Mickey Kaus joins the ranks of those hallucinating about the increasingly political quality of New York Times news coverage. From Kausfiles, in Slate:
Dueling Censuses: New York Times vs. Washington Post
Guess which one is a parody of itself?
By Mickey Kaus
Updated Thursday, June 6, 2002, at 1:41 AM PT
Just when I think I'm being paranoid about the New York Times, they go and produce a near-parody of find-something-to-complain-about, agenda-driven, distorted left-liberal coverage, with Peter Kilborn and Lynette Clemetson's census story of yesterday. It's useful to compare The Washington Post's level-headed coverage with the NYT's. Here's WaPo's lede (we won't even talk about the heds):
The economic boom of the 1990s raised the incomes of the poorest Americans, held the size of the middle class steady and swelled the ranks of those with six-digit incomes, according to census data released yesterday.
And here's the NYT:
Despite the surging economy of the 1990's that brought affluence to many Americans, the poor remained entrenched, the Census Bureau reported today. The bureau's statistics for the 50 states and the District of Columbia show that 9.2 percent of families were deemed poor in 2000, a slight improvement from 10 percent in 1989.
Of course, just because the Times saw as bad news what WaPo saw as basically good news doesn't mean the Times was wrong. But the Times was wrong. Both papers use variations of the word "slight" to describe the decline in the poverty rate, but only WaPo makes the essential point that this slight decrease was achieved while the nation accepted "high numbers of immigrants from poor countries," offering a great Gary Burtless quote on the subject. (Query: If poverty decreased despite lots of new poor people who came between 1990 and 2000, doesn't that mean the poverty rate for people who were here in 1990 must have gone down substantially?) The NYT talks a lot about immigrants, but only to raise concerns about assimilation. Most of the rest of the Times' piece is spent on a quick tour of fashionable complaints, including the unsubstantiated prospect of a "barbell economy," the effects of "sprawl," and the problem that Americans' new wealth is illiquid (tied up in big houses). ...
[How is the NYT talk of a "barbell economy" unsubstantiated?--ed. They offer zero (0) evidence that the middle has shrunk. Their big example is Nevada, which had a 94 percent increase in people with graduate degrees and "a 76 percent increase of people with less than a ninth-grade education." But what about the people in between? You only get a "barbell" if they didn't increase too. Did they increase? Bet they did. The Times doesn't say.]
The NYT does bury a near-stunning statistic demonstrating the success of , yes, welfare reform. Welfare goes mainly to female-headed households with children -- and from 1990-2000 "The poverty rate among female-headed households with children younger than 18 fell from 42.3 to 34.3 percent." That's not slight! ...
[What was the great Burtless quote? Don't make us hunt for it--ed. From WaPo:
We accept the people with poor backgrounds," said economist Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution. "That increases the number on the bottom -- people moan and groan about it -- 'inequality is getting worse.' It's getting worse in the United States because this is our shining good deed: We take in poor people. A lot of them are going to be better off in one or two generations.
Burtless is a smart, honest liberal who will tell you whether the statistics support or undermine his case. Marian Wright Edelman, the go-to quote for the Times, is a celebrity ideologue liberal who will never ever admit that anything undermines her increasingly discredited agenda. That sort of sums up the difference between the two papers' approaches.]
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