Labor And Media Lies
By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Elections — Comments (10) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
(Cross-posted--with some modifications--at Pejmanesque.)
Kudos to Angry Red for this excellent post. I just want to add something to his analysis.
It is telling that the story that prompted Angry Red's post has the Heritage Foundation--which was labeled "[t]he conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation"--as the only source backing up the Labor Department's arguments. Meanwhile, the Economic Policy Institute, which accused the Bush Administration of failing to protect overtime pay, was described as an institute "which studies issues affecting middle- and lower-income workers and receives funding from some labor groups."
You just have to love it. They don't even try to be subtle in writing the story. The Heritage Foundation is "conservative" and therefore the implicit assumption is raised that they are biased in defending a Republican Administration. But the EPI's ideological inclinations are never discussed.
Well, here is the EPI's home page. If you check it out, you see that they make all kinds of arguments from increasing the minimum wage, to increasing the corporate income tax, to having more money spent on education (as opposed to, say, promoting educational choice in a country that already spends more per capita for education than any other country on earth)--all of which demonstrate a clear left-of-center agenda. There's nothing wrong with being left-of-center, but it is noteworthy that CNN didn't refer to EPI as "the liberal Economic Policy Institute," isn't it?
Indeed, one need only look here to find out who staffs the EPI:
EPI was founded by a group of economic policy experts that includes Jeff Faux, EPI's first president; economist Barry Bluestone of Northeastern University; Robert Kuttner, columnist for Business Week and Newsweek and editor of The American Prospect; Ray Marshall, former U.S. secretary of labor and professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas-Austin; Robert Reich, former U.S. secretary of labor and professor at Brandeis University; and economist Lester Thurow of the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Not many conservatives or libertarians there, eh? Here, by the way, is another person who works at the EPI. I imagine that he feels quite at home.
So in sum, we have a story that botches the issue of overtime pay, presents one ideological actor as a clear ideologue, and muddles up the ideological nature of another actor. The latter actor, is presented as an entirely fair-minded source for information about the Labor Department's policies regarding overtime pay.
Makes you have a great deal of confidence in the media, no?
UPDATE: A response to Kevin Drum can be found here.
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Is that it pervaded the entire story.
I'm not sure if you can file this under bias. The genesis of the story is the report issued by the EPI. You can't really run this story without stating what that report said. I read the response by both the Dept. of Labour and the Heritage Foundation as an attempt to tell the other side of the story. If they had simply ignored the other side, than this might be a bias case.
I don't understand why you say the story was "botched". Is it merely because it identifies the Heritage Foundation as "conservative?"
Is it because you don't agree with EPI's assessment?
having seen how this administration is willing to lie about the costs involved in legislation (for example, the prescription drug bill), and its willingness to distort labor numbers (the attempt to include fast food workers in the "manufacturing" sector), no responsible media outlet would take anything this administration has to say at face value.
The real issue on this "overtime" thing is how the new rules will be interpreted. And the problem is that this administration has consistently screwed the working man in favor of owners for the last three and a half years, and there is no reason to suspect that it would not use the proposed changes to continue to screw workers.
Bias is there. Pejman listed a bunch of reasons. For example, the figure cited by the EPI has no factual basis, which is not pointed out by the article, yet it is used in the Headline and repeatedly throughout the story. The EPI states that "we have been unable to determine the impact of many of the changes with any precision" and congressional hearings have discredited the assertion the EPI report makes. Why make a story and use as the lead in that story the clearly discredited estimates of basically a liberal think tank?? If you are going to slap an ideological label on the Heritage Foundation then slap one on EPI as well.
Further if you read the piece Pejman links to these new rules are explicity in favor of the "working man" and shut out the "owners".
It seems fairly obvious, when you say not to "take anything this administration has to say at face value" & "this administration has consistently screwed the working man", that you're pretty hardened in your point of view so I'm not surpised you don't see the bias here.
Bias is there. Pejman listed a bunch of reasons.
if there is bias anywhere, its in Pejman's distorted view of the EPI study.
he writes:
But the EPI's figure of 6 million people losing the right to OT pay has no factual basis. It is a just an estimate by the EPI and further the EPI itself states that it has "been unable to determine the impact of many of the changes with any precision."
In fact, there is a factual basis to the EPI claims. it is based on the Labor departments own numbers, and the proposed rules.
Moreover, Perjman engages in egregious distortion of what EPI wrote. Here is the QUOTE IN CONTEXT in which the EPI says that it can't "determine the impact of many of the changes with any precision."
Altogether, we estimate that nearly six million employees will lose their right to overtime pay on the basis of just 10 of the many changes the final rule makes in these critical regulations. The total effect of the new regulation is undoubtedly greater, but we have been unable to determine the impact of many of the changes with any precision. The broad new exemption of employees in the financial services industry, for example, combined with the elimination of the provision in current law that protects the overtime rights of "line" or production workers, might affect hundreds of thousands of additional employees, but we have not been able to make a reliable estimate of these numbers. The final rule also greatly expands the exemption of "outside sales employees," creates a new exemption for athletic trainers, and weakens the overtime rights of tens of thousands of editors, reporters, and journalists "performing on the air in radio, television, or other electronic media."
in other words, the precise impact of changes affecting certain workers cannot be calculated, but the number of people effected will be "undoubtedly greater".
Contrast that with the completely out of context quote provided by your "source"....
....and then get back to me about "bias"
And you will see that I didn't write any of this. Angry Red did. Take up your argument with him and at the very least, identify your interlocutor with some degree of accuracy.
Ok the quote was not out of context but displayed exactly as CNN themselves displayed it in their story. And it serves to prove a point, which CNN fails to make. This point you further help to make when you write "in other words, the precise impact of changes affecting certain workers cannot be calculated." Since it can't be calculated, obviously there is no factual basis for the 6 million number in the EPI report. This seems pretty lucid to me.
The only reason the EPI is getting such a large number is because they are counting those employees who might but never do receive OT pay.
"The (EPI) study includes in its calculations at least 18 percent of the workforce who work 35 hours or less a week. These workers by virtue of their part time status do not work more than 40 hours, and thus do not receive overtime pay. The study rests on the premise that the right to overtime and working overtime are synonymous. In fact, the vast majority of hourly workers do not work overtime. Those that do − about 20 percent − tend to work overtime week after week and are in jobs that are clearly hourly under the proposed regulations."
To include those who never would get OT pay (and thus do not RELY on OT pay to make ends meet) is what vastly inflates their estimate to the 6 million figure. Further:
"Employees are only exempt under the proposed regulations if they meet the duties test. The study assumes that all workers in a particular occupational category are exempt, e.g., cooks, when only a few in that occupational category would, in fact, meet the duties test."
The EPI is wildly over-estimating exactly who will no longer get OT pay while the Dept of Labor gives a more realistic estimate based on who actually gets OT now. This is a clear and obvious point of distinction that was not made in the CNN article. What makes this more than just a simple unintentional error is the fact that the ideological intentions of the EPI are not discussed but those that disagree with EPI are. The 6 million figure is not discussed as a "liberal" figure, but the admin's 644,000 figure is discussed as a "conservative" figure. This is bias.
Over 400,000 people have telephones for the first time in 30 years. Don't believe for one second that these people do not want us there.
I have not been able to visit all of you who did not believe the media. They have done a very poor job of covering everything that has happened. I am sorry that I have met many, many people from Iraq that want us there, and in a bad way. They say they will never see the freedoms we talk about but they hope their children will. We are doing a good job in Iraq recently: (Please share it with your friends and
compare it to the version that your paper is producing.)
The subhead of the article says "Labor-backed group says new revisions to work rules will still mean lost overtime for millions."
Note the "labor-backed group." I think that's fairly clear; you'd expect a labor-backed group to be biased towards, well, labor.