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Ryan Avent brings us some good news:windfall for Exxon Mobil gas tax holiday. Shift the discussion over to health care or Iraq or blotting out a small portion of the sun to deal with global warming, however, and the O'Hanlon's and Tanners of the world will happily back up awful ideas and the reporters will happily reprint their quotes. What freed the media in this instance was that experts all said the same thing and that was a discoverable fact that they could relay to readers. If credentialed experts disagree, however, the media will still refuse to render a judgment. And when it becomes Democrat vs. Republican, all sorts of "experts" who have been given credentials (a sinecure at AEI) specifically in order to support Republican candidates will pop up and loudly proclaim support for health savings accounts or surges or sun blotting and the media will slowly back off in confusion.
A majority of Americans believe that the gas tax holiday is bad idea. How about that? When the press focuses intensely on an actual policy issue, and includes information on expert opinion, Americans come to the correct conclusion. Now what if that had been the press’ MO on health care, Iraq, climate change, and so on?But the key, I suppose, is that there was a fierce and entertaining fight between the candidates on the subject, whereas on other policy positions, there is largely agreement, meaning that the fur only flies on other, decidedly stupid, issues.The problem with the press's relatively good behavior on the gas tax is that it was a one-off produced by a fairly rare set of circumstances: Namely, a 1) high profile fight between two leading national candidates who were 2) on the same side of the partisan divide and were 3) squabbling over a policy issue where there was utter unanimity among experts. You didn't, for instance, have a bunch of Cato or AEI economists popping up in articles to explain the merits of a
