North Carolina’s budget, like several other states, passed by its fiscal year-end deadline of July 1, 2003.
This spring 46 state legislatures, faced with significant shortfalls caused by inaccurate revenue projections and excessive spending, had to produce new balanced budgets by June 30. Several governing bodies saw conflict between politicians who demanded budget cuts and those who wanted tax increases. The friction served as fodder for media stories about state budget woes.
A Media Research Center analysis found that the nation’s broadcast networks and largest circulation newspapers for the most part failed to recognize that overspending in the 1990s caused state budget problems. The MRC, a conservative media watchdog organization based in Alexandria, Va., said that instead news organizations emphasized the states’ plight that resulted from an economic downturn. Reporters often stressed the states’ needs for more money and that governments would likely have to resort to “draconian cuts.”
As far back as Jan. 8 of this year the major media reported the financial difficulties faced by state lawmakers, yet most failed to mention the problem was of the politicians’ own making. In a Jan. 9 daily “Cyberalert,” MRC reported that ABC’s “World News Tonight” featured a segment in which reporter Betsy Stark “cite(d) anecdotal examples of the awful things states are doing to save money, such as letting prisoners go free and closing health clinics.”
The ABC report also focused on how President George Bush’s tax cut stimulus plan would affect states.
“…state governors were hoping the president’s plan would deliver some much-needed fiscal first aid,” Stark reported. “They got none.”
MRC noted that the report featured only one “expert,” Iris Lav from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who criticized Bush’s plan. The watchdog group said ABC failed to identify Lav’s organization as liberal.
“You could think in a $674 billion plan that’s going to greatly increase the federal deficit there could be something in there to help states prevent the budget cuts and tax increases that will contract the economy,” Lav said in the segment.
At the same time, MRC said ABC ignored the Cato Institute’s “Fiscal Report Card on America’s Governors” from Sept. 2002, which reported that state general fund spending between 1996 and 2001 rose 39 percent.
MRC also noted that Stark’s report piggybacked on a similar story featured in the New York Times the same day – which also cited Lav as an expert, and failed to mention states’ spending sprees in the 1990s.
Déjà vu struck in late April, only this time the MRC was able to compare another incomplete report on state budgets from the New York Times with a story from USA Today. On April 26 the Times emphasized states’ woes based on a report from the National Conference of State Legislatures, without considering what caused their problems in the first place.
“The report’s findings reflect what many analysts say is the states’ worst financial predicament in more than 50 years,” the Times reported. “Mounting deficits for two years have eviscerated a number of critical programs and prompted even some Republican governors to support tax increases…”
The MRC contrasted the Times article with one a day earlier from USA Today, which reported, “State and local governments are spending a record amount of the nation’s wealth at the same time they’re warning that a sour economy is forcing cuts in key programs.
“A USA Today analysis found that state and local spending consumed 15.2 percent of U.S. personal income last year. That’s the highest level since record-keeping began in 1929.”
“One set of facts,” reported the MRC, “two conflicting spins.”
MRC also noted another case of ABC overlooking excessive state spending in the 1990s.
“…States from Maine to Hawaii are in crisis,” reported Diane Sawyer on the April 24 edition of “Good Morning America.” She said that states were “facing 100 billion dollars in red ink, having to cut services.”
MRC reported on May 13 that two more news organizations, as well as ABC again on May 12, adopted the states’ “starving for money” mantra.
“(ABC World News Tonight’s Terry) Moran cited states which have raised taxes,” MRC reported, “and then (ABC’s) Judy Muller listed cuts in California to lifeguards and abused children, all without pointing out how spending in the specific states cited rose much faster in the 1990s than inflation and population growth.”
MRC continued: “In a similar vacuum, on [the May 11] “Face the Nation” (on CBS), Bob Schieffer asserted that states are ‘starved for money’ and Time magazine’s Karen Tumulty fretted about ‘how libraries are closing, teachers are getting laid off. (California Gov.) Gray Davis is in the position of having to decide whether he should deny prosthetic limbs to poor people.’”
In the same “Cyberalert,” MRC cited another Cato Institute study which found that between 1990 and 2001 state tax revenue grew 86 percent – more than the 55 percent of inflation plus population growth.
Now, as the deadline for passing a budget has passed, news organizations (other than USA Today) are still oblivious to the states’ profligate spending that caused their current predicaments. On June 30 The Washington Post reported that the shortfalls are “largely the result of the national economic downturn.” “CBS Evening News” echoed the Post’s incomplete account on the same night.
Paul Chesser is associate editor of Carolina Journal.