Journamalism: Paul Krugman complains about Jonathan Weisman:

Paul Krugman: “Bothsidesing, With a Republican Slant: Here We Go Again": ‘Election results don’t change the facts…. I found a lot to agree with in Jonathan Weisman’s big oiece <nytimes.com/2025/01/04/… on how Democrats lost the working class, although he barely mentions the extent to which Republicans have followed anti-worker policies, including attempts to privatize Social Security and kill the Affordable Care Act…. Biden, however, was the most pro-worker president we’ve had in generations, only to find his political prospects dimmed by inflation. So whose fault was that?

Well, if you ask me, readers deserve more than this: “Democrats said the president was the political victim of a global trend emerging from the pandemic. Republicans pointed to his policies, and one piece of legislation in particular, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, saying it poured gasoline on the smoldering embers of post-pandemic inflation…”bOK, Democrats say one thing, Republicans say another. Views differ on shape of planet. But what are the facts? Shouldn’t readers at least be told that cumulative inflation since the start of the pandemic has been pretty much the same in all advanced countries, which sure seems to support the Democratic narrative that Biden’s policies weren’t responsible?…

You can still find ways to blame the A.R.P… claim that Europe was more vulnerable to the Putin shock… so we should have had less inflation, and the fact that we didn’t can be attributed to excess stimulus. But that… doesn’t work numerically…. The raw fact is that America didn’t have higher inflation than other advanced economies — yet Weisman not only doesn’t tell readers that, he slants the narrative by giving the last word to a Republican asserting that it was all Biden’s fault… <paulkrugman.substack.co…>

My view is that Congress and the President make fiscal policy, and the Federal Reserve makes monetary policy, but the Federal Reserve works inside the fiscal-policy decision loop and thus can—if it wishes—alter monetary policy to neutralize the expected effects of fiscal policy on aggregate demand. Thus it makes sense to say that the President and Congress choose the budget deficit and then the Federal Reserve chooses from the menu of aggregate demand level-interest rate level pairs that choice of budget deficit offers it. Thus the Federal Reserve is rightly given responsibility for choosing among feasible combinations of unemployment and inflation. And it never made sense to blame the ARP for inflation—it was the Federal Reserve’s decision to risk inflation in order to decrease the risks of a return to secular stagnation.

And I still think that, technocratically, that was the right decision for the Feb to have made. But I find myself in a very small minority here.

As for the “US inflation ought to have been lower than Europe’s, and the ARP kept that from being so”, note that the Fed raised interest rates faster and higher than the ECB even though the Putin Ukraine invasion shock was arguably less—the ARP did not at all constrain the Fed in its inflation-fighting stance.

And as for Weisman: Back when I interacted with him, other reporters at other newspapers on his beat would tell me “he was a journalism major; he doesn’t understand the issues, and has no idea which of his sources are credible; but he’s smart: he will learn”.

But my assessment was that he learned something different. What he learned was that he needed to make sure that he learned as little as possible about the actual substance, because if he did learn about the substance he would have to ask hard questions and so piss off his sources and it would be more difficult to write his stories. Hence what he learned—and this is still true—that his job was to please his sources rather than inform his readers. When you read a Weisman article, think always “this is what his sources want me to believe” rather than “this is how it is”. If you read him with that frame, his work can be useful. But not if you take Weisman as working for you and to inform you.