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Smoke Screens Around the Budget Crisis
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19065 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1991 |
2,381 Words |
| Author
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Joseph C. Goulden
Joseph C. Goulden, a veteran Washington writer, is director of
media analysis for Accuracy in Media. |
The most memorable media moment of the great budget mess of 1990 came the October morning when Today show cohost Bryant Gumbel set out to quiz John Sununu, White House chief of staff, about a much-patched compromise that the Senate was studying. Was Sununu satisfied with a bill that would lower capital gains taxes? Gumbel asked.
Sununu prides himself on keeping his face as placid as a New Hampshire millpond in public. Here he flickered a bit. No, no, he started explaining to Gumbel, "There's no capital gains reduction in the Senate package." He paused, and continued with a trace of mild exasperation. "You ought to be more accurate than you've just been."
Gumbel would not be shooed away. "Well," he persisted, "there is a capital gains reduction in the Senate package, governor." Sununu set him straight a second time, and Gumbel finally went on to something else. (An NBC press agent, queried later that morning, insisted that Gumbel was talking about an amendment that might be added to the Senate bill that day. It wasn't.)
Gumbel's minor glitch typified the trouble the media had in keeping the public informed of what was happening in the multifronted showdown over taxes and spending. Given a complex finance story, with all sides relying on disinformation and poker-table secrecy during the bargaining process, the media essentially chose to stop explaining, in any significant detail, the ramifications of the various plans being offered. Instead, they chose to stress politics--notably, President Bush's abandonment of his "read my lips" pledge about no new taxes--and the resultant fire storm that swept his own party. The economic reporting sank to the level of whether new taxes would be borne by the "big rich," the middle class, or the average Joe.
Where did our press go wrong in its reporting and analysis of the budget fight?
Reporting only half the fight. The media's most grievous failure was in giving only nodding attention to what began as a significant part of the "package" that was being bargained: the amount of federal spending that would be cleaved from the budget in conjunction with tax increases. Because of an inattentive press, the Democrats who control Congress managed to increase actual spending, to the tune of an estimated $100 billion annually.
Here the part of the story that the press missed initially (but caught up on later,
...
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