MediaWatch: October 1991
Table of Contents:
More Statistical Games
FISCAL UNFITNESS. On September 13, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe both served as bulletin boards for Citizens for Tax Justice (CTJ) and their newest attempt to prove that the rich paid less of the tax burden in the 1980s. In a story headlined "15 Years of Cuts Said to Enrich the Rich," Post reporter Tom Kenworthy suggested "The study is the latest of a growing pile of analyses of federal fiscal policy during the 1980s." Kenworthy failed to note that the study was not original research, but another reworking of the same politically loaded Congressional Budget Office statistics that other liberal groups have used as the basis of their reports. A steady stream of liberal studies which all use the same source is not exactly a "growing pile" of research.
Both papers mentioned that the CTJ figures covered the years 1977-1992, but neither made the obvious point that there is no tax or income data for 1991 or 1992 yet! Conservatives could have provided IRS data showing the income tax burden of the top one percent increased from 17.6 percent of taxes collected in 1981 to 27.5 in 1988, while the bottom 50 percent's burden dropped from 7.5 to 5.7 percent. But the Post simply excluded any critical opinion, and the Globe only allowed that "The study was faulted by conservatives as too simplistic." The Post also described CTJ as "nonpartisan," but five paragraphs later reported that Dick Gephardt appeared at the group's press conference to criticize President Bush.
FISCAL UNFITNESS II. The Post and the Globe also uncritically reported an economic study by the liberal Joint Center for Political Studies (JCPS) comparing poverty in the U.S. and Europe. Post reporter Paul Taylor passed on their conclusions in the lead paragraph: "The United States stood in 'ignominious isolation' in its failure to lift its least well-off citizens out of poverty...not only was the poverty rate here higher in the 1980s than in the six other countries studied, but also that poverty in the United States was deeper and of longer duration."
But later in the story, Taylor added that the study "defined poverty in each as 50 percent of the median income for all households with heads age 20 to 55." That means that if U.S. median income is higher than the other countries (it is), then its poverty standard is also higher. So people in the same income bracket would be poor here, but not in the European countries. Taylor not only failed to explain this, but he failed to quote any critic who could have explained it.
