Previous posts have
discussed the
politics of "sequestration" -- the across the board cuts that will happen as a result of budget deadlock.
The Washington Post reports:
The descriptions of the post-sequester landscape that have been coming out of the Obama Administration have been alarming, specific--and, in at least some cases, hyped.
“There are literally teachers now who are getting pink slips, who are getting notices that they can’t come back this fall,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
The descriptions of the post-sequester landscape that have been coming out of the Obama Administration have been alarming, specific--and, in at least some cases, hyped.
“There are literally teachers now who are getting pink slips, who are getting notices that they can’t come back this fall,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
At
USA Today, Richard Benedetto reports that many media outlets
uncritically accepted Duncan's claim. He adds:
Big national news media are not the only ones quick to fan budget-cutting fears. A front-page headline in the Omaha World Herald warned, "Furloughs would mean pay cuts for thousands at Offutt," a huge Air Force base there. The story included a similar lack of skepticism and was repeated in similarly localized versions all across the country.
Such stories have been commonplace since Obama grimly strode into an auditorium in the White House last week, stood in front of a carefully staged backdrop of uniformed first responders and condemned congressional Republicans for taking a"meat cleaver" approach to budget cuts.
"Are you willing to see a bunch of first responders lose their jobs because you want to protect a special interest tax loophole? Are you willing to have teachers laid off?" he asked.
As Obama expected, his words of woe were broadcast, printed and blogged, warning that these cuts must be avoided at all costs or the world as we know it will end.
Of course the cuts will have an impact on people employed by the government or dependent on government programs. However, journalists must be aware that claims of disaster are a decades-old cliché used by politicians intent on stopping budget cuts as much as by conscientious officials giving the public information it needs to know. Skepticism in the original reports is just as important as follow-up a week later.