July 11, 2006
JUST THE FACTS, MA'AM
Budget Deficit Drops $296B Under Estimate (Andrew Taylor, AP, 7/11/06)
The White House Tuesday touted new deficit figures showing considerable improvement upon earlier administration predictions, trumpeting the news as a validation of President Bush's pro-growth tax cuts....A question for the journalists among us: Whose opinion is being quoted in that last paragraph, or is that supposed to be a statement of objective fact? Posted by David Cohen at July 11, 2006 11:10 AMBush himself was to trumpet the good news, attributing the improvement to tax cuts he pushed in 2001 and 2003 and his clampdown on domestic agencies funded by Congress.
However, the results are less impressive when compared to the $318 billion deficit posted last fall for fiscal 2005. Despite strong revenues, the high costs of the Iraq war and Gulf Coast hurricane relief have weighed on the deficit _ as have higher interest payments paid on the national debt.
The reporter and/or editor seems duty-bound to make sure the opposition talking point gets in far enough up into the story to assure that most readers will see it (not that something like that, even with actual attribution, should automatically be paragraph last in the story, but you should go though some of the details on why the deficit is smaller than expected before you start harping that it's still bigger than it should be).
Posted by: John at July 11, 2006 1:52 PMThe article about the plummeting deficit in our daily paper is so convoluted and tortuous, the casual reader would have trouble decoding it.
Posted by: erp at July 12, 2006 8:06 AM