MediaWatch: May 1997
Table of Contents:
Imaginary Accomplishments
The "balanced budget" plan, Tom Brokaw explained on the May 16 NBC Nightly News, "contains $325 billion dollars in savings from cuts in defense and domestic programs. There will be some new spending involved as well, $32 billion dollars, most of it will go for education and health care.... NBC's David Bloom is telling us tonight the administration's financial analysts are already saying the tax cuts may be too generous for the savings in the budget if they want to keep it all in balance."
Brokaw encapsulated the most common misreporting on the budget deal. A viewer would conclude that the plan cuts spending, with about one-tenth of the amount saved allocated for new spending, leaving tax cuts as a threat to a balanced budget. Wrong on all counts, but Brokaw was not alone. "Spending cuts will include defense, Medicare, Medicaid and housing," insisted Phil Jones the same night on the CBS Evening News.
In fact, as Heritage Foundation budget analyst Scott Hodge discovered, "non-defense discretionary spending will grow by a cumulative $73 billion over the next five years, and defense spending will receive about $23 billion in new funding." As for the promised tax cuts, they amount to "less than one penny for every dollar taxpayers will send to Washington" as taxpayers "will receive only 67 cents in tax relief for every new dollar of spending."
Yet, tax cuts most worried NBC's David Bloom on May 2, the night the plan was un-veiled: "This balanced budget deal was on again, off again over the last 48 hours, but today when Republican leaders in Congress agreed that the tax cuts in the plan would not explode over the next five to ten years, well the deal got done."
The next day, NBC's John Palmer focused on the "worries" of liberals. "There will be money for broader health care coverage and expansion of the Head Start program for pre-schoolers, but critics say that's not enough." He concluded: "Congress still has to vote on the actual appropriations that will directly effect people's lives. And there could be trouble, from those who worry that the budget is weighted too much in favor of the rich at the expense of the poor."
In a surreal report, on the May 3 World News Tonight, ABC's Karla Davis intoned: "The plan calls for $115 billion savings in Medicare. It's the biggest reduction in a social program ever endorsed by a President. Even President Reagan, painted by critics as the destroyer of the social safety net, didn't rein in Medicare spending. It grew from $45 billion to $90 billion during his two terms."
But Davis had just made the same error. Medicare was projected to soar 54 percent over the next five years. The new plan reduces that to 46 percent. Quite a "reduction."
