Is printing right wing lies under the guise of journalism bad? A New York Times roundtable discussion

Just kidding kids — we’re not going to discuss that, we’re just going to do it! (Gift link in the interest of science).

Late this summer, I left my home in New York City to talk to dozens of working-class people in the South, the Midwest and the West. I had no agenda except to hear what they were saying and try to understand the world from their point of view. I interviewed hairdressers and retired sawmill workers, bakers, truck drivers, laundromat managers, pit barbecue cooks, casino card dealers and even a former professional rodeo rider.

The most common term people used to describe the economy was “horrible.” A close second was, “It sucks.”

I talked to men and women, white people, Black people, Latinos, Asians and Native Americans. They looked different, but they sounded the same. Everyone wanted better material conditions for themselves and their families, and everyone was struggling to obtain them. Some didn’t want to talk about politics. Others felt so ignored by politicians that they have disengaged from the process altogether. Everyone who offered an opinion was for Mr. Trump.

The author of this thing is a 60ish (Dartmouth, summa cum laude 1985) money manager, who was a journalist 30 years ago, and who presents himself in the lede of the piece as an “anti-Trumper,” who considers the election “a reckoning for American democracy.” I have my doubts because the piece is either a pack of the most egregious possible lies, or an exercise in total journalistic incompetence on the part of the author and its editors, if any. (Seriously I’ve written several op-eds for the NYT and all of them have been fact checked quite thoroughly, so I really have no idea what’s going on here).

Before getting to that, I’ll just note that it’s passing strange that Mr. Anti-Trumper spoke to dozens of “working” — this means low-wage, a curious locution that deserves it’s own post — people, and he couldn’t find a single Harris supporter among them (In 2020 Biden won voters making less than $50K by 11 points, and those making between $50K and $100K by 15. People making more than $100K went for Trump by 12 points).

Now onto the “facts” in this bit of Trump propaganda disguised as journalism:

If the nation is a body politic, then working people are the nerve endings that feel its economic spasms most acutely. While some of their reaction is the result of chronic, decades-long conditions, the most noticeable pains have presented themselves in the past few years. The worst inflation and the fastest rise in interest rates since the early 1980s — to well-off people, these are headlines. To working people, they are fundamental challenges to their daily lives. Working people worry much more about payday than they do Jan. 6.

The thesis of the piece is straightforward: Trump is doing so well among low-wage workers because inflation has hit them particularly hard, relative to the “well off” (Like a money manager who lives in Manhattan with his wife, an artist).

The rest of the piece is a bunch of vignettes in which “working people” talk about how great things were under Trump and how terrible they are now for people like them, meaning again low-wage workers.

Before his factory job, George worked at his local Kroger, so he is something of an expert on food prices. “I went there today for a pound of hamburger,” he says. “It used to be $2.50 at the most, now the cheapest is $4 when it’s on sale. Generic bread, you used to get it for 99 cents, now it’s $2. You might say that’s only two bucks, but it’s two bucks a week, that’s eight bucks a month.”

As a teenager, George was “a huge fan” of Bill Clinton. But he voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 and this fall, he enthusiastically plans to do so again.

“I don’t agree with everything Trump says, but I don’t care what he says,” George explains. “I care about his policies and what happens. The economy was great under Trump.”

“Where do you want me to start?” Ms. Williams says when I ask her about the economy. “The food, the gas — I just think it sucks.”

Ms. Williams is undecided whom to vote for. Reserved and soft-spoken on most issues, she is even more diffident when discussing this one. As a Black woman, she is astonished that she’s even considering Mr. Trump. But she felt much more economically secure from 2016 to 2020. “When Trump was president,” she says, “those were some of the best times we had.”

My personal favorite is the daughter of Mexican migrant workers who now owns a purportedly struggling small business with her husband:

She remembers her parents speaking favorably of Bill and Hillary Clinton but she was apolitical until last year, when, at her husband’s urging, she registered to vote so they could each pull the lever for Mr. Trump.

“We need to take action,” she recalls her husband saying, and she agrees. “The economy, the bills, the food costs, our taxes, the cost when you’re purchasing a car,” she said. “Something’s got to change.”

“I don’t like the guy personally, but I like him professionally,” she said of Mr. Trump. “He definitely has a finance brain on him.”

At no point in the piece does Adam Seessel’s summa cum laude Ivy League degree (OK Dartmouth but still) lead our contemporary Tocqueville to ask himself or more important the readers of the nation’s most prominent op ed page whether any of the beliefs he is transcribing have any correlation whatsoever with economic reality.

The answer is that they very much do have such a correlation, and it’s a perfectly inverse one:

Wages rose much faster for America’s lowest-paid workers than for their better-paid colleagues between 2019 and 2023, a new report says, a striking reversal after four decades of widening wage inequality.

Hourly pay rose by 12.1% in those years for low-wage Americans, from $12.06 to $13.52, boosted by policy decisions that aided those workers during the pandemic, according to a report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

In the same span, hourly wages grew by 0.9% for the highest earners, from $57.30 to $57.84.

The study compared wages across incomes, adjusting for inflation. It found the highest growth among workers in the 10th percentile for income, meaning that nine-tenths of workers earned more. The slowest wage growth came at the high end of the pay scale, represented by workers in the 90th percentile for earnings.

Graph:

These figures are inflation-adjusted. Low wage workers are doing MUCH better under Biden than they did under Trump. Indeed this is true for wage earners as a whole, although it’s most true about exactly the cohort that Seessel is interviewing. These data show that median real wages have been uniformly higher during the last three years of Biden’s presidency than they were during the first three years of Trump’s. Wages were temporarily higher during the last year of Trump’s and the first year of Biden’s presidencies because of the enormous upward wage pressure created by the pandemic.

I get that peoples’ perceptions of economic reality, especially in regard to the relationship between real wages and real prices, is often wildly inaccurate. But, to paraphrase Don Draper, THAT’S WHAT THE JOURNALISM’S FOR.

I have no idea if Seessel is a crypto-Trumper who is knowingly printing outrageous lies in the newspaper of record as part of a covert propaganda campaign, or if he’s just really terrible at the journalism that used to be his career before he transformed himself into a highly compensated courtier to the plutocracy. And I really don’t care, because the more salient question is why the NYT is allowing this kind of thing to get past its editors (Again I’ve always had to back up every statistical assertion I’ve made in those pages with specific citations.)

12 days.