The Treasury Secretary is ubiquitous on Tax Day:
- ABC This Week: Timothy Geithner.
- NBC Meet the Press: Timothy Geithner; Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.
- CBS Face the Nation: Timothy Geithner; Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
- CNN State of the Union: Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee; Reps. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash.
- Fox News Sunday: Ed Gillespie, adviser to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney; David Axelrod, adviser to President Obama’s re-election campaign.
UPDATE: Kool-Aid? Anybody want some Kool-Aid?
President Obama’s economic policies “were incredibly effective,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Sunday, crediting the president with having prevented a depression.
While admitting it is “still a very tough economy out there,” Geithner said the administration is “making a lot of progress” and said “the broad indicators are pretty encouraging.”
Interviewed on ABC’s This Week, Geithner was asked by host George Stephanopoulos about the gloomy forecasts from economists such as New York University professor Nouriel Roubini, who called the current recovery “anemic, subpar, below trend, below potential.”
Geithner suggested Obama could not be blamed for that, saying “if he’d had more support from his opponents in Congress, then we could have got more things passed that would have put more people back to work more quickly.” . . .
Read the whole thing at The American Spectator, which I hope citizen-journalists will study as a lesson in Neutral Objective Journalism. One of the basic jobs of a D.C. political reporter is the Sunday show round-up: What did the “newsmakers” (government officials, party leaders, candidates, etc.) say on the Sunday shows?
If you can do nothing else from the comfort of home, you can always report What People Say on TV. The key to doing that effectively, however, is to write it as straight news: “Joe Friday, Just-the-Facts-Ma’am” is a style that anyone can learn by study and practice. Repress your bloggerly temptation to snark it up, resist any urge you might have toward sensationalism, and just tell it straight. Identify the key quotes and facts and assemble them into the kind of basic reporting that wire services do.
When doing a Sunday show roundup, you generally want to work pretty quick: If your version isn’t online by noon or 1 p.m. Eastern, you might as well not bother. But on other occasions and with other kinds of What People Say on TV stories, you may have time — if you think nobody else saw the significance of the interview, news story or C-SPAN segment you saw — to fill in the background from other sources.
Some may ask, “Where’s the value-added? Anybody can see what people say on TV. Why should I do my own version of the story? Why not just link the Associated Press or Politico story and add my own caustic ideological sarcasm?” I reply that the way other sources assemble the quotes and facts — the way they do Neutral Objective Journalism — inevitably introduces a certain angle or bias to the story.
You will discover, if you try your hand at writing the What People Say on TV story, that there is no such thing as neutrality, no matter how straightforward and factual your account may be. Other than transcripts, every news story on a subject of political controversy (and what Tim Geithner said Sunday was obviously such a case) includes elements of selection and emphasis that amount to a slant. Continue reading Turbo-Tax Tim Does 3 Sunday Shows UPDATE: Geithner Praises Obama’s ‘Incredibly Effective’ Economic Policies →
