Writing for FAIR, Conor Smyth argues that the Washington Post has erred in its recent coverage of European social spending. In an article this month titled “Europe’s High Quality of Life Is Getting Hard to Afford. Just Ask France,” the Post argues that Europe needs to embrace cuts.
CONOR SMYTH; [email protected]
Smyth is a graduate student of economics at John Jay College and co-host of the History Onion podcast.
Smyth writes that mainstream media outlets “parrot tropes about reckless European spending and the mathematical impossibility of it continuing”––but both France and Germany have the capacity to afford increased social spending through higher taxes. The Post’s message, Smyth writes, is “directly in line with [the interests of the paper’s billionaire owner Jeff Bezos]: The European welfare state must die, even if that means a turn to the far right in Europe.” Smyth suggests that Jeff Bezos’s ownership has led to an “injection of pro-wealthy bias” not only in the opinion section of the paper but also the news section.
Smyth told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “The goal here is to help inform people: first, about the bias at the Post and how much they’re being misled by this kind of coverage, and second, about the relevant statistics they should be aware of that paint a much clearer picture of what’s actually going on with social spending in Europe, and how sustainable it is.
“I wrote a piece a few years back about pension reform in France, and the poor coverage of that policy. At the time, the editorial boards of different outlets were advocating for pension reform and making the misleading case that the math dictated France had to raise the retirement age to shore up finances. When corporate outlets like the Washington Post talk about government budgets and welfare states in European countries, they perpetually present the welfare state as unsustainable using very sloppy arguments…
“I’m trying to offer readers data that is not being mentioned in corporate media articles. There is one key data point that, once you look at it, makes the Post’s narrative fall apart. What you need to look at is government revenue as a percentage of GDP. That gives a sense of how much revenue a government could raise: how much of the overall output of the economy in a given year is being captured as public revenue. When you look at how much France is spending versus how much revenue it’s bringing in as a percentage of GDP, France’s deficit is about 5-6 percent. That gap could be filled with increased revenue. There is plenty of room to increase revenue.”
Smyth also notes that accurate, informative coverage of budget debates in Europe is especially important right now, given the far right’s rise in Europe. “The Post is implicitly advocating for continuing along a centrist path in terms of government deficits and budgets––the same path that has helped fuel the far-right surge over the past decade. This kind of reporting helps the far right.
“With Jeff Bezos taking a more active role in guiding the Post toward the political right, we should expect more of this sort of coverage. The opinion section has clearly been affected by Bezos’s increased involvement with the paper. But I’ve been surprised by how extreme even the reporting has become.”