Austan Goolsbee used his monthly column to report the findings of a study that sought to examine bias in the media by seeing whether they use Republican or Democratic phrases. For example, in the case of President Bush's plans for Social Security, the Republican phrase would be "personal accounts," while the Democratic phrase would be "privatization." I say nice try, but no cigar. This analysis may be useful for a very narrow notion of bias, but as someone who has been commenting on economic reporting for more than a decade, I would say it misses the real story. How about comparing the number of articles that refer to the Social Security "crisis" or the need to fix Social Security, relative to the number of stories that refer to the need to fix the country's health care system? I don't know any economist who does not believe that the health care system poses a far more serious threat to the country's economy and the federal budget, yet the media give health care reform a small fraction of the attention they give the long-term shortfall projected for Social Security. One could argue that politicians don't talk about health care reform, but this raises a cause and effect issue. Politicians do try to bring up health care reform (e.g. dozens of members of Congress have signed on to a bill that would establish a universal Medicare system), but they are generally ignored or ridiculed by the media. Since politicians don't like being ignored or ridiculed, they opt not to talk about the issues that the media doesn't want them to talk about, so they go back to the Social Security crisis. There are many other ways in which the media narrow debate. For example, when Ben Bernanke was appointed to the Fed, how many times did the media report that there is a consensus on monetary policy among economists? Yeah, I remember that consensus. It held that the unemployment rate could not get below 6 percent without triggering inflation. The consensus within the profession was proven wrong by Alan Greenspan when he kept interest rates low and allowed the unemployment rate to fall to 4.0 percent in the late 90s, and there was only the most limited uptick in inflation. I could go on, as regular BTP readers know, but I think the point should be clear. The biggest problem with bias in the media, at least in its coverage of economics, is the way in which it narrows the frame of debate, not its word choice, although I could come up with a few key phrases here also (e.g. "free trade").
--Dean Baker
