Did They Use Invisible Ink?

Trevor Bothwell of the Right Report points to this ad by the CATO Institute. It is a succinct statement in support of offering privatized Social Security accounts, and it's signed by over 450 economists. Yet it has received practically no media coverage, something that the signatories to Historians in Defense of the Constitution didn't have to worry about.

Trevor links to this site, sponsored by Social Security Choice, which lists the institutional affiliations of each signatory (CATO lists names alone) and asks a very good question:

Would it be newsworthy if 450 climatologists signed a joint petition saying that the ozone layer was being depleted? Or, to stay on point, would it be newsworthy if 450 economists jointly agreed that President Bush was WRONG to endorse personal accounts? Would the liberal media report it then? Of course they would. They would report the story even if 450 Hollywood actors agreed that personal accounts were wrong, and they aren’t even experts.

Let me suggest that the ongoing controversy over Newsweek's recantation of their Koran-abuse story is directly related to this omission. In spite of tremendous advances in the conservative and libertarian media over the past few years, the MSM continues to treat as heretics, if not nonentities, anyone who strays from the enlightened path as defined by coastal elites. Compare the silent treatment accorded the economists to what the signatories of Historians in Defense of the Constitution enjoyed back in 1998.

On the Friday before the national election, over 400 historians signed a letter, published as a full-page ad in the New York Times at the cost of $55,000, that opposed the impeachment of President Clinton. The ad received tremendous media coverage, including this page A4 story in the Washington Post (with the subtle title, "400 Historians Denounce Impeachment"). The organizers of the ad included, so it seemed initially, Sean Wilentz of Princeton and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

Granted, the impeachment of a president is huge news, and it's not shocking that their ad gained the eye of a sympathetic press. But what the ad and its spokesmen, including Prof. Wilentz and Mr. Schlesinger, forgot to mention was that, far from being the impassioned plea of concerned scholars, it was in fact organized and paid for by People for the American Way, a left-liberal nonprofit organization. The American Enterprise Magazine uncovered this fact in their January, 1999 issue:

Academics have been acting like political hacks for decades (though a big lobbying effort four days before a national election is an especially crass example of this). But the resulting news stories missed one aspect of the affair: the invaluable assistance these "historians speaking as historians"--as one organizer put it--received from People for the American Way (PAW), a left-wing activist group that was simultaneously flooding the nation's airwaves with ads supporting the President's re-election.

Though the historians neglected to mention it in their ad, or in their press releases, or at their press conference, they were only able to publish their Times ad because PAW's tax-exempt foundation purchased it for them and served as the receiver for the donations that paid for it. The mailing address given in the historians' ad is actually the Washington office of PAW, though nobody in the major media seems to have bothered to discover this. Somehow we suspect that if 400 non-liberal scholars took out such an ad and listed an address that in fact belonged to, say, the Christian Coalition, the information might come out in news stories.

In hindsight, it might be more accurate to say that, if over 400 conservative and libertarian economists sent out a press release backing a conservative president's reform on Social Security, they wouldn't get noticed at all unless some scandal could be uncovered that would serve, in the hands of partisan reporters, to undermine the economists' stated positions. Search Google News for "Social Security choice economists" and you'll get exactly one return: the original CATO press release of May 12.

Bloggers have pushed the FEC to keep their regulatory noses out of our business, and rightly so, but we've paid considerably less attention to the SS debate. Let's at least ensure that the 10% of Americans who regularly read blogs know about this key issue, as it will certainly dominate the news down the road, when many of us are ready to retire. Once again, we need to do our part in spreading the word about stories the MSM chooses to ignore.