How the Press Wastes People's Time

I'm constantly amazed at how little real 'news' goes into a newspaper or any other 'news' media. Instead of reporting facts and serious opinion, journalists love to spend time treating politics as a beauty contest where you never assess the contestants assets but instead talk about their drive, their background, this 'team', and what the future might hold. The press talks about anything but the issue at hand.

Dean Baker highlights an excellent example of how the press is currently wasting everybody's time with articles about 'job creation':

There is a cottage industry developing among political reporters trying to investigate whether the Obama administration’s claims on jobs created or “saved” by the stimulus are true. For example, ABC’s intrepid White House reporter Jack Tapper said on his blog:

“DeSeve and Bernstein [Obama administration spokespeople] were not able to say how many of the 640,329 jobs were saved and how many were created. How do they know that government officials asking for stimulus funds to help prevent layoffs were legitimate?”

The Washington Post also got into the act with its own piece commenting on the administration's jobs figures that: "Republicans and government watchdogs questioned the reliability of the figures."

This is an exercise in extreme silliness. It will be almost impossible to identify the vast majority of jobs that are created or saved by the stimulus because this would require a full knowledge of the flow of spending from tens of thousands of governmental units and the consumption decisions of 150 million households. However, there are fairly well-recognized economic relationships (outside of the University of Chicago) that allow the administration to produce reasonably good estimates of the number of jobs created or saved by the stimulus.

The administration is not using any hocus pocus in producing these job numbers. It is simply applying rules of thumbs that have been used by both Democratic and Republican administrations as well as impartial bodies like the Congressional Budget Office. If these reporters want to investigate the Obama administration's actions, their time would be much better spent looking at its ties to the financial industry where they could well be some substantive issues.

Think about it. In a couple of years will you care about the debate over 'job creation'? No. Instead you will want to know what policies are on the table, which were excluded and why, and you want to know expert opinion about how these policies could affect your life. But these are things the media really doesn't want to cover.

As Baker points out, a lot of value could come from a press that digs through the Obama relationship with Wall Street and the role his key advisors are playing. A huge financial crisis is still gnawing away at the US and this needs to be fixed. Column inches spent on this are valuable. Time spent on assessing 'how many jobs were created' is a complete waste of time. (But a fraud in spending funds under the rubric of job creation would be useful. But this isn't what the press is doing. They are indulging in silly speculation while serious issues are ignored.)