PressEthic

In his book Bias former CBS newsman Bernard Goldberg asserts that a February 8, 1996 CBS Evening News piece on Steve Forbes and the flat tax convinced him that liberal bias at the network needed to be confronted. He implied bias at the New York Times and the Washington Post too.

The problem is that so many TV journalists simply don't know what to think about certain issues until the New York Times and the Washington Post tell them what to think. Those big, important newspapers set the agenda that the network news people follow. In this case the message from Olympus was clear: We don't like the flat tax.

We can't get inside the heads of the folks at CBS News who ran the flat tax story that evening. But we can check up on newspaper coverage of the flat tax in the months leading up to the piece.

I've searched the New York Times coverage of Steve Forbes and the flat tax between January 1, 1996 and February 8, 1996. Assume for a moment that CBS News took its cues from that newspaper. Does Goldberg's accusation of bias hold together? Would a reader of the New York Times during that period come to understand that the paper opposed a flat tax?

On January 1, 1996 the Times ran a major article on Forbes and his flat tax headlined "Forbes's Silver Bullet for the Nation's Malaise." Here is the substance of the flat tax coverage in the piece (emphasis added):

His candidacy is built around his economic vision. The country, he says, is poised for growth of historic proportions, if only the Federal tax code would get out of its way. "No one outside of Washington could have devised something more complex, more incomprehensible, more monstrous, more anti-growth, more anti-family than the tax code we have today," he told a crowd of about 150 supporters recently in Sioux City.

The flat tax, Mr. Forbes says, is the key to liberating the nation's economic potential. His version of the tax, similar to that proposed by Representative Dick Armey of Texas, the House majority leader, would, in essence, eliminate taxes on investment income. There would be no tax on interest, no tax on capital gains, no tax on inheritances and no tax on pensions -- just a 17 percent flat tax on income that would replace the graduated tax schedule, which now has a maximum rate of 39.6 percent. Exemptions would also be expanded to help those with lower incomes. A family of four whose income was $36,000 or less, for example, would pay no taxes at all. At the same time, there would be no deductions for home mortgage interest or for state and local taxes, and no earned income tax credit.

If enacted, the flat tax would represent a huge tax cut for the wealthiest Americans and, Mr. Forbes asserts, a sizable tax cut for almost everyone else. Mr. Forbes does not propose raising other sorts of fees or taxes to make up for the loss in revenue. Instead he invokes the logic of supply-side economics: cuts in the tax rate would lead to stunning growth in the economy that would, in turn, lead to increased tax collections.

"Every time in America that we've reduced tax rates, Government revenues have gone up," he said.

But many economists, including many conservative economists, are skeptical of this Alice-in-Wonderland optimism, and they note that when supply-side thinking was put into practice during the Reagan Presidency, revenues declined and staggering deficits were produced. Mr. Forbes pushes such objections aside by maintaining that the deficits of the Reagan years were the result not of tax cuts but a Congressional spending spree.

"The problem with the 1980's was that Washington spent the money, and then some," he said.

Why does the reporter characterize Forbes' position as "Alice-in-Wonderland" optimism rather than the more neutral "optimism"? The non-neutral language and dismissive tone seems similiar to the CBS sins that Goldberg complained about.

On February 1, 1996 the Times published "Economic Scene; Changing the tax system has an allure. But will the fixes work?"

Two sections jumped out at me. This one:

A makeover of taxes that promises, in the words of the Kemp Commission, to double the rate of economic growth, sure beats abortion or affirmative action as a party-unifying, good-news issue.

But most economists aren't buying it. For while it is hard to find a tax specialist who is not charmed by the prospect of starting afresh, virtually all think the Republicans are repackaging green veggies as triple-fudge ice cream.

"It is completely implausible that improving incentives to work, save and invest in a system that has already moved a long way in the right direction would make a significant difference to growth," argues William Gale, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

And this one:

It is easy to see why Republicans are flogging tax reform. And it is equally easy to see why many are entranced by the intellectual elegance and simplicity of the flat tax. But as the Kemp Commission's vision of sugar plums suggests, the gap between promise and reality is wide.

In both cases fanciful imagery is mustered to describe the flat tax.

On February 4, 1996 the times published the story "IDEAS & TRENDS: Vox Populist; Just Regular Ruling-Class Guys." Here is how it begins:

THE most striking thing about Steve Forbes's rapid rise from the protected bubble of his corporate jet, the Capitalist Tool, to the turbulence of life as the hot Republican Presidential commodity is what his opponents are not saying about him.

They attack his flat tax plan as wacky. They attack his barrage of television commercials as mean-spirited and misleading. They attack him for lacking government know-how.

But they are more reluctant to fault Mr. Forbes for what may seem his most glaring vulnerability as the first official tests draw near: that this member of one of the wealthiest families in America has bought his way to the top of the field while touting as a panacea for the middle class a plan that cuts taxes for the rich.

That is because Mr. Forbes, of all people, has managed to acquire a label prized by contemporary American politicians: he is a populist.

I believe the term for this type of coverage is "backhanded compliment."

Another backhanded compliment came on February 7, with the publication of "POLITICS: THE SCENE; Forbes? The Enemy Camp Turns Joyful." It begins thusly:

The very idea that President Clinton might eventually run against Steve Forbes and his flat-tax platform sends Margo McNabb, career Democrat, into a Joycean ecstasy of Molly Bloom dimensions.

"Yes, yes, oh, yes!" Mrs. McNabb crooned, uninhibited in the outsized joy she envisions in Mr. Clinton's going to the people and denouncing the flat tax as the ultimate measure of just how reactionary a spectacle the Republicans are presenting this year as they elbow their way through the Iowa Presidential nominating competition and beyond.

"And I read that Steve the Boy Wonder has a Robert Mapplethorpe print on his yacht!" added Mrs. McNabb, delightedly swirling the Mapplethorpe taboo, dear to the Republican Christian right, into the plutocrat image of Mr. Forbes that she craves to see the President set up and smash like a November pinata.

A former Democratic state committeewoman and Story County chairwoman, Mrs. McNabb has no internecine fight on her hands this year. But like most other Democrats, she is thoroughly enjoying the mixed enthusiasm and shock of Republicans at the high polling tides of the Forbes phenomenon. For fun, she concocts attack commercials that seem little more exaggerated than the dirk-and-blunderbuss appeals already blanketing this state like the season's tiresome, mud-spattered snows.

"One would open with a coupon-clipping, bonbon-eating dowager as the maid comes in," Mrs. McNabb fantasized, cackling at her imaginary 30-second spot, Bubba versus the Plutocrat. "The President would wipe up the floor with him," she concluded, asking what could be better for a Democratic candidate than reducing things to the issue of poor versus rich?

But Mr. Forbes continues to fairly mesmerize Iowa audiences with his single-theme denunciation of the Internal Revenue code, an attack that always draws on the same Dracula specter that, word for word, he first raised at his campaign opening last year. "Kill it, drive a stake through its heart, bury it and hope it never rises again to terrorize the American people!" he advises in his familiar peroration with his familiar unblinking smile of delight. He prescribes all but a clove of garlic, and inevitably audiences burst into applause at his imagery-filled message that a money-sucking "monstrosity," the graduated income tax, can be exterminated.

His stump appearances lately are more remarkable for what the audiences do not ask about the flat tax than for the dedicated repetitiousness of Mr. Forbes's performance.

There seems little voter memory of the recent history of supply-side economics.

In the same time period I've been writing about the Times editorializes several times against the flat tax.

I haven't provided a comprehensive look at Times news coverage. There are other articles that seemed reasonably balanced (though none that seemed skewed to favor the flat tax).

But my impression from the excerpted material above -- and from reading through all the articles that a Lexis search for "Forbes" and "flat tax" turned up during that period -- is that any reader of the New York Times understood that the paper opposed the flat tax, and absorbed a dismissive attitude towards it.

This doesn't prove that CBS News took its cues from the New York Times. But it does mean that Goldberg's assertion is plausible.