 |
 Schadenfreude  |
This is the New York Times Schadenfreude Ping List. Freepmail me to be added or dropped.
Posted on 05/30/2003 1:15:20 AM PDT by Timesink
I noticed that the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities was referred to as "a liberal group" in a New York Times article today (natch, the article was about something supposedly terribly wrong with President Bush's tax cuts). Is this something new for the post-Jayson Blair era? Nothing will ever stop the Times from being a mouthpiece for liberal advocacy groups, and reporting their opinions as news -- but perhaps at least the Times will now have the decency to disclose the political orientation of the source.
Yep, this is the same Center on Budget Policy and Priorities that I wrote about yesterday. It's the one Paul Krugman admitted Wednesday on his personal website was the source for some unsourced tax statistics in his Tuesday column. It's the one that Krugman specifically admitted was "Democratic in orientation," but he claimed that its "statistical work is absolutely impeccable."
So then I started thinking... hmmm... With Maureen Dowd under investigation by the Times for slightly distorting a Bush quote -- a mild offense, in my opinion, compared to one of Krugman's typical flat-out lies -- maybe Krugman decided it was time to strap a fig-leaf in place as best he could (or maybe Howell Raines or another of his corporate masters told him to).
The message on Krugman's website: if anyone ever asks, here's my source (see, I disclosed it!); here's its political orientation (see, I finally disclosed it! -- for the first time ever, having cited CBPP in the past at least 14 times, in columns on 5/29/01, 8/21/01, 9/30/01, 1/11/02, 2/19/02, 4/19/02, 7/30/02, 8/6/02, 8/30/02, 9/20/02, 12/27/02, 1/21/03, 3/21/03, and 5/9/03 -- although I think I'll say "Democratic" instead of using the "L" word); and it was all just objective statistical facts anyway (see, I never even had to source it, but now I have anyway -- so there!).
So then I started thinking some more... hmmm.... isn't it odd that the Times would run a 1500-word commentary by Krugman in the Saturday edition -- Krugman normally appears just on Tuesdays and Fridays -- on the subject of deflation and the Keynesian economics concept of "the liquidity trap." (here, by the way, is my vivisection of that commentary). Now why would the Times do that?
I can't believe I didn't think of this immediately. This commentary by Krugman was the Times' correction of Krugman's notorious "divide-by-ten" lie from his April 22 column! I won't repeat the specifics of the lie here -- I've already covered it so many times. Suffice it to say that after I raised such a stink about it here and on National Review Online, Krugman published a series of no less than ten increasingly desperate rationales for it, spread over eight postings on his personal site (one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight) -- the improbable centerpieces of which were deflation and the liquidity trap. Mickey Kaus teased Krugman by asking, "Paul Krugman's Web-only explanation of his thinking about deflation and the "liquidity trap" seems like Essential Reading for All Concerned Americans. ... Why not make this a NYT column?"
And so he did. So now if anyone asks Howell Raines how the Times responded to all those accusations from Luskin and the vast right-wing conspiracy about the divide-by-ten lie, Raines can say, "A Princeton economics professor on the short list for the Nobel Prize assures me that was all a misunderstanding, which we've now cleared up having run a lengthy commentary on deflation and the liquidity trap. No one can accuse us of not dealing with the issue" Of course neither the divide-by-ten lie nor the commentary's relevance to it were mentioned in the commentary. But fig-leaves are now firmly in place. All the plausible deniability that's fit to print.
Posted by Donald Luskin at 2:26 AM
|
Schadenfreude |
Nah! - They're listening to Rush!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.