Two weeks ago, I attended a two-day conference for journalism students in New York that was sponsored by The Fund for American Studies, an economically conservative think tank. The conference billed itself as an inexpensive opportunity for aspiring journalists to learn "how to report economic news clearly and accurately," according to the group's Web site. But instead of a crash course in writing on economics, the conference turned out to be a seminar on the virtues of supply-side theory. Speakers who dealt with the economy delivered paeans to Reaganomics to unwitting audiences made up primarily of college students who, by and large, had no idea that they were being taught opinion as if it were fact.
In a session called "Making Sense of Economic Proposals," Edward Ryan, the conservative chairman of the economics department at Manhattanville College, explained that "limited government is the system that has brought prosperity and happiness," as if that sentiment were a self-evident truth. He inveighed against rent control, the minimum wage and professional licensing by state governments. Wall Street Journal editorial board member Susan Lee, speaking about President Bush's proposed tax cut and its likely effect on the federal budget, said that "there is absolutely no evidence" that deficits spike interest rates. (Lee, by the way, is the author of the now-infamous Wall Street Journal editorial from last November arguing that poor people were "lucky duckies" for not bearing the burdens of a high tax bracket. The editorial suggested that someone who earns $12,000 a year should pay more than the standard 4 percent in income tax to "get his or her blood boiling with tax rage.") In other sessions, Steven Malanga, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, whined about business regulations in New York during the administration of former Mayor Abe Beame, and Newsweek contributing editor Rick Thomas even broke into the realm of social policy, denouncing the "radical environmentalists" at Greenpeace and calling Roe v. Wade "a stupid decision." At a discussion called, simply, "Business and Economic Reporting," Business Week economics editor Michael Mandel encouraged young journalists to cultivate a healthy skepticism for conventional wisdom -- and, along those lines, told us to dismiss arguments that the president's tax cut would drive up interest rates.
That's a legitimate opinion, but it is an opinion, and one with which many economists disagree. Among those who disagree are the 10 Nobel laureates and 440 other economists who signed a letter last month linking deficits to interest-rate increases. There's also Gregory Mankiw, the president's recent choice to chair the Council of Economic Advisers, who set the following sentence off in italics in his textbook, Principles in Economics: "In an open economy, government budget deficits raise real interest rates, crowd out domestic investment, cause the dollar to appreciate, and push the trade balance toward deficit."
Mandel, however, presented his theories as if they were facts. And that, more than anything else, was the trouble with the conference. Had the organizers prominently advertised it as a conservative seminar, students might have been able to filter fact from opinion. Alternatively, had the event been aimed at veteran reporters -- who understand how to recognize spin -- none of this would have been a problem. But the conference was geared toward college students, most of whom had little journalism experience and even less economics training. An informal poll revealed that of the 50 journalists present from nearby universities and community colleges, a little more than half had taken an economics course. Of those, only two recognized a possible correlation between deficits and interest rates, which is at the heart of the tax-cut debate. So when speakers ridiculed the connection between deficits and interest rates, only a handful of students knew they were hearing an extremely controversial opinion.
"I've never taken an econ class," said Hillary Profita, a Cornell University senior and a columnist for The Cornell Daily Sun. "I'm pretty unfamiliar with economics in general." Evan Axelbank, a sophomore at Ithaca College, thought that most conference participants were "probably not well versed in specific economic principles."
Profita received an e-mail invitation to the conference from Cornell's department of career services. The invitation advertised the list of all-star speakers -- including Diane Sawyer -- and the conference's deceptively innocuous title, "Gloom or Boom: Covering the Economy and Financial Markets." (Sawyer's keynote address, by the way, didn't deal with economics at all; a program assistant told me that Sawyer was recruited because she knew the conference director's father from their work together in the Nixon administration.) According to the organization's Web site, The Fund for American Studies aims to "provide college students with a balanced perspective on American political and economic institutions and the free market system." To professional political reporters versed in this sort of cryptography, the meaning may be obvious, but to college journalists it was less than clear. "I didn't know much about The Fund for American Studies, but I wouldn't have assumed that it was a conservative group," Profita told me.
Roger Ream, president of the group, denies that there was any ideological component to the conference. He told me that he "can't control what the panelists say," and that his group "is an educational organization, trying to teach young people about economic ethics. . . . There was no effort to be partisan at all, or even to get engaged in politics. We wanted the speakers to talk about how to cover tax policy or budget policy -- not, 'Is the tax cut good for the economy?'" The closing speech -- which was delivered by conservative Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund and titled "The President's Tax Plan: Will it Fly?" -- must have been a little off-topic.
Of course, Ream didn't organize the conference; that job fell to his vice president for programs, Steve Slattery. I asked Slattery why he didn't advertise his group's ideological position during announcements or promotions for the conference. In the same breath, he told me, "The idea was to educate people how to cover stories, not advance an agenda," and "We believe in limited government and free markets. Also, our professors might advance a point of view, but you have that with any university." I pointed out that universities themselves don't have official positions on how to regulate the economy. "But economics departments at colleges tend to be dominated by socialists, and they don't advertise that," he replied.
Well, no such socialists showed up at this conference, but The Wall Street Journal's editorial page was well-represented. In his closing speech to the conference, John Fund delivered a stirring and forthright discussion of how good journalists -- even polemicists like himself -- must strive to understand and include other perspectives. It's too bad his hosts with The Fund for American Studies don't agree.
Adam B. Kushner, a senior at Columbia University, edits the Columbia Political Review.
