Channeling Eric Boehlert: Cherrypicking economic news
New York Times on what people believe, not what the facts say
Losing Eric Boehlert was devastating for American journalism. I’m going to try to channel him.
Listen to the AUDIO of this piece.
The last post he made on Press Run before his death on April 4 took the media to task for spreading doom and gloom about an economy that is more robust than it has been in years.
The jobs report had just come out, showing 400,000 new jobs had been created in March. That would be the 11th straight monthly 400,000-plus rise in jobs, a trend that is consonant with the 3.6% unemployment rate - the lowest it has been in decades.
According to Heather Cox Richardson, President Biden has added 7.9 million jobs since he took office in the middle of a pandemic.
And Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted that the expanded child tax credit passed as part of Biden’s COVID relief package - along with parsing that child tax credit as a monthly stipend rather than all at once as a tax refund - has given low-income Americans more stability. Bunch cites the Bank of America Institute’s Consumer Checkpoint Report that spending by people making less than $50,000 - which, take note, BofA sees as “low income” - is up by 33 percent over the last three years, and that on average, low-income households have about $1,500 more savings than they did in 2019.
Additionally, low-income wages have risen 11.8% in the wake of a pandemic that made people rethink their relationship to work. Linda Chavez points out in The Bulwark that 47 million Americans left their low-pay, bad-treatment jobs during and after the pandemic, and most found new ones. But our lower immigration rates have left a void in the number of people who want to take those low-income jobs.
Let’s do some math for a second. Lower-income households - those who make less than $50,000 a year - have seen their wages grow by almost 12%. Meanwhile, inflation, as reported by Trading Economics, is 7.9%. That means wage growth for about a third of the country rose faster than inflation.
And yet, former Bill Clinton pollster Mark Penn lamented in the New York Times last week that people think the country is in a sad, sad state. And it’s all Biden’s fault.
Why is it in a sad, sad state? Because people believe it is. Not because it is, mind you. But because people believe it is.
Many Americans believe the 2020 election was stolen. That is a false belief. Many Americans believe immigrants don’t pay taxes. That is a false belief. Many Americans think U.S. media is unbiased. But consider how Bunch started his Apri 21 column:
As one of America’s top anti-poverty researchers, University of Michigan social-work professor H. Luke Shaefer knows that for too long the vibe around efforts to lift up the nation’s poorest residents has largely been one of failure. So he laughed recently when a journalist told him that his editor insisted on changing his copy when he wrote — accurately — that poverty in the United States actually declined during 2021.
You read that right. A conscientious reporter crunched the numbers and talked to the experts and wrote that the economy was good - that, in fact, the expanded tax credit for low-income people worked. But in his gut, his editor was sure that was wrong. Because for us journalists, our guts always beat out statistics. And besides, as a former executive producer of a public radio talk show I once hosted told me, “Most of our listeners believe the lies.”
Excuse me, but I thought it was our job to tell the truth.
Penn, who is not a reporter, but who is - possibly worse - a pollster who feeds reporters a narrative, perpetuated some untruths in his piece. He didn’t lie. He was just… imprecise.
For instance, Penn noted, “In 1991, the homicide rate was 9.71 per hundred thousand.” By 2014, he wrote, that rate was 4.4 per hundred thousand, before it started going up again.
Penn insinuates that the lower homicide rate resulted from “the key federal bipartisan anti-crime bill widely credited then with reducing violence in America,” and he dismisses “criticism today by those who argue it led to inequitable rates of incarceration.” He provides no proof that the crime rate went down since 1991 because of higher incarceration rates. By the mid-1990s, our economy was booming, interest rates were low, and people were spending - turns out, racking up more debt than we could afford. But hey, we weren’t angry and killing each other.
Penn’s piece also notes, correctly, that violent crime rates went up in 2020 and 2021. What he fails to note is that the violent crime rate - including homicides - is nowhere near 1991.
The Council on Criminal Justice noted that “even with the 2021 increase, the homicide rate for the cities studied was just over half what it was for those cities in the early 1990s.”
This graph from the CCJ shows the homicide rate from 1979 to 2020 - a whole forest perspective sorely lacking in Penn’s microscopic tree piece. It shows that the homicide rate started going up in 2015, before rising sharply in 2019. Gee, what was happening in 2015 that empowered a lot of angry people? Hmm… people were campaigning for an election… There was one candidate who courted racists and white supremacists… But stoking hate doesn’t raise violent crime, does it?
Naw. It’s Biden. It’s gotta be Biden.
Penn does have a bit to say about President Trump. For instance, he noted that Trump “effectively” used immigration “as a wedge issue” in 2015. But he somehow misses the tie between the “use” of “immigration” to an increase in hate and fear.
And Penn blames Biden for an uptick in the fear of nuclear war, while Trump and his supporters still talk about Russian President Putin - who attacked Ukraine without provocation - as a friend who can help them.
Seriously, a dictator with nuclear weapons has created a global crisis and a pollster blames Biden.
The line that made me laugh the hardest was, “Foreign policy was barely discussed in the limited presidential debates of 2020.” Why yes, because the journalists who put the debates together barely touched on foreign policy.
In his last missive, Boehlert wrote:
Virtually all the Beltway coverage today agrees on this central point: When it comes to the economy, Biden’s approval rating is taking a hit because Americans are freaked out by inflation. But maybe it’s taking a hit because Americans are under the false impression that jobs are disappearing. Voters don’t know what they don’t know because the press isn’t interested in telling them about record job success and an economy that’s years ahead of where experts thought it would be coming out of a global pandemic.
Voters don’t know what they don’t know because there are too many editors who throw away truth in favor of their gut.
Eric Boehlert spent a lot of time pointing out how journalists create a narrative, then rely on pollsters like Penn to measure how the narrative is hitting people, so they can write about how the narrative they created has been reinforced. This is one of those times, except the pollster is reinforcing the narrative directly.
Statistics show violent crime went down under Obama, rose when Trump came into the picture, and have been ticking up since the pandemic. There are so many underlying factors for the current climate the U.S. finds itself in - from anger and unrest borne of the killings of George Floyd and Brianna Taylor to the nihilism of Gen Z about whether anyone really cares to the mainstreaming of white supremacist hate.
We need to dig into these issues. But that takes the ability to listen and write about the issues with nuance. Something I often wonder if we as a journalism profession are up to.
Addendum: I write above that the low-income tax credit worked, and that is why low-income people are better off economically at the moment. It not only gave people money, it gave people stability from which to launch themselves into more permanent stability. But the monthly tax payments have stopped. And the economy is slowing down. Cause and effect are clear here, but I bet that one journalist’s editor won’t think it’s a story.