For any of you who read this site, Luskin versus Krugman was hardly news (if anything, the only "news" about the story in The New Yorker was that this blog-centric matter had risen to a level at which it was deemed important enough to be covered by a mainstream mag). But for the general public, this was the first they'd heard of my long-running campaign to expose Krugman as a serial liar, and how he has attempted to fight back by smearing me with false accusations that I "stalked" him "personally." Two weeks is about how long it takes for The New Yorker to make it to the top of the magazine pile in most people's bathrooms, so I'm just now beginning to get reactions from non-combatants in my circle here in Silicon Valley.

The reactions are falling in predictable ways into four quadrants in a two-by-two matrix, defined by whether one knows me well or not, and by whether one is liberal or conservative. As you'd expect, the three quadrants occupied by conservatives and people who know me well (whether liberal or conservative) have reacted well, with anything from "atta-boy -- go get 'em, tiger -- sue the bastard" to "well, the article didn't make you seem like too much of a lunatic -- you dodged a bullet." But the people in that fourth quadrant -- those who both don't know me well and are liberal -- have reacted just as Paul Krugman no doubt hoped they would: venomously.

It's made worse by the fact that when one is written about in the press, it seems that people no longer feel bound by common rules of civility in their dealings with the newly minted "celebrity" -- it's as though one is no longer a person, but rather a symbol, so normal social bounds don't apply. Yesterday a family member was accosted in the grocery store by a woman we have known peripherally for several years. "I saw the story about Don in The New Yorker. Oh my God, how can you stand to show your face! I mean, I just love Paul Krugaman," she said, demonstrating her love for the professor by inventing an extra syllable in his surname. "I just hope that none of your friends read The New Yorker!"

Well, what does one say to such a person? One rarely has the presence of mind to say the most truthful and relevant thing: "Whatever your private opinion, you are being unspeakably rude." And one doesn't wish to simply be rude back: "Oh yeah? When's the last time there was an article about you in The New Yorker?" So one tends, naturally, to stare in disbelief, wait until the venom is spent, and then move on to the frozen food section.

Now what about The New Yorker article itself, viewed from the perspective of two weeks later? My first reaction was to be amazed at how balanced it is, considering The New Yorker's strongly liberal bias in political and economic matters, and its generally fawning coverage of Krugman and his ideas (to the point of plagiarism in one case). But... in the fullness of time, I now see that my first take was just a version of "whew -- it could have been worse." The reality is that the article is subtly and deceptively shaded in order to make my face-to-face meeting with Krugman more colorful than it really was, and to make my work debunking Krugman's lies, errors and distortions less substantive than it really is. And worst of all, the story deliberately covers up Krugman's continuing smear campaign against me, using The New Yorker reporter himself as a pawn.

First, the article includes "facts" that are outright fabrications by the author, Ben McGrath. In the article's opening paragraphs McGrath sets the scene of the meeting after Krugman's lecture in San Diego. He describes me waiting in line to have Krugman autograph my copy of his book, The Great Unraveling:

"The line inched forward, and, after a time, a member of the audience, carrying a camcorder to record the event for posterity, stepped up and asked Krugman to personalize his inscription."

McGrath knew from my own writings about the event that I had a camcorder with me in the lecture hall. But the statement that I approached Krugman personally "carrying a camcorder to record the event" is utter fiction. I didn't even have the camcorder on my person at that time. Yet McGrath paints a picture of me doing something that would be very aggressive and intimidating -- which I did not do -- that is, walk up to Krugman with a running camcorder held up to my eye.

Shortly after, McGrath describes what I said to Krugman before leaving:

"'Now, you keep up the good work, Paul,' Luskin said, grinning."

That I was grinning is a complete fabrication by McGrath. I was not grinning. And I didn't tell McGrath I was grinning, when he interviewed me. And in my writings on the event, all I said was that "I walked away, with my skin crawling." Just the opposite of grinning. McGrath just imagined it -- and wrote it.

After the article was published, I talked to McGrath about these fabrications -- the false "facts" that failed to be even questioned in The New Yorker's famously extensive fact-checking process. McGrath is a very nice man who was sincerely trying his best to be fair -- and he was appropriately embarrassed to be confronted with these inaccuracies. His explanation was, in essence, that these were plausible inferences made in order to set the scene. Plausible, perhaps -- but nevertheless utterly false. And "the scene" that these inferences "set" was strongly colored by these details -- a color that was simply not truthful. But McGrath, apparently, had his "scene" all "set" in his mind, and that's what he decided to write, facts or no facts.

Now I certainly don't expect The New Yorker to run a correction. What would it look like, anyway?

"Mr. Luskin was not carrying a camcorder when he asked Mr. Krugman to autograph his book, and Mr. Luskin was not grinning when he spoke to Mr. Krugman. We regret these errors."

A lot of good that would do. The right correction would be one The New Yorker would never run:

"The article cited facts which were untrue, which contributed to the false impression that Mr. Luskin behaved in his meeting with Mr. Krugman in such a way as to intimidate Mr. Krugman, and to portray Mr. Luskin's activities as frivolous. We regret portraying Mr. Luskin in a falsely unfavorable light."

Further, when McGrath was interviewing me for the article, he asked me to comment on three things told to him by "a Krugman spokesperson." First, the Krugman spokesperson told McGrath that I entered the San Diego lecture hall under false pretenses, by giving a false name or no name [fact: I paid for my ticket with my credit card, and signed in at the door under my true name]. Second, the Krugman spokesperson told McGrath that I recorded the lecture with a camcorder, in violation of law [fact: there is no such law]. And third, the Krugman spokesperson told McGrath that over the summer I had revealed that Krugman was vacationing in France, something it was claimed I had no legitimate way to know [fact: I guessed as much, based on Krugman's own statements about his vacation habits].

McGrath quotes Krugman himself saying: "I mean, yes, he’s not a literal stalker, in the sense that he’s going to stick a knife in my back or anything." But at the same time as Krugman himself was giving that oh-so-reasonable statement, his spokesperson was feeding the same reporter false evidence to lend credence to charge that I indeed "stalked" Krugman "personally." Thus while McGrath was inventing facts to make me look bad, he was concealing facts that made Krugman look bad. And in doing so, he missed the real story: that Team Krugman is still busily trying to smear me.

This experience with one of America's best written and best edited magazines cuts right to the heart of everything that's wrong with just about everything you read or hear in any mass-media. It's all like this -- and usually a lot worse. The reality is that the media can't afford to have its reporters learn the truth. It takes too long, and it's too much work. It's not economic to do anything but grind out the "Talk of the Town" column from an office in New York using nothing but a telephone and a web-browser. And there's another reason, too. If stories like this one lacked the kind of color that McGrath had to invent, they wouldn't be as interesting to read. Truth may be more interesting than fiction, but it's way harder to write. Without the sexed-up human interest story, McGrath would have actually had to delve into the substance of my critiques of Krugman -- something which he totally omits as though it were utterly irrelevant. The reader is left assuming that my critiques of Krugman are based on... nothing.

And by covering up Krugman's attempts to use the reporter himself as a pawn in his smear campaign against me, MrGrath sidesteps the complication of himself having become part of the story. McGrath remains free to pose as the omniscient and disinterested narrator, regurgitating his own preconceived "balanced" story of an amusing little battle of wits, when in fact, it's actually a dirty story of dirty tricks in which the reporter has both had a dirty trick played on him, and is himself playing one. For McGrath to not take sides under such circumstances is, truly, to take sides. Krugman's side. 

Can't you imagine the correction for that?

"The campaign against 'political hate speech' originates with the Republican National Committee. But last week the committee unveiled its first ad for the 2004 campaign, and it's as hateful as they come. 'Some are now attacking the president for attacking the terrorists,' it declares."

Why doesn't Krugman have the balls to come right out and say that the RNC's "hate speech" denunciations were specifically aimed at Krugman himself, with respect to that horrible book cover, and reported on Sunday right in the pages of Krugman's own New York Times? And it's downright deceptive for Krugman to be opining on the RNC's statement without acknowledging his own stake in the matter. Well... what else can he do? After all, he can't deny the charge of "hate speech," because he won't deny responsibility for the book cover that triggered the RNC's denunciation. So... blame the victim.

And I don't find that statement "Some are now attacking the president for attacking the terrorists" to be anywhere near "as hateful as they come." Certainly it's nowhere near as hateful as the typical Krugman column that likens Bush to a recovering alcoholic falling off the wagon, or compares him to the Emperor Caligula or Captain Queeg, or a Krugman book cover that shows President Bush's face with Frankenstein's monster sutures across the mouth and brow, and the word "Enron" stitched into the flesh of his forehead.

Nor do I find anything "as hateful as they come" about this statement made by President Bush on Labor Day in a speech in Ohio, which Krugman now quotes for the second time in a Times column :

"For example, here's President Bush on critics of his economic policies: 'Some say, well, maybe the recession should have been deeper. It bothers me when people say that.' Because he used the word 'some,' he didn't literally lie — no doubt a careful search will find someone, somewhere, who says the recession should have been deeper. But he clearly intended to suggest that those who disagree with his policies don't care about helping the economy."

Is it "as hateful as they come" for a President of the United States to say "it bothers me"? Not normally, but this is another situation in which it is Krugman himself who is the focus of the denunciation -- or at least he imagines it is. And why shouldn't he? After all, who has taken more heat over the last couple months for shamelessly resisting the reality of robust economic recovery that is blooming all around us? Hell, Mickey Kaus even sponsored a "gotcha" contest to come up with the silliest, most negative Krugman statement on the economy!

But I suspect this could be a case where Krugman's so vain, he probably thinks this song is about him. Bush was probably referring to any number of economists and analysts who have argued in good faith that the recent recession wasn't deep enough to wring out the excesses of the roaring nineties (for example, Morgan Stanley's Steve Roach, whose bearish opinions Krugman has often quoted to bolster his own).

But my favorite part of today's Krugman tantrum is this line, referring to both of the two "hateful" quotes cited above:

"Again, there's that weasel word 'some.'"

Krugman doesn't like the unaccountability of the assertion that "some say" or "some are now attacking the President." Well, this one is a howler and a half. "Some" is Paul Krugman's own personal favorite weasel word. I just did a search and dozens upon dozens of examples poured out until I felt that weasels ripped my flesh. How about this triple-play some-fest, from his July 18 Times column:

"And just as some people argue that the war was justified even though it was sold on false pretenses, some say that the biggest budget deficit in history is justified even though the administration got us here with cooked numbers. Some point out that Ronald Reagan ran even bigger deficits as a share of G.D.P."

Ahh, but my favorite is this one, from a posting on Krugman's personal website, one of his many in response to my having ratted out his ghastly "divide-by-ten" tax-cut lie:

"There are some people who would accuse me of lying if I said that grass is green, but there's nothing to be done about that."

That "some" is... moi.

Here's my suggestion now to Krugman. Just come clean on the matter of the UK book cover. Admit you knew about it and approved it. Say you regret it. And then start writing some serious columns about the horrible mistakes the Bush administration is making by fomenting a trade war with China. You were wrong about the tax-cuts and the economy, but the facts are on your side this time. Use your expertise in trade theory, and keep it objective. I'll back you up -- this is one we can agree on.

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 1:38 AM | link  

Monday, November 24, 2003