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Article Artículo

What Is the Point of Budget Reporting?

That is a serious question. What are newspapers, radio and television stations, and Internet sites trying to accomplish when they report on the budget?

Presumably they are trying to convey information to their audience. This raises the question of why they so frequently just report budget numbers in billions or trillions of dollars; numbers that will be almost completely meaningless to the overwhelming majority of their audience.

This point is simple and straightforward. When a newspaper tells its readers that the government will spend $76 billion this year on food stamps, as the NYT did recently, the number is virtually meaningless to almost everyone who sees it. Most people, even the well-educated readers of the NYT, are not budget wonks. They know $76 billion is a big number, way more than they will ever see in their lifetime, but spending on food stamps would also be a really big number to most of us if were $7.6 billion or $760 billion. When the NYT tells us that we are spending $76 billion on food stamps it is not informing readers as to whether this level of spending is a big item in their tax bill or a major contributor to the budget deficit.

It turns out that it is not just NYT readers who get confused by large numbers. Apparently NYT reporters and/or editors have the same problem. The NYT article on food stamps last month described food stamps as a $760 billion program. The NYT later printed a correction, but this was a pretty egregious error to slip by the editors. The paper went one step further this month when it reported Italy's debt as $2.6 billion. The correct number is $2.6 trillion, three orders of magnitude larger.

Mistakes like these find their way into print because even NYT editors are not hugely familiar with the budget. It is highly unlikely that they would have printed that food stamp spending is 22 percent of the budget, as opposed to the actual 2.2 percent number for 2013. Editors would know that the food stamp program does not take up more than one fifth of the budget. Similarly, they never would have written that Italy's debt is 0.1 percent of GDP, as opposed to the actual number of approximately 130 percent.

Dean Baker / July 19, 2013

Article Artículo

Ecuador

Latin America and the Caribbean

Venezuela

World

Scholars Write on the Supposed "Irony" of Snowden's Asylum Requests in Latin America

A group of Latin America scholars have taken issue with the supposed “irony” of Edward Snowden’s requests for asylum in Ecuador, and acceptance of asylum in Venezuela. The authors debunk what they say “has become a media meme” that it is “ironic” that a whistle-blower and free press advocate like Snowden would seek asylum in those countries. The authors point out, “most media outlets in Ecuador and Venezuela are privately-owned, and opposition in their orientation.”

The letter also offers important context and corrections of reports that seem to discredit the governments of Ecuador under President Rafael Correa of Ecuador and Venezuela under Hugo Chávez (and now Nicolás Maduro), which “contribute to a climate of demonization that enables U.S. aggression against those countries and damages relations between the people of the U.S. and our foreign neighbors.” While the media contacts for the letter say they have received few responses from the reporters and editors to whom they sent the letter, it has received some attention, with Chicago Public Media station WBEZ interviewing Ecuador expert Steve Striffler (at 22:30) on their “World View” program yesterday and posting an article about the letter on their site here.

Here is the full text:

The supposed “irony” of whistle-blower Edward Snowden seeking asylum in countries such as Ecuador and Venezuela has become a media meme. Numerous articles, op-eds, reports and editorials in outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and MSNBC have hammered on this idea since the news first broke that Snowden was seeking asylum in Ecuador. It was a predictable retread of the same meme last year when Julian Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and the Ecuadorian government deliberated his asylum request for months.

Of course, any such “ironies” would be irrelevant even if they were based on factual considerations.  The media has never noted the “irony” of the many thousands of people who have taken refuge in the United States, which is currently torturing people in a secret prison at Guantanamo, and regularly kills civilians in drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and other countries. Nor has the press noted the “irony” of refugees who have fled here from terror that was actively funded and sponsored by the U.S. government, e.g. from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile, and other countries.

CEPR and Stephan Lefebvre / July 18, 2013