Winter’s Haven

In case you weren’t aware, the vast majority of mainstream media sucks. One big problem is sensationalism bias; however, I can almost forgive them for this, since they are at least acting in their own self-interest by reporting the sensational and extraordinary. What’s truly and utterly pathetic is the media’s tendency to just transcribe whatever politicians say without the slightest investigation or critical analysis. Similarly, “balance” frequently means finding both a Democrat and a Republic, and parroting whatever each of them say on the issue.

Matthew Yglesias brings us an especially ugly example. Rudy Giuliani played the very old, very thoroughly debunked, “lowering taxes will increase tax revenues!” card at a recent political event. And sadly but typically, pretty much no one in the traditional media was willing to come out and say what every sane economist knows: this is bullshit. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the Laffer curve, there is solid economic theory which implies that if you raise tax rates high enough, you will hurt the economy enough that tax revenues will indeed decrease as you raise tax rates further. However, all the evidence clearly says that our current tax rates are not nearly high enough for this to happen. To quote Mark Thoma, “Any reporter who thinks there’s a debate about whether cutting taxes has increased tax revenues has not been paying attention and has no business covering economics.”

I also recommend Ebomuse’s fine rant against the lazy, spineless media.

This one is getting posted under epistemology because, well, trusting the mainstream media is a bad idea. I got burned by this not so long ago. Expert bloggers are doing all us us a great service by taking a more careful, critical look at the world than the old media tends to.

This entry was posted 2007-Aug-8 and is filed under Epistemology, Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.