Politics

A majority of Senators supports a bill to end tax breaks for oil and gas companies and opposes a bill that would expand the areas open to oil and gas exploration. Is the presence or absence of majority support really irrelevant to the reporting of the stories? A continuation of our ongoing feature on limitations of the paper's reporting (the feature also includes examples of reporter opinions and assumptions getting tucked in to national political stories as though they were facts).

Even as reporter opinions and assumptions get neatly tucked in to national political stories as though they were facts, those stories are still being billed as hard news. For those not gripped by centrism-mania, it is clear how powerfully those reportorial assumptions warp and limit coverage. This edition presents the first entries in what, sadly, promises to be a continuing feature.

A front-page story in last Thursday’s New York Times purported to have uncovered an “odd alliance”: a non-profit group affiliated with the Tea Party running a PR campaign closely aligned with the interests of a gigantic Indonesian paper company. This confluence of “seemingly disparate interests,” the Times asserted, was surprising because “the Tea Party movement is as deeply skeptical of big business as it is of big government.” But while the story skillfully followed the money trail, it was an example of something all too common in American political journalism: an impressive display of fact-finding dropped into a confused conceptual frame. A more clear-eyed understanding of the relationship between the Tea Party and business interests points to a host of basic reporting tasks to which the Times and its peers could direct their impressive resources.

A poll question featuring constrained choices prompts unsupported press claims, but other surveys suggest that public support for government spending remains strong.

Last week’s proposal from a group of Republicans in the House of Representatives to slash federal spending by more than $2 trillion over 10 years includes a proposal that could strip away federal funds for research on an array of energy-related projects, and potentially make it harder for new technologies to reach the marketplace.

The way a recent New York Times/CBS News poll framed the issues meant the results invariably stayed within the bounds of a relatively narrow range of policy options, rendering a broader spectrum of policy choices invisible.

When the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to
cut its own budget last week, the scant coverage in major outlets
represented a missed opportunity to probe what the consequences of the
reduction might be — or how previous staff reductions have affected the
ability of Congress to perform its work.