Friday, May 21, 2004
Page 7
CALIFORNIA COMMENTARY (Column)
Do Taxpayers Get a Fair Shake From Local Media?
By JON COUPAL
(The writer is an attorney and president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association.)
Taxpayer groups, whether grassroots or business oriented, frequently complain how poorly they are treated by the media. But how much of this alleged bias is real?
California has nearly 100 daily newspapers, and during our combined 50 years of advocating for taxpayers on state and local issues, we have come into contact with just about all of them.
They range from papers like the Turlock Journal, with a circulation of under 7,000, to the giant Los Angeles Times whose daily circulation approaches one million. But regardless of size, the print media is very important to anyone affected by taxes—meaning just about everyone. In many areas, the community paper is the only source of information on local tax, spending and budget issues.
Let’s make it clear at the outset that we are excluding the editorial pages for purposes of this discussion. We accept (because we have little choice) that the editorial policy of most daily papers favors higher taxes and more government spending. But this is of less consequence than most people realize. A paper’s editorial bias is usually well known and readers readily distinguish opinions on these pages from day-to-day reporting.
What we are talking about is that news as reported in the media is usually distorted. Distorted, in this context, does not mean untruthful. It means unbalanced.
Herbert Bayard Swope observed, “The First Duty of newspapers is to be Accurate. If it be Accurate, it follows that it is Fair.” With all due respect to the first recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, we think this statement is a classic non sequitur. A paper can be both accurate and grossly unfair. For example, to say that a man cut his wife with a knife may be an accurate—yet horribly incomplete—statement if we later find out that the man was a surgeon performing a life-saving operation on his beloved.
One of the biggest problems we see in local stories is that there is a disproportionate amount of the stories’ space and time given to the pro-tax side. In particular, bonds and tax increase stories designate 80-90% of their time to proponents, or to describing all the good the measure de jour will accomplish. Pull any story about higher taxes off your local newspaper’s website and count the paragraphs for the tax—including descriptions of all the benefits it will pay for—and paragraphs against it. In a typical 22 paragraph story, maybe two paragraphs will be devoted to reasons why not to vote for the tax. The rest are supportive of it, directly or indirectly.
Unfortunately, reporters have a tendency to take assertions from public officials as fact—unless perhaps the assertions are disputed by other public officials or some favored advocacy group with a stake in more government spending. While the press will include brief quotes from non-governmental opponents of increasing taxes, these are treated as an afterthought and are usually buried near the end of the story.
On tax issues, the press resists asking the hard questions of government officials. Either most reporters can’t think of probing questions, or they just feel uncomfortable challenging “experts” in their field. Contributing to this problem is the youthful inexperience of many reporters assigned to these important issues. (Being interviewed by a seasoned, knowledgeable reporter is an enjoyable, but regrettably rare, occurrence.)
Almost every government agency and politician has a PR staff to send out slick press releases and to contact the press—all at taxpayer expense. If the press thought of these people as what they are—salespeople—they might have a more circumspect view of their pronouncements.
Compounding the gullibility in some cases is just plain laziness. It is far easier to take packaged government sales pitches at face value than to do some legwork to test their assertions. And even the most ambitious reporter has to deal with pressing deadlines that often discourage any further investigation.
Here is an example of how gullibility and laziness combine to bias a story.
Every school district wants more money—normally seeking school bonds paid for with higher property taxes.
To gain support they have to convince the public that they have pressing needs. So every district follows the same strategy (indeed, they use the same consultants): They call the press and take reporters and TV crews on a tour of leaky pipes, falling down ceilings, exposed electrical wires, etc. One theory is that, even if they had money to burn, they wouldn’t fix all these maintenance failures, as they need some of them to fool the press in preparation for the bond vote.
TV news dutifully highlights these problems, and shows this staged footage several more times prior to the election. Newspapers cover the story and include photos. The press loves these PR tours because they are packaged, well organized and, perhaps most important, photogenic—unlike talking heads or boring accounting.
But few reporters ask the right questions, or do the work that would give balance to the story. They should be asking real questions such as:
1. How much has the district budget grown over time? Has it kept up with inflation, or even exceeded it? (YES, by a lot!)
2. How much has the maintenance budget grown over time? Get figures.
3. Do you contract out repairs to save money, or do you use just in-house government personnel?
4. Why doesn’t the district prioritize maintenance? Isn’t it deemed important?
5. How much do you spend on PR people? Shouldn’t that money be spent on maintenance, if the problem is as bad as you say?
Under the “laziness” category, reporters fail to leave the “Potemkin Village” guided tour to look at other schools which are not part of the rigged presentation. Going to different schools and looking around would reveal few of the maintenance problems being highlighted by the tax increase advocates.
And the press could surreptitiously monitor the schools’ public works crews. A little poking around would probably find a pronounced inefficiency and even deadbeat behavior, up to and including sleeping on the job (as the press can find anytime by following around a water district repair crew).
All that said, intentional bias per se is not the major problem with most media stories involving government spending and taxes. It’s very real, but not the major problem. The real problem is simply human imperfections: Trusting “experts” and politicians, trying to get the job done quickly and with the least effort, and just not knowing how to do the job right.
Copyright 2004, Metropolitan News Company