Im-Politic: How The New York Times Op-Ed Page Really Blew It on Tom Cotton

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fact-checking, free speech, freedom of speech, globalization, Im-Politic, journalism, Mainstream Media, MSM, op-ed page, opinion journalism, Paul M. Krugman, protests, Tom Cotton, Trade

Although pretty much everyone who’s thought about it agrees that The New York Times op-ed page has thoroughly bungled its handling of an article it recently published by Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, disagreement is rife over what the blunder was.

Because I’ve written several times for The Times‘ Op-Ed page and others, I’ve got two thoughts that I believe can usefully add to the mix. But first, it’s important to note that even The Times as a company can’t seem to agree on what went wrong.

At various times, various staffers in various of its departments (including ownership) have claimed that Cotton’s main argument (that President Trump should call in the U.S. military to restore order in cities where it’s broken down and/or where state and local authorities can’t or won’t respond inadequately)

>should never have run because it fell outside the bounds of responsible opinion;

>that it might constitute responsible opinion but that its publication at a time of major national tumult – and especially race-tinged tumult – was inappropriate, and even heightened dangers to Times and other reporters covering the George Floyd protests, and to African-American reporters in particular;

>that however controversial, the argument wasn’t out of bounds, but that the article wasn’t satisfactorily fact-checked;

>that it was indeed fact-checked as per usual; and

>that Cotton’s and other allegedly out of bounds views should be presented in the paper, but in hard news articles (where adequate context, scrutiny, and counter-arguments could be provided), rather than on the op-ed page (where regardless of whether it was fact-checked or not, publication per se created an aura of approval or legitimacy or prestige that was unwarranted. Here’s a good summary from The Times’ main national competitor, the Washington Post.

Moreover, if you’re not already confused enough, how about these two positions stated by the newspaper’s ownership – the first by publisher A.G. Sulzberger (presented in the above linked Post piece):

>“I believe in the principle of openness to a range of opinions, even those we may disagree with, and this piece was published in that spirit” and

and the second by his spokesperson:

“We’ve examined the piece and the process leading up to its publication. This review made clear that a rushed editorial process led to the publication of an Op-Ed that did not meet our standards. As a result, we’re planning to examine both short term and long term changes, to include expanding our fact checking operation and reducing the number of Op-Eds we publish.”

At least these statements weren’t made on the same day.

And to top it all off, the article hasn’t been retracted or yanked from The Times‘ website.

Now for my two observations. The first involves the fact-checking issue.

As mentioned above, I’ve written frequently for The Times and other op-ed pages. And I can tell you from personal experience that fact-checking for outside contributors is spotty at best. I’ve been asked to provide cites for the specific data that my articles typically contain. But I have no reason to believe that anyone on the paper has looked through these numbers in detail – or at all.

That’s especially revealing because the trade and globalization subjects on which I’ve most often written are so obviously alien territories to the paper’s opinion staffers. But I’ve never knowingly presented a number or fact that I know is either inaccurate or misleading – or in which I haven’t had complete confidence.

More disturbing, one undoubted reason that my articles have been even superficially fact-checked is that they run counter both to the newspaper’s official stance generally favoring pre-Trump U.S. trade.policies, and to the unofficial but clear approval of such policies by The Times‘ straight news economics correspondents.

It’s unimaginable to me that anything like such requirements – including contextualizing – have been imposed on articles that conform with these official and unofficial Times‘ views. And I’m certain this is the case because flagrant errors have been so easy to spot.

One example: It’s become seemingly mandatory that articles favoring pre-Trump policies contend that 95 percent of the world’s population lives outside U.S. borders, and that therefore any deviation from so-called pro-free trade policies that ignores or slights the need to reach these potential consumers would be a catastrophic mistake. Never, ever pointed out: The vast majority of this 95 percent earns far too little to be significant customers for American-made products, or to become significant customers in the policy-relevant future. (I debunked the claim here.)

And as I’ve repeatedly shown on RealityChek – notably in the case of Nobel Prize winning economist Paul M. Krugman – serious fact-checking seems at least as rare when it comes to The Times‘ regular columnists.

So let’s please drop fact-checking as an excuse for challenging the legitimacy of running Cotton’s piece.

My second observation involves the broader debate set off by this fiasco (which resulted in the chief of the opinion pages resigning and the head of the op-ed page getting moved into another job). As with The Times internal deliberations, it’s been all over the place, too, but one central and explicit charge has been that even The Times‘ official waffling on the Cotton piece’s suitability amounts to troubling retreats from the ideals of journalistic objectivity and of free expression (which of course needs to comply with well established Constitutional limits, like prohibitions on speech and other forms of expression that are defamatory, or that posed dangers to children, or that ,’by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.”).

To which my response is: Grow up. After all, The Times is a private company, and is under no obligation to publish all or even most ideological or philosophical comers on its opinion pages or anywhere else. It’s not a “public square.” Get a permit (if needed), and preach from a soap box on a street corner if you want one of those. 

True,the paper – which literally invented the op-ed page – avowedly conceived of the feature, in 1970, as an effort to:

“afford greater opportunity for exploration of issues and presentation of new insights and new ideas by writers and thinkers who have no institutional connection with The Times and whose views will very frequently be completely divergent from our own.”

Times editors added:

“In furtherance of our belief that the diverse voices of our society must be given the greatest possible opportunity to be heard, we are at the same time approximately doubling the weekday space devoted to letters from our readers.”

I personally believe that this commitment to maximum (legal) diversity has been admirable. But that’s far from claiming that the paper has any legal or moral obligation to seek such variety. So my only quarrel with The Times on these free speech issues is an insistence on transparency – and honesty. If Times management wants officially to turn the op-ed page into a megaphone for whatever set of viewpoints it likes, or against whatever group of opinions it dislikes, just do it, and announce the decision to your readers.

At the same time, if the paper wants to keep sitting on the fence, or groping in the dark, or simply doesn’t even yet know what it’s groping towards, that should be announced, too. Such a confession of broad fallibility has its ethical virtues, too. In fact, for the nation’s too-often high handed Mainstream Media, and its pretensions of omniscience and unimpeachable civic and intellectual integrity, nothing could be more refreshing – not to mention newsworthy.

Im-Politic: A Media Watchdog Lets Chuck Todd Off the Hook

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Chuck Todd, Erik Wemple, Im-Politic, Mainstream Media, Meet the Press, Michael T. Flynn, MSM, NBC News CBS News, Trump, Washington Post, William P. Barr

If you heard two significantly different explanations for the same big mistake (and possible instance of wrongdoing) from the same organization, wouldn’t you at least think of investigating further, rather than simply leave the matter hanging? If so, congratulations. You have infinitely better journalistic instincts than Washington Post media columnist Erik Wemple – who’s supposed to earn a living trying to resolve such discrepancies, and who failed miserably in his coverage of a major recent journalism controversy.

The mistake and possible misdeed entail the treatment by NBC News’ Chuck Todd of an interview on another network with Attorney General William P. Barr. The film clip of that session – first broadcast on CBS News – used by Todd to kick off a panel discussion on the weekly Meet the Press program he hosts was missing a key passage. What Todd showed last Sunday morning depicted Barr answering in an apparently cynical way a question about his hotly debated decision to drop the Justice Department’s case against then senior Trump administration foreign policy appointee Michael T. Flynn.

Specifically, Barr was asked how he believed history would view his handling of the Flynn case. In the excerpt seen by Todd’s panelists and Meet the Press viewers, Barr’s answer stopped with the flip remark, “History is written by the winner, so it largely depends on who’s writing the history.”

As Todd noted, those words created the impression of Barr as a completely unscrupulous hack lacking any regard for his most solemn responsibility: “I was struck…by the cynicism of the answer. It’s a correct answer. But he’s the attorney general. He didn’t make the case that he was upholding the rule of law. He was almost admitting that, yeah, this is a political job.”

The problem is that Barr’s answer didn’t stop there. Wemple reported that he continued with the following points: “But I think a fair history would say that it was a good decision because it upheld the rule of law.  It helped, it upheld the standards of the Department of Justice, and it undid what was an injustice.” In other words, Todd’s comment, anel discussion, was utterly inaccurate.

And here’s where the conflicting explanations come in. That same evening, following a protest by the Justice Department’s chief press spokesperson (included in Wemple’s article), NBC responded with the following (also presented by Wemple):

“You’re correct. Earlier today, we inadvertently and inaccurately cut short a video clip of an interview with AG Barr before offering commentary and analysis. The remaining clip included important remarks from the attorney general that we missed, and we regret the error.”

That is, before sending the material to Todd and whoever helps him with these tasks, someone at NBC just happened to cut off a recording of the interview at exactly the point at which Barr transitioned from wisecrack mode to serious mode. I’m personally struggling to believe that this action was an innocent mistake, as NBC’s use of the word “inadvertently” clearly claims. After all, the deleted portion represented essential context. But maybe the scissor (or the digital  editing tool) slipped. So maybe the network’s expression of regret is totally sincere.

But Todd himself appears to disagree. Tuesday, in an on-the-air appearance, he gave viewers an entirely different version of events. According to Todd (and reported by Wemple),

“Now, we did not edit that [Barr material] out. That was not our edit. We didn’t include it because we only saw the shorter of two clips that CBS did air. We should have looked at both and checked for a full transcript. A mistake that I wish we hadn’t made and one I wish I hadn’t made. The second part of the attorney general’s answer would have put it in the proper context.”

He continued: “Had we seen that part of the CBS interview, I would not have framed the conversation the way I did, and I obviously am very sorry for that mistake. We strive to do better going forward.”

To his credit, Wemple raised disturbing questions about Todd’s account:

“The scope of these oversights bears some explanation. ‘Meet the Press’ aired on Sunday. CBS News published the transcript of the Barr interview in its entirety on Thursday, allowing ‘Meet the Press’ several days to evaluate it. A longer version of the interview video was available by Friday morning. The show’s mistake amounts to a stunning breakdown.”

But this partly helpful explanation was only partly helpful. For it missed the glaring contradiction between the two explanations. As I mentioned, it’s conceivable (despite Todd’s denial) that the crucial Barr passage was accidently snipped. It’s also possible that the Meet the Press staff was just lazy and incompetent, and failed to do the most elementary journalistic double-checking.

It is flatly impossible, however, for both explanations of the same set of events to be true. And yet Wemple not only overlooked this whopping inconsistency. He actually praised Todd’s apology for having “struck a tone consistent with the screw-up.”

Of course, that can’t simply be “end of story,” as Wemple clearly believes. Absent further investigation (“Wemple? Wemple?”) no one outside NBC News can know which of these versions of the Barr episode is true, or whether there’s still another explanation. So in the absence of definitive evidence, here are two alternatives that mustn’t be ruled out:

>If the snipping version is the more accurate, it wasn’t accidental at all. Instead, it may well have resulted from some zealous staffer who thought he or she could get away with an outright deception – largely because NBC has become a den of Never Trumpers, and because the other leading mainstream news organizations aren’t interested in seriously policing themselves even when unmistakable scams are uncovered, – as Wemple’s own performance has made clear. Sure Fox News might pick it up. But so what? Its findings usually get dismissed (by most outside ‘Fox Nation”) as raw partisanship anyway.

>If the lazy, incompetent version comes closest to the truth, it’s all too easy to imagine that everyone at Meet the Press is so devoted to the Resistance that as soon as someone spotted a Barr statement that made this also-loathed Attorney General look bad, no one saw no reason not to run with it.

And unless one of Wemple’s peers rises to the challenge, speculation is all that’s left. Because in this case, a so-called “media watchdog” lacked both bark and bite.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: A Sleepy U.S. Intelligence Response to the CCP Virus?

Tags

Blob, CCP Virus, Central Intelligence Agency, China, CIA, coronavirus, COVID 19, intelligence community, Mainstream Media, Mike Pompeo, MSM, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, The New York Times, Trump, U.S. intelligence, Wuhan labs, Wuhan virus

The head-shaking problems with yesterday’s New York Times article on the Trump administration, the intelligence agencies, and the CCP Virus, start with the headline. Instead of “Trump Officials Are Said to Press Spies to Link Virus and Wuhan Labs,” it obviously should have been “Spies Investigating Virus Origin Proceeding Slowly and Grudgingly.” Because those were by far the most important alleged revelations it contained.

I say “alleged,” of course, because nearly all the new information the Times reporter team spotlighted is based on unnamed sources – which means it shouldn’t yet even be considered “information.” That doesn’t mean it’s not newsworthy. It simply means that this material amounts to what some intelligence officials, or other individuals who convinced the authors that they know the real story, for some (undisclosed reasons), want the reporters to make public. Sometimes this material turns out to be true and important, and sometimes it doesn’t qualify for either description. So we’ll just have to wait and see.

But even if the Times‘ findings are judged to be credible, it’s mind-boggling that the authors missed the real significance of what they were told – or at least it’s mind-boggling if you still consider the Mainstream Media as a reliable watchdog of democracy, rather than an appendage of the bipartisan, cross-institutional “Blob” that even a top Obama administration official complained had dominated both American implementation and even discussion of foreign policy matters for way too long.

For the bulk of the piece clearly shows that the Times‘ sources have real problems with the idea of the intelligence agencies spending much time and effort probing China’s responsibility for releasing an historic pandemic on Americans and the rest of the world.

Skeptical? Recall that this is a disease that’s now killed hundreds of thousands worldwide and, as widely noted recently, caused more fatalities than the Vietnam War – or soon will, as even those wondering about counting methodologies have to acknowledge. The official reaction has thrown 30 million Americans out of work already and almost certainly plunged the economy into a genuine depression that will reduce its growth and wealth- and opportunity-creating capacity for years.

In other words, the virus has inflicted far more damage on Americans than Islamic terrorists, Vladimir Putin, or whatever other threats the intelligence community is supposed to be monitoring.

Yet here’s what the article reported:

>”Senior Trump administration officials have pushed American spy agencies to hunt for evidence to support an unsubstantiated theory that a government laboratory in Wuhan….”

>”NBC News reported earlier that administration officials had directed intelligence agencies to try to determine whether China and the World Health Organization hid information early on about the outbreak.”

>”Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence, has told his agencies to make a priority of determining the virus’s origin.”

In other words, despite the human and economic devastation wrought by the virus, readers are being told that the intelligence agencies weren’t exactly foaming at the mouth to figure out why these disasters happened. That’s tantamount to learning in early 1942 that the intelligence agencies needed to be directed to determine why Pearl Harbor happened. This is a situation the reporters are OK with? And believe has no major news value?

And the Times‘ unintentional revelations about blasé intelligence attitudes don’t stop there. For example, the article claims that “Most intelligence agencies remain skeptical that conclusive evidence of a link to a lab can be found….” and that “The C.I.A.’s judgment was based in part on the fact that no signs had emerged that the Chinese government believed the outbreak came from a lab.”

In addition, “Intelligence officials have repeatedly pointed out to the White House that determining the origins of the outbreak is fundamentally a scientific question that cannot be solved easily by spycraft” and “the agency has told policymakers it lacks enough information to either affirm or refute it. Only getting access to the lab itself and the virus samples it contains could provide definitive proof, if it exists….”

But the authors don’t even note that China has denied outside analysts of any kind access to the two Wuhan labs in question. Indeed, they simply treat is as a claim by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is maybe not-so-coincidentally portrayed as “the administration’s most vocal hard-liner on China” who “in particular has tried to hammer China over the lab.” In other words, a zealot.

Perhaps more important, what these passages indicate is that the intelligence agencies have no access to the labs because the Chinese have placed them off limits and America’s spies are…shrugging their shoulders? Patiently waiting for Beijing to open the doors? It’s like none of the spies, or other sources on which the Times relied, knows the definition of “spycraft.” Or is especially interested in its practice.

On the one hand, it should go without saying that if the nation’s intelligence agencies are trying to penetrate the labs surreptitiously, no one connected with them, and especially no one who knows the inside story, would breathe a syllable about such efforts, even on background. On the other hand, the lips who spoke to the Times seem pretty loose. Moreover, it’s odd that these Times reporters, who  deal with these agencies and their practices all the time, didn’t themselves even mention a cover story as a possibility.

And regardless of what appears in the U.S. press, you need to assume that the Chinese are on the lookout for such espionage. Unless they’re feeling pretty confident in their ability to keep their secrets because, during the Obama administration, they “dismantled C.I.A. spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward”?

Where did I read this contention, strongly indicating that U.S. intelligence agencies couldn’t penetrate the labs even if they wanted to? I read it in a 2017 story in The New York Times – written in part by two of the same reporters responsible for yesterday’s article. Yet somehow, this possibility never made it into yesterday’s piece.

Which raises the possibility that intelligence officials or their friends and well-wishers are pushing this tale of improper Trump administration pressure in order to hide their inability to reconstruct adequate China capabilities.

Yet there’s another possibility, and one that’s even more troubling: The Times‘ sources are really most concerned that, as the article conspicuously notes:

“Any American intelligence report blaming a Chinese institution and officials for the outbreak could significantly harm relations with China for years to come. And Trump administration officials could use it to try to prod other nations to publicly hold China accountable for coronavirus deaths even when the pandemic’s exact origins cannot be determined.”

In other words, these sources are first and foremost concerned with preserving what’s left of a pre-Trump China policy status quo with which virtually the entire American foreign policy establishment was entirely comfortable. And by the way – the Mainstream Media was entirely comfortable with that China policy, too.

Making News: New American Conservative Article Shows that the NY Times is Flunking Journalism 101

Tags

CCP Virus, commentary, coronavirus, COVID 19, globalism, journalism, Mainstream Media, Making News, MSM, nationalism, reporting, The American Conservative, The New York Times, Wuhan virus

I’m pleased to announce that my latest article for an outside publication is now on-line.  The piece, titled, “Front Page NYT: ‘Nationalism Is Jeopardizing’ COVID Fight,” appears in The American Conservative. 

Click here and you’ll find a detailed look at a recent front-page news article in our nation’s supposed newspaper of record that reveals a scary truth:  Either The New York Times‘ staff has forgotten the difference between fact and opinion, or it no longer cares.  Not coincidentally, by the way, the slant is all pro-globalism. 

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Glad I Didn’t Say That: Chicken Little Warnings About Tariffs & Sanitizer Shortages

Tags

CCP Virus, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, coronavirus, COVID 19, disinfectants, Glad I Didn't Say That!, hand sanitizers, Mainstream Media, MSM, soap, tariffs, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, Trump, water, Wuhan virus

“Widespread shortages of hand sanitizer, disinfectants and other products needed to combat the spread of the coronavirus are being exacerbated by the Trump administration’s tariffs on Chinese imports, according to public filings by companies asking for exemptions from the levies.”

– The Wall Street Journal, April 10, 2020

“CDC recommends washing hands with soap and water whenever possible because handwashing reduces the amounts of all types of germs and chemicals on hands. But if soap and water are not available, using a hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol can help you avoid getting sick and spreading germs to others.”

– Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, March 3, 2020

(Sources: “U.S. Tariffs Hamper Imports of Sanitizer, Disinfectants,” by Katy Stech Ferek and Josh Zumbrun , The Wall Street Journal, April 20, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-tariffs-hamper-imports-of-sanitizer-disinfectants-11586683800?mod=hp_lead_pos5 and “Show Me the Science – When & How to Use Hand Sanitizer in Community Settings,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” as updated through March 3, 2020, https://www.cdc.gov/handwashing/show-me-the-science-hand-sanitizer.html)

Following Up: The Mainstream Media’s One-Sided CCP Virus Blame Game Continues

Tags

Anthony S. Fauci, CCP Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, China, coronavirus, COVID 19, Following Up, Mainstream Media, MSM, Robert Redfield, testing, The Washington Post, Trump, Wuhan virus

I’m well on the way toward formulating a new Law of Life: “If you’re hoping for accurate information about anything, always read to the very end of a relevant news item.” And I got a lot closer to final endorsement upon opening my Washington Post today and seeing the banner headline topping the front page blaring “70 days of denial, delays and dysfunction.” The subhead helped, too: “From the White House to the CDC, political and institutional failures cascaded as the virus spread. Despite being better prepared than many countries, the U.S. saw opportunities to mitigate the crisis slip away.”

Honestly: Why didn’t the Post just lead off with “Why the Bozo in the Oval Office Needs to be Impeached Immediately or Defeated in November”? What else could the newspaper’s real intent have been?

At this point, let me just note that I don’t keep focusing (in part) on the Mainstream Media’s (MSM) performance during this CCP Virus crisis because I don’t like their journalists, or because I’m a supporter of many of the President’s policies and I think (correctly, in my opinion) that these news organizations have done an especially poor and biased job in covering the Russia collusion and related impeachment stories.

Instead, I keep focusing on the MSM because they’re the main way the nation receives not only news but much information of any kind, and this goes double for the current situation – even taking into account the daily presidential press briefings (which, not coincidentally, have been directed toward the…press).

In this vein, here’s some crucial information that you find out if you make it all the way to the end of this looooong story, which maintains in the fifth paragraph (which comes on the front page of that print edition lead story, “Warnings were sounded, including at the highest levels of government, but the president was deaf to them until the enemy had already struck.” For good measure, in the seventh paragraph, the Post reporting team emphasizes that

“it took 70 days from that initial notification [from China on January 3 – from a health official to the head of the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention – CDC – that something new and dangerous was spreading in Wuhan] for Trump to treat the coronavirus not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked America’s defenses and was poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens. That more-than-two-month stretch now stands as critical time that was squandered.”

And let’s not forget the charge that “Trump’s baseless assertions in those weeks, including his claim that it would all just ‘miraculously’ go away, sowed significant public confusion and contradicted the urgent messages of public health experts.”

Again, what could be more awful?

Elsewhere in the article, however, we learn that

>”On Jan. 6, [CDC chief, Robert Redfield] sent a letter to the Chinese offering to send help, including a team of CDC scientists. China rebuffed the offer for weeks, turning away assistance and depriving U.S. authorities of an early chance to get a sample of the virus, critical for developing diagnostic tests and any potential vaccine. China impeded the U.S. response in other ways, including by withholding accurate information about the outbreak.”

>Nor did China’s obstructionism end there: it reported on January 14 that it had seen “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.”

>As of late January, “The Chinese were still refusing to share the viral samples they had collected and were using to develop their own tests. In frustration, U.S. officials looked for other possible routes.

“A biocontainment lab at the University of Texas medical branch in Galveston had a research partnership with the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) head of preparedness and response hoped that scientists at the two labs “could arrange a transaction on their own without government interference. At first, the lab in Wuhan agreed, but officials in Beijing intervened Jan. 24 and blocked any lab-to-lab transfer.

“There is no indication that officials sought to escalate the matter or enlist Trump to intervene.”

And in a major omission, this lengthy Post account ignored compelling evidence that the first CCP Virus case in China dates from November 17.

>On the purely American side, regarding testing, the CDC had developed “an institutional arrogance, a sense that even in the face of a potential crisis there was no pressing need to involve private labs, academic institutions, hospitals and global health organizations also capable of developing tests.”

In other words, these CDC failings long pre-dated the Trump presidency.

>In a meeting in the Situation Room in mid-February, [head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony S.] “Fauci and Redfield told White House officials that there was no evidence yet of worrisome person-to-person transmission in the United States. In hindsight, it appears almost certain that the virus was taking hold in communities at that point.”

The point of this post isn’t to add to the blame game, but rather to underscore how one-sided the MSM’s participation has been. And even though the proverbial buck in the United States rightly stops with the President, and consequently it doesn’t sound terribly convincing to claim that many long-serving experts in the U.S. bureaucracy have let him down, in this case, here’s an episode where it has the added virtue of lots of truth.

Im-Politic: Selective CCP Virus Finger-Pointing

Tags

Barack Obama, CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Dan Diamond, Daniel Lippman, Defense Production Act, DPA, George W. Bush, health security, healthcare goods, Im-Politic, Jessica Silverman-Greenberg, Mainstream Media, MSM, Nahal Toosi, National Security Council, Nicholas Kulish, pandemic, regulations, Sarah Kliff, The New York Times, Trump, ventilators, Wuhan virus

Mainstream Media accounts of the Trump administration’s CCP Virus response keep appearing emphasizing how lousy and lackadaisical it’s been compared with the federal response to potentially dangerous disease outbreaks during the Obama years – and especially given supposedly prescient pandemic warnings that the Obama-nauts sounded to their successors that allegedly were ignored.

So RealityChek is going to have to keep pointing out major flaws in these accounts that both reporters and their editors should have noted, and questions they should have asked.

Keep in mind, moreover, that today’s pushback comes on top of (1) this blog’s description of a 2011 Commerce Department report on America’s increasingly dangerous vulnerability to foreign cutoffs of vital healthcare goods that was completely ignored; and (2) a similar presentation of federal economic data making clear the nation’s healthcare security – another way to think of this vulnerability – has been weakening for at least two decades.

Let’s start with the article in today’s New York Times detailing how a George W. Bush administration plan continued under Barack Obama failed to plug what its public health officials viewed as “one of the medical system’s crucial vulnerabilities: a shortage of ventilators.” The effort entailed finding businesses willing to try to build ventilators that were cheaper, more portable, and easier to use than were then available, and then awarding the contract to the best proposal.

According to Times reporters Nicholas Kulish, Sarah Kliff, and Jessica Silver-Greenberg (and presumably their editors), the eventual failure mainly highlighted “the perils of outsourcing projects with critical public-health implications to private companies; their focus on maximizing profits is not always consistent with the government’s goal of preparing for a future crisis.”

And although this point wasn’t made, the obvious message that the piece meant to send readers is that the President continues making a big mistake by not unleashing the full power of the Defense Production Act (DPA)– which creates vast government power to order whatever companies it wishes to make whatever products it considers necessary as quickly as possible, and to prioritize sales to Washington, not other customers. Underlying this position, of course, is the (completely ignorant) belief that this 1950 law (amended several times since) enables a Chief Executive to snap his fingers and instantly start assembly lines churning out ventilators and face masks and pharmaceuticals, etc.

But let’s leave aside this DPA fetishism. As I tweeted, the following sentence in the piece isn’t completely uninteresting given the unmistakable importance of quick results: After an initial failure (that shouldn’t be pinned on either of those two administrations), “The federal government started over with another company in 2014, whose ventilator was approved only last year and whose products have not yet been delivered.”

That doesn’t sound like the regulatory process reflected particular urgency – and clearly the problem extended into the Trump administration. But this business-as-usual attitude reigned even though, as the article noted, the ventilator project “came in the wake of a parade of near-miss pandemics: SARS, MERS, bird flu and swine flu.” In other words, evidence abounded that pandemics weren’t a rarity. Recently, they were becoming frequent. And still apparently no thought was given to any regulatory fast-tracking.

Finally in connection with this episode. It’s commendable that these pre-Trump public health officials tried to do something new. Less commendable, and less understandable, is why none of them recognized the foreign vulnerability problem and the offshoring-happy trade policies that fostered them.

Two other recent articles seeking to pin the blame for U.S. CCP Virus unpreparedness on Mr. Trump came out March 16 and March 25 in Politico. The first documented that on January 13, 2017 – seven days before the Trump inauguration – a team of outgoing Obama administration officials held a briefing for a team of incoming Trump-ers “intended to hammer home a new, terrifying reality facing the Trump administration, and the incoming president’s responsibility to protect Americans amid a crisis” – the distinct possibility that a major, deadly pandemic would sweep over the United States from abroad.

Further, the briefers specified that the new administration “could face specific challenges, such as shortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs and other medical essentials, and that having a coordinated, unified national response was ‘paramount’….” Unfortunately, continued the article by Nahal Toosi, Daniel Lippman, and Dan Diamond, the Trumpers seemed pretty apathetic. And that’s pretty damning, right?

In principle, yes. But why did the Politico staff bury this observation: “None of the sources argued that one meeting three years ago could have dramatically altered events today”? Because it would take much of the punch out of this supposed bombshell?

Also buried: An observation in the apparently actual briefing document that, when in terms of “U.S. hospital preparedness and response,” “State and local governments lead public health response.” That’s an important piece of the current American response – even though it’s been relentlessly portrayed in the press another example of the administration’s failure. And P.S. – this document said nothing about ensuring adequate national screening capability.

Politico wasn’t finished, however. Nine days later, it ran another piece – by two of the same reporters – charging that the Trump administration’s CCP Virus policies have “failed to follow” a detailed pandemic playbook prepared by the Obama National Security Council that, it seems, would have prevented much of the virus damage inflicted on the nation.

Again, it’s a plausible claim – although, like the first Politico piece, this article left out the development of the Trump administration’s own pandemic strategy by the fall of 2018 (which means that work on it throughout the federal government began months before).

Also, like the first article, it failed to pose these crucial questions: If the Obama pandemic specialists were so utterly convinced that a pandemic would strike sooner rather than later, and that Team Trump was falling down on the preparation job, why didn’t they alert Democrats in Congress, or Never Trumper Republicans? Certainly there’s been no shortage of lawmakers (especially Democrats) looking for any opportunity to slam the administration (especially if this activity could do some good).

Additionally, if these pandemic warriors did send their message to these lawmakers, why did the public hear so little about it?

My hunch: For three years, the Never Trumpers of both parties had much higher priorities. Think “Russia” and “impeachment.”

Those Stubborn Facts: A CCP Virus Credibility Gap – for the News Media

Tags

CCP Virus, coronavirus, COVID 19, Mainstream Media, media, MSM, Those Stubborn Facts, Trump, Wuhan virus

Share of Americans approving President Trump’s CCP Virus response:  60%

Share of Americans disapproving:  38%

Share of Americans approving the news media’s CCP Virus response:  44%

Share of Americans disapproving the news media’s CCP Virus response:  55%

 

(Source: “Coronavirus Response: Hospitals Rated Best, News Media Worst,” by Justin McCarthy, March 25, 2020, https://news.gallup.com/poll/300680/coronavirus-response-hospitals-rated-best-news-media-worst.aspx)

Glad I Didn’t Say That! Politico Shoots Itself in the Foot on Foreign Meddling

Tags

Democrats, election 2016, election interference, Glad I Didn't Say That!, Mainstream Media, MSM, Politico, Trump, Ukraine

“…acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told reporters the U.S. aid was withheld at least in part because of a request to have Ukraine investigate unfounded allegations that foreign countries assisted Democrats in the 2016 election.”

–Politico, October 17, 2019

“Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.”

– Politico, January 11, 2017

 

(Sources: “Mulvaney acknowledges Ukraine aid was withheld to boost political probe,” by Quint Forgey, Politico, October 17, 2019, https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/17/mulvaney-confirms-ukraine-aid-2016-probe-050156 and “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire,” by Kenneth P. Vogel and David Stern, Ibid., https://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/ukraine-sabotage-trump-backfire-233446)

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: New Lows for Mainstream Media Coverage of Trade & Manufacturing

Tags

Don Lee, exports, imports, intermediate goods, Mainstream Media, manufacturing, media, MSM, National Foreign Trade Council, offshoring lobby, producer goods, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Trade, U.S. Business and Industry Council, William Reinsch, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Everyone, no matter what their views on trade and related economic issues, agrees that reviving the U.S. domestic manufacturing sector represents a major challenge. What everyone needs to agree on is that the goal will never be reached as long as the Mainstream Media keeps presenting views on the subject that are as silly as they are downright ignorant. If you think I’m exaggerating, consider these two recent examples.

The first came in a piece by a team of New York Times reporters earlier this month. According to headline on the December 2 article, “Trump’s Tough Trade Talk Could Damage American Factories.” The reason?

“[M]any existing American manufacturing jobs depend heavily on access to a broad array of goods drawn from a global supply chain — fabrics, chemicals, electronics and other parts. …Mr. Trump’s signature trade promise [steep tariff hikes], one ostensibly aimed at protecting American jobs, may well deliver the reverse: It risks making successful American manufacturers more vulnerable by raising their costs. It would unleash havoc on the global supply chain, prompting some multinationals to leave the United States and shift manufacturing to countries where they can be assured of buying components at the lowest prices.”

To be sure, this article suffers numerous flaws. For instance, what’s the “U.S.-made product” it uses as its signature example of globalization-related trends that (one must logically assume) are being portrayed as beneficial for American industry? A movie seat chair comprised of two-thirds imported parts by value. Talk about a formula for a hollowed out manufacturing base!

But the main problem is with the authors’ apparent belief that these parts and components and materials (often called intermediate or producer goods) must be imported because they’re either not made in America, or can’t be made in America at all, or at competitive prices.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, a huge percentage of American manufacturing output consists precisely of these products. It’s hard to know exactly how big because of shortcomings in U.S. data collection. But the U.S. Census Bureau’s monthly trade figures show that, on a pre-inflation basis, America’s goods exports for the first 10 months of this year have totaled just over $1.2 trillion. Of those, nearly 62.5 percent consisted of “capital goods” and “industrial supplies” – i.e., intermediate goods. (See Exhibit 6 in this release.)

But such exports are surely far greater, because the Census figures don’t break out the numbers for auto parts.

Similar problems plague American manufacturing output numbers, but also leave no doubt about the prominence of intermediate goods in the U.S. industrial complex. They show that, in 2014 (the last year for which detailed data are available), American manufacturing’s pre-inflation production was slightly more than $2 trillion. Of this amount, nearly 37.5 percent consists of products clearly identifiable as intermediate goods (like machinery, metals, and chemicals).

But again, due to data shortcomings, it’s difficult to tease out other leading intermediates – including not only auto parts but semiconductors and other electronics components and electrical equipment. (These figures are calculated from the “GDP by State” interactive tables in this section of the Commerce Department Bureau of Economic Affairs website, which includes national totals.)

So the claim that Trump-ian tariffs would eviscerate domestic manufacturing by cutting off American industry’s access to imported producer goods completely ignores the potentially greatly positive impact of stimulating demand for the nation’s immense (remaining) domestic producer goods complex.

The second example is even nuttier. In a December 12 piece, Los Angeles Times reporter Don Lee quoted an attack on tariffs from William Reinsch, identified as a “distinguished fellow at the nonpartisan Stimson Center.” That’s a big problem right there, as what Lee didn’t mention is that for 15 years, Reinsch was president of the National Foreign Trade Council, a pillar of Washington’s corporate offshoring lobby.

Yet it was Reinsch’s actual statement – and Lee’s apparent failure to see its fatal flaw – that was the real eye-opener. According to Lee, one of Reinsch’s main objections to tariffs broadly is that “We may assemble more stuff here, but we’ll export less because they’ll be more expensive. We’re going to be losing market share. Ultimately, the cost is jobs.”

Of course, as shown by that aforementioned New York Times article, too much American manufacturing already consist of “assembly.” More important, however, is that it seemingly hasn’t occurred to Reinsch or to Lee that the United States is running immense trade deficits overall, and especially in manufacturing. In other words, all else equal, the potential gains of producing “more stuff here” (and Reinsch never explains why it would be restricted to assembly) vastly outweigh the losses from exporting less.

Outsized domestic gains are even likelier because the United States has much more control over its own market and access to it than over foreign markets. Nor do Reinsch and Lee seem to know that the nation has been losing major market share even in advanced manufacturing industries for many years, as documented by several reports of mine issued by the U.S. Business and Industry Council. Here’s the latest.

President-elect Trump’s trade policy proposals are anything beyond controversy, and a thoroughgoing debate over the best globalization approach for the U.S. economy would be a long overdue and welcome development. Sadly, these two articles make clear that too much of the Mainstream Media remain far from making valuable contributions.