With Washington Post reporters, you never know what they are thinking. Is Fletcher omitting the relative scale measures because he knows that readers will conclude that he is really stupid if he writes “Bush has dramatically increased aid to Africa from $2 to $6 per African per year” and the purpose of his article is to please his sources inside the White House? Or is Fletcher omitting the relative scale measures because he genuinely has never bothered to learn anything either about the relative size of aid to Africa in what the federal government does or about the relative importance of U.S. aid in the context of Africa’s development and economy and so is easily manipulated by his sources inside the White House? Mendacious? Or lazy and stupid?
Why Oh Why Can’t We Have a Better Press Corps? (Brad DeLong, via Dean Baker)