The Press

NY Times on Job Creation

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The Sunday editorial page of the New York Times has an article titled “Wanted – Leadership on Jobs“. This article describes the current unemployment situation as bleak and requests “leadership” from politicians to arrest this trend. The brief editorial is nine paragraphs long; 8 of them describe the problem, and then the 9th (summary) paragraph includes their recommendations:

If successful, ambitious goals like health care reform and energy legislation may generate jobs, but officials have not persuasively linked them to job growth. Congress and the administration also have not done enough to directly create jobs. That could be done with more stimulus to spur job creation, or a large federal jobs program, or tax credits for hiring, or all three. Or surprise us. Just don’t pretend that the deteriorating jobs picture will self-correct, or act as if it is tolerable.

Often times our debate with the NY Times is presented as a left / right political view issue. However, in this case, the differences are even more profound – the NY Times simply has no idea what the problem set is, so they can’t even fathom a solution.

Job Creation

The first and most profound misunderstanding is that jobs are not “created”. They don’t come about from a fiat by government and can’t be “willed” into existence.

Jobs are a by-product of:

– Either a successful (profitable) business or a business in growth mode
– That has a need for services or labor to meet a business requirement
– That they can profitably sell to a third party, or leverage as part of a broader business venture

The issue of whether or not to hire additional employees is an issue that all of the employers that I have worked with or consulted for over the last two decades have wrestled with continuously. If government or the NY Times wants to increase the number of jobs, they need to peer inside the head of a business executive and work to push the levers that would make them more likely than not to hire. Thus the first and most significant problem with the lack of understanding of the NY Times is that they don’t even frame the problem correctly – if they want to create jobs, they need to think like a business person.

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An Important Qualifier

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Via Instapundit comes a major  (albeit British) media report that the Tea Party protest in Washington turnout could be as high as two million.

As impressive as that no doubt upper-limit estimate is, I think that the raw number leaves out an important qualifier.  To be    truly accurate, the report should say:

Two million people with jobs…

Getting hundreds of thousands of kids, the professionally unemployed  and government workers to show up isn’t that hard (especially if someone buys the bus tickets). Getting two million middle-class, middle-aged people with jobs, careers, children and businesses is way, way more impressive.

We can safely assume that for every individual who made it to the protest that there are dozens of people whose grown-up obligations prevented them from attending.

That thought should keep Obama and Pelosi up at night.

[update (2009-9-13 10:17pm): I should point out that I don’t think anyone really believes that two million people showed up in Washington. One percent of the entire U.S. population is 3 million people so two millions gets you two thirds of the way to one percent of the entire population. I don’t think there is a city in world that could handle that big an influx of people. Washington D.C. itself only has a population for 590,000 so having nearly four times the population of the city show up is really not credible no matter what the senior Democratic leadership thought. On the other hand, having hundreds of thousands of people, most who have never protested before, show up is significant and puts the tea party in the big leagues no matter how you cut it.]

[update (2009-9-13 6:53pm): For unknown reasons, all comments by Hippeprof were deleted from the thread below. This issue is being investigated and we will try to recover the comments. If anyone else saw their comments disappear please email me at the link to the upper right.]

[update (2009-9-13 8:02pm): 20 comments were found to have been removed by the spam filter. We have restored them and I will be cleaning up duplicates and removing the “hey, what happened to my comments?” post in order to keep the thread clean.]

[update (2009-9-12-10:16): The technical problems have resurfaced. Your posts may not show properly. We may have to freeze the comments. If you have an important point to make  you can email at the link to the upper right and I will add your comment to thread manually as time permits.]

The Medium, The Message, & President Micheletti

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Our need for understanding has not disappeared if our appetite for the press has. PJTV may be a new medium; its message: “Honduran President Micheletti on Hugo Chavez, Cocaine & American Media” may be new as well. Accessible, quickly put up, quickly listened to: this is the old way on steroids. But the argument Micheletti makes is simply an old way – to “respect the laws of my country” – that speaks of restraint and proportion. Laws are not uniformly good, of course, but we’ve seen the patterns before and we recognize the threats Micheletti describes. Leaders who want to abrogate laws limiting their own powers are seldom in the right.

Texas is at least well represented by Cornyn. Texans, for all the talk by others of our cowboy ignorance, are aware of our southern border. Note Cornyn’s conclusion, which is gratitude for a medium that even covers Micheletti, even tries to find out what happened. The interview with a representative from our State Department is not designed to make us feel grown ups are in charge, but rather the kind of boozy judgements in a frat on Saturday night – I don’t know much about the details, but I sure know about my position.

Perhaps if Texas could develop its own foreign policy, it might be more sensible – imagine our spot on the map at the end of this report.

An Example For Others

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CNN has announced that they will not renew the contract for reporter Susan Roesgen. (Details here and here.)

Ms. Roesgen became nationally famous after she vigorously argued, on air, with Chicago TEA Party protesters she was in the process of interviewing. She characterized the protests as…

“… anti-government, anti-CNN since this is highly promoted by the right-wing conservative network Fox.”

But it was her smug, superior exchanges with other protesters that really got people riled. Lucky thing Founding Bloggers were there to catch it all on tape.

I wrote to CNN after the story broke, pointing out that Fox had actually fired veteran, award-winning reporter Rebecca Aguilar after the badgering she was giving to a 70-year-old man caused him to break down into tears during an interview. At the time, I openly wondered if Fox was going to prove to be the more ethical cable news channel. With Ms. Roesgen’s firing, CNN has proven that they can at least rise to the same standard set by so-called Conservatives if they strive mightily.

Of course, Fox is being sued by Ms. Aguilar, who claims that the firing was based on racial prejudice. This is not something CNN has to worry about, as Ms. Roesgen is not a racial minority, so they certainly aren’t at much risk. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that CNN has finally done the right thing.

(Hat tip to Glenn.)

A Question That Needs to be Asked

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Most of you are no doubt familiar with the Washington Post salon scandal, where people with very deep pockets were invited to pony up $25,000 USD in order to have a dinner at the house of publisher Katharine Weymouth.

What would you get for that kind of scratch? The movers and shakers at the newspaper would personally introduce you to the movers and shakers at the White House, as well as the reporters who covered them. Pay them cash, and the good folks at the WaPo would create an instant handshake relationship with the very people who are shaping the future of the country, and those who shape public perception of same. If you are a representative from a special interest group, a corporation or lobbyist, this was like sounding the dinner bell at fat camp.

As the article I linked to above points out, this sort of thing is done all the time by newspapers with their foot in the White House press room door. But this time around it was just a bit too blatant to pass the smell test. The wage slaves in the WaPo’s very own bullpen, the ink stained wretches that are never invited to any of the best shindigs because they are “gray people”, screamed bloody murder. No one had asked them, they claimed. HA! Like anyone who spends their days in a newspaper’s board room on the top floor would ask what a reporter thought when bucks were on the line!

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