The "Job Killers," Part 1

Students of persuasion from Aristotle to Adolf Hitler have advised propagandists that statements can acquire the illusion of truth through repetition. Let's suppose you hear a plausible statement, but you are unsure whether it is true, i.e., “Greenland has about 50,000 inhabitants” or “Zachary Taylor was the first president to die in office.” Research in social psychology has shown that the more frequently you are exposed to such statements, the more likely you are to judge them to be true. A recent statistical analysis of 51 studies found this “illusion of truth effect” to be highly reliable. The effect is largely unconscious. People judge familiar statements to be true even when they can't remember whether they've heard them before.

Here's a statement I'll bet you've heard quite often in the past few years: “Government regulations are job killers.” Peter Dreier and Christopher Martin, Professors of Political Science and Communication respectively, did a content analysis in which they looked at every instance of the phrase “job killer” in the Associated Press, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post from 1984 to 2011. There were 381 articles that contained the phrase “job killer” and its variations. (If you think that's not very many, remember that stories from these four organizations are widely reprinted. The Associated Press alone serves 1700 newspapers and 500 radio and TV stations. The authors cite one article that received 12,800 citations.)

The first thing they noted is that use of this phrase has become more frequent in recent years. In fact, it increased dramatically after Barack Obama took office. From the first three years of the George W. Bush administration to the first three years of the Obama administration, appearances of “job killer” increased by 1156%; that is, there were about 11.5 times as many “job killer” stories.

Most of the accusations focused on federal (65%) and state (12%) government policies designed to regulate business. The top four policies claimed to be job killers were environmental regulations (18%), tax policies (17%), health care reform (10%), and wage policies (8%), usually proposals to increase the minimum wage.

Not surprisingly, the most common sources in stories claiming that something was a job killer were Republican politicians (42%) and business spokespersons (19%). But the third most frequent source was the authors themselves. 17% of the time, the newspaper used the phrase in articles or editorials without attributing it to any source, suggesting that the claim that government regulations are job killers is part of the conventional wisdom. The Wall Street Journal was more likely than the other organizations to use the phrase without attribution.

91.6% of the articles alleging that a government policy was or would be a job killer did not present any evidence to support that claim, either from the source or from the article's author. In the 8.4% of cases where evidence was presented, the most frequent types reported were anecdotes (3.4%), quantitative data (1.6%), a study (1%), and the opinion of an economist (.8%). The authors did not find a single case in which journalists attempted on their own to investigate the veracity of a job-killing claim.

In cases where a source claimed that a policy was a job killer, reporters provided a counterclaim from an opposition source only 7% of the time. I find this especially noteworthy. Even when claims have broad empirical support, such as the evidence for global warming, reporters usually engage in false balancing by citing the opinions of a small minority of global warming skeptics. However, claims of job-killing seem to be exempt from the norm of balance which requires journalists to present both sides of the issue. Are other conservative statements similarly exempt? Does labeling a statement “controversial” only apply to claims made by liberals?

Concerns about unemployment are higher during economic hard times, so you might expect articles about job killers to increase during a recession. However, there was no correlation. The only historical variable that predicted job-killing claims was the occupant of the White House. They were up during Democrat administrations and down when Republicans were in power.

Dreier and Martin cite journalism textbooks and the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics, which state that it is a reporter's job to verify what newsmakers say. This advice is apparently now archaic. To report that a politician's or businessman's statement is true or false risks being accused of bias, especially at this historical moment, when the truth appears to have a liberal bias.

Failure of reporters to investigate the claims of politicians has the obvious consequence of making it more difficult for the public to determine whether their statements are true. It also means that politicians pay no penalty for lying, since they are never called out for it. This would seem to encourage further falsehoods. Perlstein has argued American politics has become a fact-free zone where lying has become the new normal.

It's obvious that the job killer meme—along with the equally suspect claim that the wealthy are “job creators”—has become a powerful weapon in the hands of Elephant politicians and their allies in the corporate media. Few journalists seemed concerned when the House of Representatives passed an attempt to kill the Affordable Care Act (ACA) entitled “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Act.” In fact, an analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicted that the ACA would not lead to significant layoffs, only voluntary retirements. Politifact rated House majority leader Eric Cantor's statement that Obamacare was a job killer as “false” for that reason.

To what extent do government policies protecting workers, consumers or the environment actually lead to job loss? It's hard to say, since there hasn't been a lot of good research. One policy that has been extensively studied is the minimum wage, where research shows that increasing the minimum wage does not increase unemployment. For another example, see Part 2 of this post.