Duncan is worried about the class of folks who listen to NPR and read Time magazine and thus consider themselves informed, not really realizing that these outlets have a sort of establishment bias and produce a studied obfuscation of certain crucial facts in the political atmosphere.
This, incidentally, helps explain why I'm spending so much time on the Brooks article from earlier today. The median reader doesn't actually have the time, inclination, or resources to personally fact check and footnote every article they read. So they tend to use certain heuristics to help them navigate the media sphere -- chief among them trusting that authors operating out of established media outlets are being basically truthful. Conversely, they can rely on the aggregate disreputation of an outlet -- the reason I don't read or critique the Wall Street Journal editorial page is that most everyone I can reach already knows it's a stew of lies and disinformation.
But Brooks is different. He's a respected writer, perched on the world's most respected op-ed page, and making his argument through frequent references to established and credible outlets like the CBO and the Brookings Institution. It's a rare reader indeed who wouldn't trust that product. But that product is not trustworthy. Nor, for that matter, are some of his past columns on economics, which misleadingly invoked trusted and even liberal sources to add illusory credibility to conservative, controversial pronouncements. So you actually need to create an instinctive skepticism in readers as to his economic arguments -- enough so that if something sounds wrong, they'll check to see whether it is in fact incorrect, rather than just believing the air of credibility Brooks so artfully produces.
And incidentally, I agree with Duncan on one other thing: Brooks was fed this data. The slipperiness of the arguments relies on fairly sophisticated manipulation of the data, and more even than that, an ability to know where to look in the data to manipulate it. It's very smartly done, and all the more dangerous for it.
