October 03, 2014
Christopher Ingraham had a piece in the Post’s Wonkblog in which he reports on a Pew poll showing the public has no idea where their tax dollars are going. The poll found that one third of respondents thought foreign aid was the biggest item in the budget. In fact, it accounts for less than one percent of spending.
While we can decry the ignorance of the American people, the media deserves much of the blame in the same way that teachers are held responsible for the poor performance of their students. (Actually, there is a far better case against the media.) News outlets like the Post routinely report on budget items in millions and billions of dollars. Often the sums refer to multi-year expenditures, sometimes not even making the time period covered clear to readers.
For the vast majority of readers these numbers are completely meaningless. Even well-educated people have no idea what it means when they see that we are going to spend $190 billion on transportation over the next six years.
The media could be far more informative in their reporting if they made a point of putting these numbers in some context, most obviously expressing them as a share of the total budget. Most people would understand what it meant if an article said that we were spending 1.0 percent of the budget on transportation over the next six years.
In effect, the Post is the bad teacher making fun of their student for not knowing anything. It ain’t pretty.
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