In a report meant to cover Uncle Sam's release of June's Monthly Treasury Statement, Associated Press reporter Martin Crutsinger went well beyond the wire service's normally lazy, slanted reporting in this area.
In his report's apparent final incarnation early Tuesday morning, the AP writer:
- Told us the amount of June's deficit ($94.3 billion), but didn't disclose the figures for June's receipts ($215.4 billion) or "outlays" ($309.7 billion), or how they compared to June of last year. In doing so, he "succeeded" in concealing the accelerating decline in tax collections.
- Didn't tell us that the past month's deficit is by far the worst June ever.
- "Forgot," as he did in May, to tell readers that the deficit would be hundreds of billions of dollars higher if it weren't for an "accounting change" retroactively put into place by Treasury in April that changed the definition of "outlays."
- Cited the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as contributors to the deficit situation, without identifying any of several other expenditure categories that have been worse offenders by far.
- Found an economist, without dissent, to support the claim that what the Obama administration has done had to be done.
And that doesn't even count Crutsinger's Krugmanesque rewrites of the history of the 1930s Depression era and 1990s Japan (to be covered in Part 2 tomorrow), or the apparatchik-like tone present in a few of his paragraphs.
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