MediaWatch: October 1992

Janet Cooke Award: NBC: Liberal Public Relations

Pity the Heritage Foundation. Pity all the conservative groups and congressional staffers who work long hours year after year putting out studies on the economy, only to have them ignored by the "objective" media. But for their liberal counterparts -- the Children's Defense Fund, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, Citizens for Tax Justice, the Families USA Foundation, or Ralph Nader's Public Citizen, to name some favorites -- almost every new "study" makes the papers, the news magazines, even the network news. To top it all off, the media (1) fail to identify these groups as liberal and (2) refuse to approach the conservative experts for comment on the liberal studies. By perfectly following this sorry formula and more, NBC reporter Jeff Madrick wins the October Janet Cooke Award.

On the September 7 NBC Nightly News, Madrick served as press agent for the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), another media favorite, but he didn't tell viewers about the ideology of EPI. It's a liberal group founded by Dukakis and Clinton economic adviser Robert Reich, and headed by Dukakis adviser Jeff Faux, among others. To add insult to injury, Madrick passed on EPI's assertions without bringing on a conservative expert to rebut their claims. Madrick began: "A new report from the Economic Policy Institute shows that adjusted for inflation, 80 percent of all American workers are earning less today than they earned in 1979."

Misleading. As we've argued before, using 1979 as a starting point is a clever way of impugning the economic legacy of the 1980s. According to the Census Bureau, median male income did decline from $21,680 in 1979 to $20,461 in 1991. But 60 percent of that decline occurred in 1980, dropping to $20,736, and the figure dropped further to $20,367 in 1981. By 1991, it had climbed slightly to $20,469.

This looks lackluster compared to the median income for full-time female workers, which grew from $18,141 in 1981 to $20,553 in 1991. Putting the entire economy together, the Census found that median household income rose steadily throughout the 1980s, although it's fallen since Reagan left office. Economic policies of the Presidents on both ends -- Carter and now Bush -- have caused drops in income statistics. Starting at the 1979 figure and jumping to 1991 creates what Republican economists at the Joint Economic Committee call "the Democrat party line." Starting data in 1981 or 1982 (or even 1989) creates a much different impression.

Madrick also announced: "The new report on the working poor shows that one in five workers earned near poverty-level wages in 1973, one in four workers in 1979, and in 1991 it was almost one in three. The reasons: far fewer high-paying manufacturing jobs, partly because of foreign competition. Far more low-paying service jobs and a minimum wage that has not kept up with inflation."

Misleading. EPI's economic manual The State of Working America 1990-91 does claim that the share of workers earning less than the Census poverty line went from 25.7 percent in 1979 to 31.5 percent in 1987. But the chart doesn't differentiate between full-time and part-time workers, between major bread-winners and teenage minimum-wage workers. The EPI's source, the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), also does not include self-employed or supervisory workers in their wage surveys, skewing the numbers downward. The Average Wage Index put out by the Social Security Administration (SSA), however, which includes the employees the BLS excludes, shows that the average wage increased throughout the 1980s.

If Madrick had allowed a conservative economists to participate in his story, they might have explained that contrary to the conventional wisdom, even the BLS data 82 percent of the jobs created during the Reagan boom came in higher-paying, high- skilled jobs. From 1982-89, only 12 percent of the increase in employment came in low-paying jobs like fast-food workers.

As the NBC report continued, Madrick slipped from debatable statistics to completely anecdotal impressions "More and more working poor are joining the unemployed at food banks, like this one in San Jose, California." And, "Melissa Anderson, a California state employment counselor, says she's never seen it this bad for workers." Can these impressions be statistically proven or extrapolated nationwide? Or does this matter less than bringing everyday people into the story to make it interesting for viewers?

In a cordial conversation with MediaWatch, Madrick was asked why conservative experts weren't included: "I talk to conservative economists all the time. I know their point of view on that...To me, the main issue, of course, is direction, and I think it's virtually unmistakable what direction it took over a period of time." Madrick conceded the point about not labeling the EPI as a liberal group: "That wasn't my decision, and I don't have a good answer on that....To me, the EPI data in the particular cases I cited were pretty clearly the case...That wasn't my decision to put 'liberal think tank' in there, but I think that's a point. I think we often leave out 'conservative think tank,' too."

When asked to explain the claim about the number of workers making poverty-level wages, Madrick asserted: "It's mostly full- time workers, and their average hourly wage, but if you bring up that point, my gosh...Should we talk about the redistribution study of the Treasury Department, talking about young people and how much their income grew since they were 18? There are lots of quibbles. In all sincerity, to me, the direction is so clear that the absolute numbers in themselves aren't really the story, it's the direction of the numbers. And TV, since we have so few words, it tends to be hard to put in what in a print story I would certainly put in." Madrick concluded: "Let me try to assimilate the points you make and we'll see what I can do as time goes on."

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