media bias

The Myth of Bush the Deregulator

by Ryan Young on May 17, 2010

in Economy, Politics as Usual, Regulation, Sanctimony

Here’s a letter I sent recently to The New York Times:

May 14, 2010

Editor, The New York Times
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10018

To the Editor:

Your May 12 article “With Obama, Regulations Are Back in Fashion” (page A15) asserts that the Bush administration had a “deregulatory agenda.” If that is true, then President Bush failed miserably in executing it.

His administration added 31,634 new regulations to the books, and repealed hardly any. The cost of complying with federal regulations exceeded $1 trillion for the first time on Bush’s watch. 587,321 new pages were added to Federal Register during the Bush years.*

Even the regulation-intensive Obama administration is passing new regulations at a pace nearly ten percent slower than President Bush.

Contrary to the article, the Bush administration was the best friend regulators have had in a generation or more.

Ryan Young
Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Washington, DC

*All data from Wayne Crews, Ten Thousand Commandments.

Funny, That

by Ryan Young on September 23, 2009 · 2 comments

in Environment, Global Warming, International

An article in today’s New York Times laments the difficulty of “building momentum for an international climate treaty at a time when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.”

Media Bias: The More, the Better

by Ryan Young on August 12, 2009

in Culture, Odds & Ends

David Boaz makes an excellent point about media coverage of President Obama’s health care proposal:

The media tendency to refer to the defeat of a big-government scheme as “failure” reflects a possibly unconscious bias toward government action.

Well put. Why not make it conscious, then? Call it truth in advertising.

An objective media would be nice. But we are unlikely to ever see such a thing. Even the very best reporters are human. And humans are biased. Different people are biased in different ways, of course. But objectivity is still a fiction. Being open about this ugly truth could do much to reduce public confusion.

If readers have a clearer idea of what exactly they’re reading, they can run the articles through their liberal and conservative B.S. filters as needed, and more easily get to the heart of the matter.

Few readers seem to bother so long as the liberal Washington Post and conservative Washington Times continue with their objectivity charades. Bias can be harmful and misleading, true. But denying it only avoids the problem. Let’s tackle it instead.