Samuel Corum/Sipa USA via AP Images
Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy speaks during a press conference with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, in front of the West Wing of the White House, May 9, 2023.
Many years ago, journalism professor Jay Rosen usefully named the “savvy school” of political journalism. “Savviness is that quality of being shrewd, practical, hyper-informed, perceptive, ironic, ‘with it,’ and unsentimental in all things political,” he wrote. This school of reporters think it is “better to be savvy than it is to be just, good, fair, decent, strictly lawful, civilized, sincere, thoughtful or humane.”
The savvy style is alive and well when it comes to Washington coverage of the debt ceiling. At Axios, Hans Nichols wrote an article premised on the idea that of course Democrats and Republicans are going to have to compromise, but lamenting that “both sides appear comfortable shaving it close.” On CNBC, Joe Kernen recently interviewed Punchbowl News’s Jake Sherman. “It’s not true that there were three clean raises under Trump,” Kernen claimed. Sherman agreed, pointing to the 2011 debt ceiling increase. “In modern times, the debt ceiling is raised with negotiations.”
This is bad reporting and bad for the country.
There are two big problems here. First and most obviously is factual inaccuracy. While it is technically true that debt ceiling increases have commonly been packaged with other legislation, and this was the case under Trump, in none of them have Democrats taken the ceiling hostage in the way that Republicans are doing today.
As we have pointed out over and over again, Republicans are making aggressive, hyper-ideological demands to harm the country if they don’t get their ransom, despite holding just one branch of Congress—sweeping spending cuts, work requirements for Medicaid, repeal of the core of President Biden’s climate bill, and more. In 2019, by contrast, House Democrats conducted ordinary budget negotiations in which both sides got a little something they wanted, and then threw in a debt ceiling increase because it would be needed anyway.
For the situations to actually be comparable, Democrats would have had to make similarly extreme demands—say, Medicare for All, repeal of the Trump tax cuts, free postal banking, and a pony for every child under 11—with the explicit threat that otherwise the global economy gets it.
The reason the only example that Sherman cites is the 2011 increase is because that is the only time in American history the ceiling has been raised through that kind of extortion process. President Obama indulged Republican hostage-taking hoping to get a “grand bargain” to cut the deficit—but it was such a disaster that the next time it came up in 2013, he refused to negotiate and successfully stared them down. That is actually the most recent example of this kind of debt ceiling fight in “modern times,” and Sherman just ignores it completely.
Second, savvy reporting influences the outcome of the situation it purports to describe neutrally. The cynical, knowing pose signals to readers and watchers that reporters have the inside track about what’s going to happen, but writing articles or going on television to make confident predictions often makes that prediction more likely to happen.
This is especially true when Democrats are in power. As a rule, the party is gutless and easily cowed, and terrified of negative news coverage. Sure enough, reporting indicates that Biden administration officials are anxiously wringing their hands about using any of the executive branch tools to do an end run around the ceiling, like the platinum coin or declaring it unconstitutional, because there might be negative consequences. (The negative consequence of re-establishing the norm that Republicans can extract poisonous concessions by threatening default, thus guaranteeing they will ask for even more next time, doesn’t seem to bother them as much.) CNN reports that Biden himself is worried about invoking the 14th Amendment because it might take too long to litigate.
If reporters like Sherman, Nichols, and Kernen were calling Republican extortion what it is, instead of predicting that Biden would have to give in to it, the administration would unquestionably be less defensive.
Now, as my colleague David Dayen previously wrote, Obama shares a lot of the blame for this situation. What is considered “savvy” is heavily influenced by how the parties behave, and his disastrous 2011 precedent established that both sides accepted taking the debt ceiling hostage as legitimate, at least for a moment. By the same token, there’s no reason whatsoever for the Biden administration to listen to savvy journalists.
But that’s no excuse for political reporters to mislead their audiences on recent history, nor to de facto collaborate with Republican legislative hostage-taking.
