Ryan Lizza’s long New Yorker profile of Paul Ryan is a masterpiece of subtle liberal partisanship. My favorite part is Lizza’s treatment of Ryan’s proposal for premium support Medicare. When referring to the Ryan Roadmap, Lizza describes “Obama’s alleged cuts to Medicare rather than for Ryan’s plan to end the program.” Nowhere in the article do you learn that the most recent version of the Ryan budget spends just as much on Medicare as does President Obama’s proposal, and retains Fee For Service Medicare for those who want to use their premium support to pay for that option. If I thought that Lizza was being at all intellectually honest, I’d find it strange that Lizza would mention the most recent Ryan budget’s changes to Medicaid while not listing its changes to Medicare. Lizza also doesn’t note that premium support payments are to be adjusted for health status. None of this qualifies as lying of course. It is just leaving out relevant facts so that New Yorker readers will have a maximally hostile view of the Ryan budget while walking away from the article feeling well informed.
Lizza made a more clumsy attempt to do the same thing with Michelle Bachmann last year. Joe Carter brought the reality.
July 31st, 2012 | 1:35 pm
Well, I find it shocking “…that Lizza would mention the most recent Ryan budget’s changes to Medicaid while not listing its changes to Medicare.”
And it qualifies as worse than lying. Establish a reputation as a detail-oriented in-depth reporter, and then use that as a platform to deceive.
I knew Lizza had punted, perhaps for reasons of unintentional ideological blind-spot, on investigating Rev. Wright(he was one of the first reporters in a position to know something was fishy there), but I honestly thought better of him.
July 31st, 2012 | 3:48 pm
That sounds so clever, what Lizza does in that article. If he is self-aware (no guarantee, of course) then I predict he will do a David Mamet one day and become a conservative. In the meantime, it is probably fun deceiving for a cause. However, I’ll bet it wears thin and becomes irksome over time., unless he really likes being a poseur. Some people do, but if he is that clever, then he’ll know what he’s doing.
July 31st, 2012 | 6:23 pm
Carl, yeah maybe it is worse, but he is also acting as an effective propagandist to a particular audience. A dimwit like Ed Schultz would have just accused Ryan of wanting to starve children and then would have suggested that Ryan was about to be indicted for cannibalism (Ryan is from Wisconsin after all.) That would play fine with the MSNBC prime time audience. The just want someone to reassure them that the Tea Party makes the SS look like the Girl Scouts. It would have made no impression to anyone who was still thinking. The New Yorker presumably includes some significant number of readers who want to think of themselves as open minded. The Schultz routine have been tuned out. So Lizza combines extensive quotations of Ryan on matters of general philosophy while characterizing Ryan’s policy proposals in ways that make them seem maximally alien and unintelligible.
Kate, look at Joe Carter’s takedown of Lizza’s profile of Bachmann. Lizza knows exactly what he is doing (and he is pretty good at it.)
July 31st, 2012 | 7:40 pm
Would that such writers as Lizza could be embarrassed by something as simple as the truth. He writes hokum for major publications; it’s a good gig if you can get it. What’s truly awful is that those publications welcome hokum.
August 1st, 2012 | 8:39 pm
Did you link to the right Lizza piece?
I am reading that as a short biography on Paul Ryan. Like a readers digest version of a biography for the twitter age.
The reasoning for the bio/profile is the jurisdictional hook of gaming what a republican victory would mean.
Thus he says: “To envisage what Republicans would do if they win in November, the person to understand is not necessarily Romney, who has been a policy cipher all his public life. The person to understand is Paul Ryan.”
Seems a reasonable thesis… as far as such things go.
The parts that are “unfavorable” or “difficult” for Ryan simply involve the discussion of his home town(irish mafia?), with a local focus on stimulus vs. his philosophical stance on earmarks. The allegation is that he let his constituents down in service to his vision of the national interest. i.e. he probably could have found earmarks to keep the GM plant open.
Kate: “Would that such writers as Lizza could be embarrassed by something as simple as the truth.”
Can you identify a sentence in the Lizza article, that is a lie(you have the entire bio-profile to scan)?
My choice for likely candidate: “It simply took money from one part of the budget and spent it on private accounts, at a cost of two trillion dollars in transition expenses.”
While in the bio/profile Lizza mentions Obama’s “you didn’t make that” comments (the article really is that broad brush), what is clear is that Lizza did not run the numbers for this estimate.
In any case some of the biggest “Hokum” in all of economics involves taking estimates and reporting them as objective or hard numbers. Because I happen to know that a transition expense is always an estimate (and boy do they often times differ wildly) in terms of policy I am most interested in having this explained.
It is a simple question: What is a transition expense, and how was it calculated?
(I happen to have an idea on both)
If Lizza is writting this article then we are talking policy. Otherwise it seems to me Lizza is just puffing politics.
August 1st, 2012 | 9:32 pm
John the magazine profile runs a little over 6,000 words. Presumably enough room to mention the revisions Ryan made to his budget regarding Medicare since he found room to mention the revisions to Social Security and Medicaid. Slip his mind did it?
“The reasoning for the bio/profile is the jurisdictional hook of gaming what a republican victory would mean.” So presumably he might want to mention that Ryan and Obama currently propose to spend the same amount on Medicare. That would give us some idea of what Republican policy might look like. Lizza might also have mentioned that Ryan proposes to devote over 20% of annual GDP to federal government spending (over the next 20 years) when he writes that Ryan and House Republicans want to “starve” the federal government. That doesn’t mean you have to support either premium support Medicare or Ryan’s preferred spending level. I would probably want somewhat more spending coupled with Social Security reform that, in the out years, freed up some spending from entitlements to other things. Or you can leave out that sort of context to make Ryan’s proposals seem maximally scary. Not lying, but short of “gaming what a republican victory would mean.”
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