Patterico's Pontifications

7/12/2005

More Predictable Negativity on the Budget from the L.A. Times

Filed under: Dog Trainer,Government — Patterico @ 8:14 pm



Today’s L.A. Times story on Schwarzenegger’s budget is utterly predictable.

Every time he cuts anything, the paper devotes buckets of ink to the wailing from the people affected. For example, look at the sub-head: “Schwarzenegger cuts dozens of items totaling $190 million to dismay of programs’ backers.”

How about: “to the cheering of advocates of spending restraint”? After all, this budget allows us to avoid new taxes or significant borrowing, leading to an upgrade in the state’s bond rating by Moody’s. Surely some anti-tax/anti-spending activists are pleased. But you’d never know it from reading today’s article. There is not a single positive quote from anyone in the article, outside of the Schwarzenegger administration. Did the paper contact, say, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers’ Association for a reaction? We are not told.

Evidently they needed room for all the negative quotes. There are two from heads of environmentalist groups; one from the head of a labor group; one from a professor whose health program was cut; and one from a Democrat state senator who says Schwarzenegger broke a promise.

Meanwhile, the news of the upgrade in the state’s bond rating is buried on page C4. (The story above mentions it but quickly explains that this good news was “dampened by warnings from budget analysts.”)

Aargh.

P.S. Independent Sources shows the difference between the way the story treats Arnold’s cuts vs. the way the paper portrayed deeper cuts by Gray Davis.

5 Responses to “More Predictable Negativity on the Budget from the L.A. Times

  1. From the fine dweintraub blog:
    “Schwarzenegger’s most interesting veto was of $6.1 million to preserve 114 positions in the office of State Publishing, a move made by Democrats to reduce the state’s use of private contract printers.”

    That particular boondoggle really pissed me off. I have some friends who were in the printing business, and here the State is overpaying by over six buttloads of money to Socialize the industry. And this is all so these dorks Rudy Bermudez (D-Norwalk) and Joe Dunn (D-Santa Ana) get some of the action.

    What does dismay even mean? To the dismay of me, LA Times is not giving me a whole bunch of money.

    Shredstar (91b3b2)

  2. good stuff, especially in lihgt of the following ethics guidelines of the Times “ethics code” put out by John Carrlo today. HT: Instagodfather:

    A fair-minded reader of Times news coverage should not be able to discern the private opinions of those who contributed to that coverage, or to infer that the newspaper is promoting any agenda. A crucial goal of our news and feature reporting – apart from editorials, columns, criticism and other content that is expressly opinionated – is to be nonideological. This is a tall order. It requires us to recognize our own biases and stand apart from them. It also requires us to examine the ideological environment in which we work, for the biases of our sources, our colleagues and our communities can distort our sense of objectivity…
    People who will be shown in an adverse light in an article must be given a meaningful opportunity to defend themselves.

    So basically the arnold budget article is a 1000% contradiction of these guidleines. Kewl.

    spwb (500ab8)

  3. If newspapers were smart they’d use bloggers as their fact-checkers, and be happy about it.

    They aren’t very smart–yet.

    Dean Esmay (86944b)

  4. The Times could well have written “Schwarzenegger cut dozens of items totaling only $190 million to dismay of taxpayers who had hoped for savings of 20 times that. State Senator McClintock noted that $190 million was ‘a mere six dollars for each Californian — barely enough money for lunch. If I’d been elected, I’d need several of those blue pencil things before I was done.'”

    or some such…

    Kevin Murphy (6a7945)

  5. It should be abundantly clear that the LAT has no interest in the truth. It cares only about its “message.”

    Bostonian (326071)


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