Ignorance is Bliss - Unless You're a Reporter, And Then It's Infuriating

Jon Margolis [1], former chief political reporter for the Chicago Tribune and the author of "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964 [2]," lives in northeastern Vermont, where he writes and teaches.

Perhaps poor Emily Friedman and her bosses at ABC News have been sufficiently skewered for their March 2 report [3] about the rich folks who were going to outfox President Barack Obama by intentionally making less money, some of them apparently figuring that they’d actually end up with more.

The purpose here is not to pile on, but to illustrate. Or, more precisely, to reveal what Friedman and (especially) her bosses illustrated by producing and broadcasting this disaster.

Not that there wasn’t a pretty good story lurking somewhere in the doings of the put-upon plutocrats correspondent Friedman discovered. It just wasn’t the story that appeared. Simply consider the confusion of the very first source quoted.

“We have to find a way out where we can make just what we need to just under the line so we can benefit from Obama’s tax plan,” said one woman, identified only as a 63-year-old attorney from Lafayette, La., who seemed to think that if she could keep her income to a mere $249,999 – just a buck short of where Obama’s proposal would raise the tax rate – she’d be better off.

The story – obviously – was that some wealthy and therefore presumably sophisticated people – at least one of them an actual lawyer – are so ignorant about the details of America’s income tax system that they think they can keep more of their money if they earn less of it. Then the story could expose how muddle-headed these folks are by explaining that under our graduated, marginal rate, tax system, Obama’s higher tax rate would apply only to their incomes above 250 grand. They’d pay exactly the same tax up to that point. Only on that next dollar (number 250,001) would they pay the higher tax – 36 cents instead of 33.

Meaning they’d keep 64, rather than 67, cents of it, which would be 64 cents more than they’d have had they not earned that last dollar. When it comes to personal income taxes, people do not end up with more by earning less.

Instead of revealing the ignorance of folks who should have known better, ABC News revealed only the ignorance of … ABC News. It boggles the mind that no one who prepared or looked over that piece didn’t know how America’s tax system works.

(Yes, in the “updated version” of the story now online – which was altered from the original after the first burst of criticism – the caveat of a “financial advisor” that the income-cutting ploy “won’t help a great deal” was inserted right after the quote from the Lafayette lawyer. What a pitiful renunciation! Humiliating and incorrect, both. “Won’t help a great deal”? Hogwash. It won’t help at all. The original version seems to have been obliterated from the cyberspace that the un-technorati can reach.)

Alas, this kind of thing is all too typical these days in the news dodge. When it comes to how the U.S. government works – its laws, regulations and other policies – too many journalists seem not to know much. And not to care much.

And, worse, not to care much that they don’t know much, an attitude that leads to the assertion of grand (or, more often, petty) conclusions based on little or no knowledge.

Consider the palaver [4] one morning last week on CNN’s “American Morning” after a piece by correspondent Jason Carroll about what he called “a shared history of wasteful government spending” on the part of Democrats and Republicans alike.”

Hard to argue with that. But Carroll and the only source he quoted (Tom Schatz of Citizens Against Government Waste) seemed to think that all government spending was waste. That’s more debatable, as was the condemnation of the two specific spending proposals in the supplementary budget bill now before Congress – “nearly $1.8 million for pig odor research in Iowa. Another $1 million for cricket control in Utah.”

At which point co-host Kiran Chetry, who sometimes shows a glimmer of understanding how the world really works, pointed out that many people  “don’t consider (this spending) waste.”

“Yes,” Carroll said, “but come on, you saw some of the examples there. Some of these examples, I mean, are going to be sort of hard to defend.”

Whereupon the other co-host, John Roberts, mentioned that Iowa Sen. “Tom Harkin said that controlling pig odor in Iowa is a very, very important issue.”

Carroll was having none of that.

“Use an air freshener,” he said. “You know what I mean. It’s cheap.”

What’s cheap, actually, is reaching a conclusion apparently on the basis of no reporting. The wisdom of the pig odor appropriation will not be assessed here. Only the journalism will be. The journalism was shoddy, there being not the slightest evidence that Carroll or anyone at CNN had, for instance, called Harkin’s office, or Googled “pig odor,” to see whether it might be a real problem in Iowa, perhaps fit for $1.8 million in federal research.

It might be. There are 20 million hogs in Iowa (seven for every person) and increasingly they are not raised by Farmer Jones on his few hundred acres of corn, soybeans and livestock, but in huge containment centers where they are kept by the tens of thousands. The stink ranges so far and wide that, as Harkin said, “people constantly complain, with good reason … so it makes good sense to fund research that addresses how people can live in our small towns and communities and livestock producers can do the same and co-exist.”

Perhaps it makes a little more sense if one knows that the government does not merely tolerate these pig factories; it subsidizes them, and thereby subsidizes everyone who eats pork, which is almost everyone.

Maybe it shouldn’t subsidize pork production. Or alfalfa growing, either, the reason for the proposal to control Mormon crickets (Anabrus Simplex), which every once in a while – and now seems to be one of them – swarm by the millions, eating their way through what Utah Republican Sen. Bob Bennett called $343 million worth of forage crops.

(By the way, the Mormon cricket got its name because in 1848 its devastation of crops planted by Mormons recently arrived in Utah was averted when flocks of California gulls came out of the West like Young Lochinvar to devour the crickets. The Mormons considered this a miracle, which it may have been, or maybe swarms of insects naturally attract flocks of birds. Why we can’t rely on the gulls now instead of spending a million gucks has not been investigated.)

OK, we’ll let the politicians argue over which programs deserve appropriations. The reporters and commentators can weigh in, too. But is it too much to ask them first to know what they’re talking about?

First of all, reporters should realize that they might be carrying somebody’s political water when they do these stories. Making fun of taxing and spending, while always tempting and sometimes appropriate, sustains a Republican theme, even if (as in the case of the cricket example) the proposal has Republican backing.

Perhaps reporters should reconsider the conventional wisdom that has demonized the “earmark” as a synonym for “waste.” First, because reporters should reconsider all conventional wisdom. Second, because scorning earmarks implies the belief that only the executive branch should propose specific spending programs. Maybe it should, but that’s certainly not what the Founding Fathers had in mind.

Spending taxpayers’ money on pig odor or cricket eradication might or might not be wasteful. Calling it wasteful without knowing much (or anything) about how our agricultural production system works, or the history of how Americans have controlled (often not very wisely) the natural world, is downright ignorant.

The motto of the news business ought not be: “Knowledge? We don’t need no stinkin’ knowledge. We’re journalists.”

Think Jon ought to know something? Here's [5] how you can let him know.