October 3, 2006
From the desk of Jane Galt:Ouch!
Greg Mankiw is always sweet and polite, even to those he disagrees with. Yet he manages to make this sting--quite a bit, I imagine:
A reader calls this sentence from The New Republic to my attention:Posted by Jane Galt at October 3, 2006 4:00 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound links
Mankiw...left his post as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors after publicly supporting offshoring.The sentence is true in the same sense that this sentence is true:
Japan bombed Pearl Harbor after Thomas Jefferson completed the Lousiana Purchase.Both sentences get the chronology right, but they mislead the reader by compressing the time line of events and insinuating a cause-and-effect that is absent in the historical record. In the first case, the correct statement would be:
Mankiw got into political hot water by making positive comments about offshoring. Twelve months later, with the presidential election over and the furor over offshoring having largely subsided, his two-year leave of absence from Harvard came to an end, and he returned to his tenured chair as had been planned all along.I bring this up not because I am defensive. (Well, maybe I am, a little.) Rather, I think this sentence illustrates, in a small way, how journalists twist the truth to suit their own ends.
One of the basic principles of economics is that people respond to incentives. Remember that journalists are people too. They are rewarded for compelling and interesting stories. Unfortunately, the truth is often boring. Journalists are incentivized to make the truth sound more exciting than it really is. (I highly recommend the movie Shattered Glass for a more extreme case of how journalists respond to incentives. Like the above sentence, it also involves the New Republic.)
Professor Mankiw just posted an update along with an apology he received (and graciously accepted) from the author Clay Risen who said it was “sloppy, rather than slanted, journalism” and understood that Mankiw had not left because of any controversy over his comments and did not intend to communicate otherwise. IMO the graciousness of the apology by the author and the willingness of Professor Mankiw to accept it and admit he may have been a bit hasty in impugning Risen’s motives is the real lesson.
"I joined the Confederate Army for two weeks, and then deserted. And the Confederacy fell."
--Mark Twain
The Paul Newman/Sally Fields movie Absence of Malice also points out the way journalists can slant a story to gain readership points while unfairly harming the subject of the story.
I'll accept that Clay Risen sincerely apologized for what he wrote. I'll even accept that he believes the error was due to sloppiness rather than bias. That does not disprove Professor Mankiw's argument: journalists have an incentive to write interesting articles. Sometimes people react unconsciously to an incentives. I doubt most journalists sit down with the intention to juice up their story by making things up out of whole cloth. Instead, they choose quotes, examples, words, and phrasing with an eye to generating interest more than understanding. Misunderstanding is usually only a byproduct of this approach, not the goal of the journalist.
I have a hard time accepting it as mere sloppiness. Why mention the offshoring at all unless to suggest a causal relationship?
Your next challenge is to put the correct statement into sixteen words :)
Also see the movie "His Girl Friday" for a slightly tongue-in-cheek look at journalists.
Ben Fulton
Ho, ho ,ho but no- the point is not editing for space. The next challenge is to put the slanted take into sixteen fewer words than the sixteen word limit you proposed.
I highly recommend the movie Shattered Glass for a more extreme case of how journalists respond to incentives. Like the above sentence, it also involves the New Republic
Meow!
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