmal WaPo story on the differences between Obamanomics and McCainonomics:

....

To establish tax credits for health insurance requires the creation of a bureaucracy to assess and monitor health insurance plans—somebody has to decide purchase of which health insurance plans qualifies one for the tax credit, and which does not. Regulation via tax expenditures and a bureaucracy to define and monitor them is regulation—a point that eludes Perry Bacon Jr. His example of how McCain is for reducing regulation—well, that dog just won't hunt. And as for job creation—covering the uninsured definitely creates health-care jobs; tax credits to persuade people who almost all already receive employer-sponsored insurance to switch to catastrophic-only coverage is not and is not intended to be a job-creation measure. But Perry Bacon doesn't seem to realize this.

Nor does Bacon appear to realize that a government that spends through tax expenditure creates as many potential distortions as a government that spends through, well, spending—that is why they are called tax expenditures, after all.

....

This story, from yesterday's USA Today, is one of the better recent pieces of reporting on the economy and inequality that I've seen. Here's the opening framing paragraphs and an excerpt from later on in the piece:

Work hard, play by the rules and tomorrow will be better than today. That implicit promise has been at the core of the American Experience through good times and bad.

But now, whipsawed by plummeting home values, $4-a-gallon gas, rising food prices and gyrating financial markets, Americans increasingly fear that the national bargain has unraveled, that their once-steady march toward affluence has derailed. In a new USA TODAY poll, 54% of those surveyed say their standard of living is no better today than five years ago.

....

Writer James Truslow Adams was the first to coin the term "American Dream," writing in 1931 that it was "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement."

Amid the darkest days of the Depression, with the unemployment rate then heading toward 20%, Adams' ideal seemed more illusion than aspiration.

However, once the nation had escaped the clutches of economic collapse and world war, his vision was realized.

In a period that economists now refer to as the golden age, rich and poor alike prospered. From the end of World War II in 1945 to 1973, those at the bottom of the income charts actually advanced a bit faster than those at the top, in what Harvard University economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz labeled "growing together."

In recent years, however, most of the economic gains have gone to those at the top.

....

In yesterday's Dem debate, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopolous set what must be a new low in debate moderation (the fact that David Brooks gave them an "A" today tells you all you need to know). One particularly egregious example—Gibson repeatedly asserting that cutting the capital gains taxes increases revenue—was made even more maddening by the failures of both Obama and Clinton to say much useful in response. Today Dean Baker has a good post that the candidates should review before they answer any more questions about capital gains taxes:

... the evidence that a capital gains tax cut raises revenue is rather dubious, since most of the apparent increase is likely due to timing: investors delay selling stock when they know a tax cut is imminent. After the cut takes effect, they then declare their gains and pay taxes at the lower rate.

But this is only part of the story. As President Reagan noted when he signed the 1986 tax reform, taxing capital gains at a lower rate than other income gives people enormous incentive to game the tax code. If the tax rate on ordinary income for high-income taxpayers is 35 percent, and the tax rate on capital gains is 15 percent, then these folks can get a 20 percent return if they can make wage, interest, rent or dividend income appear as capital gains income. This can fuel a lot of creative tax shelters. This gap will also lead to an increase in capital gains tax collection – at the expense of ordinary income tax collections.

There is one other important point worth noting about the capital gains leads to more taxes story. Presumably the greater collections are supposed to come from people selling their stock or other assets more frequently. This means more fees for the financial industry, but is this what we really want to promote. The fees from these trades are a drain on people’s investments. There is a lot of research showing that active traders typically lose money. Is it good policy to promote more active trading (that is, if you don’t work on Wall Street)?

In a new paper, the Entitlement Crisis Crew uses an interesting metaphor—the federal budget as a plane on "autopilot":

The first step toward establishing budget responsibility is to reform the budget decision process so that Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—the major drivers of escalating deficits—are no longer on auto-pilot.

Sunday's WaPo editorial on the report parrots this line with some extra screech added to make sure you're listening:

The federal budget is on an autopilot course to ruin[!] Spending on the three big entitlement programs -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- grows automatically, consuming a large and growing share of the budget with benefits that flow mostly to the elderly.

Not wanting to be left out, even the conservative Dems at PPI get into the act writing that "a prominent group of veteran budget and policy analysts today proposed a novel way to avoid a fiscal train wreck[!]: Take entitlement programs off auto pilot."

I'm not sure "auto-pilot" is an especially effective frame for the Entitlement Crisis Crew to use if they want to achieve their goal of convincing everybody that the fiscal sky is falling. Autopilot in the non-metaphorical sense is an incredibly sophisticated, entirely sensible, and, as far as I know, utterly uncontroversial element of modern aviation that reduces fuel usage, shortens flight times and has plenty of other benefits.

If you really want to scare people, it might be better to say that Social Security is like a plane full of explosives and rotten herring being flown by a bunch of Swedish terrorists into the heart of America. Or, if that's too extreme, you could compare it to a plane being flown by bunch of crazy monkeys on the lam. Most travelers don't worry too much when the pilot says she's putting the plane on autopilot, but if you see a bunch of insane monkeys heading into the cockpit, you know you're in trouble.

Talking about Social Security as a program on autopilot is another example of Third Way-types and conservative Dems adopting a conservative framing of a core progressive issue. The last time I saw auto-pilot used to refer to the budget was in an Wall Street Journal op-ed by conservative William Voegeli in November 2007 who claimed that Social Security and Medicaid will bring about "the Swedenization of America on autopilot[!]" Instead of copying conservatives, Entitlement-crisis centrists and conservative Dems should come up with something more original. They can even use my crazy monkeys on the lam framing without crediting me.

When you hear an expert in Washington DC lament that "nobody [in the media, presidential campaign, public] is talking about incredibly important issue x on which the future of the republic rests", it's safe to presume that whatever their particular issue x is, it's an issue that they've been defining, framing, and talking about in pretty much the same way for the last 10 to 40 years. It's also safe to presume that their particular issue x has been talked about so much already that nobody's listening anymore—and that their real complaint isn't that "nobody is talking about issue x" but that "nobody is doing what I've been saying they should be doing about issue x for the last 10 to 40 years."

Such is the case with "the budget crisis" as conventionally framed by the media and DC insiders on the center and right as a problem solely caused by "entitlements" aka "socialsecuritymedicareandmedicaid." Contrary to the entitlement-crisis framing, Social Security is a distinct program from Medicare and Medicaid and on fiscally sound footing. Moreover, increases in expenditures on Medicare and Medicaid are not an "entitlement" problem but a symptom of the larger health care problem we face as a nation.

If you don't believe me, read this article in Health Affairs by the venerable Henry Aaron (of the non-entitlement-crisis-mongering wing of the Brookings Institute). The abstract alone provides a succinct rebuttal of the entitlement-crisis framing:

Many budget analysts allege that growing expenditures on entitlements will necessitate a reexamination of all public spending and taxes. In fact, anticipated budget problems are fully explained by projected growth of Medicare and Medicaid. But the same forces driving public-sector health care spending are also driving private spending. Sensible reforms of publicly financed health care require a systemwide approach. Apart from health care, currently legislated federal revenues suffice to cover all currently projected spending, including all Social Security and other entitlements. The United States confronts a public and private health care spending problem, not an entitlement crisis.

Still, the entitlement crisis-mongers are stickin' to their story and if you don't buy into their particular framing of the problem, well, you're part of the problem buddy.

An editorial in Sunday's WaPo provides the latest example of this tactic. It starts with the standard ominous and shopworn slogans about the perils of socialsecuritymedicareandmedicaid:

THE FEDERAL budget is on an autopilot course to ruin. Spending on the three big entitlement programs -- Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid -- grows automatically, consuming a large and growing share of the budget with benefits that flow mostly to the elderly.

It goes on to describe one more proposal to save the republic by fixing socialsecuritymedicareandmedicaid—this one put together by mostly conservative think-tankers, who I guess after losing the fight to privatize socialsecuritymedicaremedicaid have decided they now need to focus on some of their second-best solutions—and then closes with this:

Alice M. Rivlin, said when the proposal was unveiled, "We're hoping to start a conversation. If you don't like our proposal, tell us what you think should be done—because continuing the status quo is simply not an option."

Here's my suggestion. If you really want to start a conversation and stop continuing the status quo, why not actually try to ... start a conversation, instead of just trying to draw out the same old and rather unproductive one about socialsecuritymedicaremedicaid. And, if you're a centrist or conservative Democrat, how about really trying to work with "an impressive and ideologically diverse collection of economists and budget experts" to start that conversation—this would mean engaging with the mainstream experts and economists to your left instead of spending two years trying to reach common ground with movement conservatives at the Heritage Foundation and AEI.

It doesn't happen all that often on economic issues, so it's worth noting that the Washington Post's ed board is right on today:

WE'RE REALISTS. We know that legislation can involve a certain amount of moral and intellectual corner-cutting. But is it too much to ask that a bill called the "Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008" not contain a provision that might, at the margin, encourage home foreclosures? Apparently so, because the bipartisan Senate housing relief package includes just such a measure.

We refer to a $7,000 tax credit (payable over two years) to anyone who purchases a foreclosed home within a year of the proposal's enactment. Supposedly, this would help clear the nation's swollen inventory of repossessed properties, thus propping up home prices more generally. Here's the catch. For lenders as well as borrowers, foreclosure is an expensive hassle. If at all possible, most banks would rather avoid repossessing a house, which they must then try to resell. But, by making it cheaper to buy a foreclosed house than a comparable unforeclosed property, the tax credit makes it more feasible to sell one. The cost and hassle -- for the lender -- of foreclosure go down, and the benefits go up. Other things being equal, lenders would be that much more likely to foreclose -- rather than to help homeowners stay in their houses on modified terms.

....

Perhaps the only provision that's more objectionable is the bill's $6 billion tax break for money-losing home builders -- who threatened not to give any more campaign money when they got shut out of the economic stimulus bill in February.

....

.... on the whole, the legislation looks like an election-year turkey, stuffed and cooked to order for lobbyists.

Also on the Senate housing bill, the AP's Andrew Taylor has a good story on opposition to the bill. Taylor notes that House Dems will not include in their package the two worst elements of the Senate bill: the $7,000 credit for buying foreclosed homes, and the business tax break.

Reporter Tony Pugh has an excellent story in the McClatchy papers that uses CEPR economist John Schmitt's research on the decline in good jobs, particularly for workers with only a high school diploma or less. Here are the opening paragraphs that Pugh uses to frame the data:

The steady loss of "good jobs" by less-educated workers has left them more vulnerable to recession than at any time in nearly 30 years, and signs are mounting that a recession is either already here or coming soon.

High school dropouts and even high school graduates who lack specialized job training have seen their already limited employment prospects steadily decline during America's decades-long shift from a manufacturing-based economy to a service economy.

Not long ago, Americans who were unable to attend college could count on finding local factory jobs after high school. The lucky ones landed in muscular industries such as aviation, steel and automobiles, while others found work on assembly lines building durable goods.

These and other "good jobs" were the signature byproducts of a robust economy that once was the envy of the world. The jobs provided stability and decent wages that allowed families to buy homes, provide for their children and retire in modest comfort.

This is a good example of a story that tells a structural economic story effectively. Instead of starting with a sympathy story about an individual worker who is harmed, Pugh describes the overall decline in employment prospects and how they stem from the shift to a service economy. With this framing established, Pugh goes on to tell the stories of two individual laid-off workers, but in both cases he does a good job of explaining the economic factors that led to the layoffs. He also goes back to Schmitt for an explanation of why good jobs are declining:

Helping fuel the loss of good jobs has been a decline in union membership, industry deregulation, increased outsourcing of state and government services and economic policies that focus more on containing inflation than on maintaining full employment, Schmitt said.

My only critique of Pugh's report is that he doesn't say much about how to fix the decline in good jobs. Ideally, he would have gone one step further and provided the thoughts of Schmitt and others on the numerous policy options available to turn bad and so-so jobs into good ones.

If you're not a Nation subscriber, the April 7th issue, dedicated to commemorating the 75th anniversary of the New Deal, is worth picking up on the news stand.

Seventy-five years ago, facing the catastrophic, worldwide failure of the free market, Franklin Roosevelt launched what is perhaps the greatest democratic experiment of the twentieth century. Touching nearly every aspect of American life, the New Deal transformed banking, business, labor, agriculture, arts and literature, urban and rural landscapes and, of course, the relationship of citizens to government itself. Today, decades of conservative rule have jeopardized much of the New Deal's legacy. Many of its reforms and regulations have been gutted, and much of the infrastructure it built crumbles from neglect. Yet the New Deal endures, not just in institutions like the FDIC and Social Security but in the very idea that where and when there is crisis government should rise to the challenge for the good of the common people. How can a look back help us confront the challenges of the present--from the tangled housing, credit and financial market crises to global warming to the small-mindedness of public policy and debate today? What is the unfinished business of the New Deal? And what can we learn from its failures and limitations? ....

Of particular note, Eric Schlosser's piece on the minimum wage, Andrea Batista Schlesinger's article contrasting the big ideas of the New Deal with the policy minimalism of DC based groups like The Third Way, and Richard Parker on why the New Deal matters today.