December 16, 2018
That’s what New York Times readers are likely to believe after seeing this op-ed by Gracy Olmstead. The piece is an argument against farm subsidies, or at least their current form, which primarily benefit wealthy farmers.
It referred to these subsidies in 2018, as being “nearly $900 billion worth.” The link provided in the piece is to an article on the new farm bill. It covers ten years. More importantly, the vast majority of the money in the bill is not for farm subsidies but for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or food stamps. The amount going to farm subsidies is around $20 billion a year. Instead of being 20 percent of the budget, as this piece implies, farm subsidies are actually less than 0.5 percent of the federal budget.
There is zero excuse for allowing such a grossly mistaken number into the paper. The piece is an op-ed, not a news story, but the paper does fact check op-eds. (I can vouch for that. I have had several columns very carefully fact-checked.)
A newspaper’s job is to inform its readers. In this case, the NYT flunked badly.
Comments