For a fail-safe indicator of media bias, it’s hard to beat labels. The little words the reporters stick in to describe institutions often turn out to tell more about the bias of the reporters and news organizations than about the institutions to which they are being applied.
A good recent example — a good example, but bad journalism — of this phenomenon comes in a news article by Patricia Cohen that appears in the business section of the New York Times under the headline “What Trump and the G.O.P. Can Agree On: Tax Cuts for the Rich.”
Ms. Cohen mentions three research organizations or think tanks in her article. One, the Tax Policy Center, is a joint venture of two center-left organizations, the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. Ms. Cohen refers to it as “the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington.”
Two others, the Tax Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, are also nonpartisan, but they are on the center-right of the ideological spectrum. Ms. Cohen refers to them as “the conservative American Enterprise Institute” and “The conservative Tax Foundation.”
Got that? The Times describes the center-left think tank as “nonpartisan,” but it describes the center to center-right think tanks as “conservative.”
Don’t just take my word for it; even the New York Times itself, in those precious moments when it is being more truthful and less nakedly partisan, is willing to concede these points. A Times news article from 1989, for example, referred to “the American Enterprise Institute, a centrist policy group in Washington.” A Times news article from 2007 identified the think thank as “the American Enterprise Institute, a nonpartisan group.” Another Times news article from 1989 referred to “the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization in Washington.”
The Tax Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute haven’t gotten any more conservative since 1989 or 2007; it’s the New York Times that has changed, moving to the left and becoming less careful and more ideological in its reporting and editing.
The bad labeling is just one of several problems with Ms. Cohen’s article. The article says supporters of “a progressive income tax… note that there is little evidence that lowering taxes on the wealthy leads to significantly stronger economic growth. There is no guarantee that the rich will not use their extra money to buy, say, a multimillion-dollar Picasso to hang in their living room or finance a company in China rather than plow the money into American businesses and their workers.”
Left unsaid by the Times is that it’s not only rich people who spend money in ways that other people might consider unproductive. The government might use this money wastefully, too, buying expensive, malfunctioning computer systems from companies with well-connected lobbyists, building “bridge-to-nowhere” infrastructure projects in the districts of powerful senators, fighting unnecessary wars, or giving welfare benefits to people who don’t really need them.
As for the two examples offered by the Times of frivolous or unhelpful spending by rich people, neither of them is as unproductive as the newspaper suggests. That Picasso, for example, probably generated a commission for an American art gallery or auction house when it was sold. The buyer also had to pay sales tax on it. The buyer also probably paid an art handler to hang it up, and an insurance company to cover its potential loss in a fire or theft. As for the company in China, if it’s successful, its managers will want to buy American products like Cadillacs and iPhones. They’ll want to send their children to American boarding schools and colleges.
If the Times had wanted an example of genuinely wasteful spending by rich people with windfalls from tax cuts allowing to keep more of the money that they earned, it might have mentioned the possibility of their using the money to purchase subscriptions to the liberal, partisan, New York Times. Now that would be a way to really squander some cash.
