Columbia Journalism Review: Old Dog, Old Tricks
Wag That Tail, Fido; It's July
Felix Gillette
We all know that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but it turns out you also can't get him to drop his old tricks. Especially, when the dog in question is the White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB). And the trick in question is OMB's deeply-ingrained reflex of eagerly wagging its tail -- perhaps "frantically spinning" is the better description -- every time it reports on the federal budget deficit....
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In recent years, many media outlets simply ran with the OMB's cheerful mid-session reports--tossing in plenty of laudatory quotes from presidential supporters praising the deficit "reduction" as vindication that the administration's fiscal policies were now turning a corner....
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Recently, however, journalists appear to be catching on. As we noted previously, the Washington Post's Jonathan Weisman did a nice job of calling out the White House back in January when it released its predictably gloomy budget-deficit projections for the current fiscal year.
"This is the third straight year in which the White House has summoned reporters well ahead of the official budget release to project a higher-than-anticipated deficit," reported Weisman at the time. "In the past two years, when final deficit figures have come in at record or near-record levels, White House officials have boasted that they had made progress, since the final numbers were below estimates."...
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Let's hope that this time around more reporters will follow Weisman's lead and call out the OMB's "good news" about the federal budget deficit for what it really is--a dog and pony show. And a tired, predictable one, at that.
http://www.cjrdaily.org/politics/wag_that_tail_fido_its_july.php
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