Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

An unexpected mental collision, as my reading and thinking about speculation crashes into my reading and thinking about "why oh why can't we have a better press corps?"

Let me back up. Back in 2001, Paul Krugman hit the point that deliberate and illegal market manipulation--artificial supply restrictions--were the principal factor driving California's energy crisis no less than seven times in less than five months. As he deservedly patted himself on the back last month:

Various notes on speculation: During that whole period, I was pretty much the only voice in a major news outlet even suggesting that market manipulation might be a central factor...

And indeed, market manipulation somehow escaped mention in the very same section of the very same paper he was writing for--in articles written by news-division reporters like Joseph Kahn and Tim Egan that I can find. Maybe it's the fault of the NYTimes search engine, but all it finds is reporters like Kahn and Egan giving "he said-she said" accounts--charges of market manipulation by PUC Chairs balanced by claims from energy companies that they simply "played by the rules" with no way for non-expert readers to evaluate them.

Exhibit A: New York Times reporter Timothy Egan in May 2001 on the California energy crisis:

Timothy Egan, May 11: Many Utilities Call Conserving Good Business: Hundreds of miles to the south [of Seattle], the city-run utilities in Los Angeles and Sacramento, have generally managed to avoid the rolling blackouts of recent months by opting out of the state's deregulation experiment and promoting conservation with near-religious fervor.... When Vice President Dick Cheney said last week that conservation could not be a centerpiece of energy policy, he left some utilities -- those that have spent 20 years trying to prove just the opposite -- feeling as though their efforts had been undermined. In his speech, he said, "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy."...

These guys in the Bush administration are doing this manly stuff, putting their horns on to make it sound like conservation is for sissies," Mr. Royer said. "But we know from experience that conservation equals generation. They are the same." Other utilities, even some that embrace conservation, agree with the Bush administration that the nation cannot conserve its way to energy independence....

S. David Freeman, the man named by Gov. Gray Davis to oversee the state's response to its power crisis, said that conservation remained a way not only to get through the difficult summer ahead but also to meet long-term energy needs.... Tom Eckman, the conservation manager of the Northwest Power Planning Council, which was created by Congress to guide major power decisions in this region. "It's common sense. If you can get something for 10 cents, why pay a dollar for it?"...

Mr. Cheney said that the Bush administration would oppose any measure based on a premise that people should do more with less. His remark was echoed this week by Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman. Asked on Monday if Mr. Bush believed that Americans should change their lifestyles in the face of a power crisis, Mr. Fleischer dismissed the idea of people using less energy as one solution. "That's a big no," said Mr. Fleischer. "The president believes that it's an American way of life, and it should the goal of policy makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one. And we have a bounty of resources in this country"...

Exhibit B: Paul Krugman writing thirteen days before on the California energy crisis:

Paul Krugman: The Real Wolf: [E]vidence has convinced Mr. Wolak that "power generators use forced outages strategically to withhold capacity from the market."... [The FERC's] emergency price caps are full of loopholes, offering extensive opportunities for what Mr. Wolak calls "megawatt laundering" -- selling power to affiliated companies that for one reason or another are exempted from the price controls (for example, the controls do not apply to "imports" from neighboring states), then selling it back into the California market. Severin Borenstein of the University of California Energy Institute adds that because the allowed price depends on the cost of generation at the least efficient plant, generators will have a clear incentive to produce inefficiently: "I predict we will find some plants we never heard of before that are suddenly operating again, and they will be pretty inefficient."... [T]his is not a serious plan. There are serious proposals to mitigate the crisis out there -- indeed, last fall Mr. Wolak submitted a proposal that was well received by other experts -- but FERC has ignored all of them. The charitable interpretation is that FERC still doesn't get it.... The uncharitable interpretation is that last week's action was meant to fail. The Medley Report, an online newsletter, calls the FERC plan "a grand exercise in posturing without substance... a very clever temporary move by the Bush administration to deflect any political fallout"...

Exhibit C: Today New York Times reporter Timothy Egan is very angry on his weblog about energy market manipulation in 2001:

Timothy Egan: [T]he West Coast... phony energy crisis of 2000 and 2001... the great energy heist... an extended bad dream, part “Twilight Zone” and part “Chinatown.”... The price of energy spiked — tenfold, a hundredfold — despite low demand. Californians became the most efficient users of power in the nation, and still suffered through dozens of rolling blackouts. None of it added up. And into the worst energy crisis since the Arab oil embargo of 1973 came Vice President Dick Cheney, blasting conservation as a sissy virtue and saying the nation needed to build a new power plant every week for the next 20 years...

Exhibit D: Today New York Times reporter Timothy Egan is very angry on his weblog at the assembled weblogs of America:

Save the Press: [A]nyone who cheers the collapse of the newspaper industry should consider... the larger principle of healthy democracies needing informed citizens. Last week, almost 1,000 jobs were eliminated in the American newspaper industry... layoffs and buyouts is edging toward closures and bankruptcies....

[O]nline advertising accounts for only about 10 percent of total ad revenue, newspapers are hemorrhaging money.... [T]he Web format will never generate enough money to keep viable reporting staffs.... [T]here’s plenty of gossip, political spin and original insight on sites like the Drudge Report or The Huffington Post... built on the backs of the wire services and other factories of honest fact-gathering.... Web info-slingers will find that you can’t produce journalism without journalists....

And just how much do most contributors at the The Huffington Post make? Nothing!... [T]he Brentwood bold-face types who grace HuffPo’s home page can afford to work for free, but it’s un-American, to say the least.... If any of those guys on the docks heard that I was now part of a profession that asked people to labor for nothing, they’d laugh... then probably shut The Huffington Post down.... We could be left with a national snark brigade, sniping at the remaining dailies in their pajamas, never rubbing shoulders with a cop, a defense attorney or a distressed family in a Red Cross shelter after a flood.... [P]erhaps a nation can function without newspapers. But it would be a confederacy of dunces.

And when Exhibits (A)-(D) combine inside my brain, they collide. And my first and instinctive reaction is: Karma.

Egan could have given Paul much more backup in 2001. Indeed, he could have called Frank and Severin, et cetera, and put something like Exhibit (B) high up in his Exhibit (A) article. He didn't.

This is, I think, a huge problem for the New York Times's--in fact, its biggest problem. I know that the people writing for the Huffington Post are smart people trying their best to tell it to me as they see it. I don't know that about the New York Times. I'm pretty sure that they know or suspect important things that they are not telling me, or are soft-peddling for internal bureaucratic or external source-maintenance reasons. I see: New York Times. I think: Judy Miller, Elizabeth Bumiller, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, William Kristol, John Tierney, Adam Nagourney, Ben Stein, Bill Keller, David Shipley, Jim Rutenberg.

Thus the Wheel of Karma turns. The suspicion that reporters like Tim Egan identified with the New York Times brand know important things about the issues they are writing about that they are not telling me is a huge hurdle in today's world: a world in which electrons are cheap, attention is scarce, and reputation is valuable.

And the Wheel of Karma grinds fine, for the way for Tim Egan to have reputation now is for him to have, back in 2001, provided Paul Krugman with extra backup when Paul was trying to tell the California energy crisis story wie es eigentlich gewesen. Egan didn't. And today time machines are scarcer than attention...

Appendix: Egan "he said-she said" California energy stories from 2001:

• http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D00E3DA1031F932A25751C0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print
• http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F07E1D7103BF932A25756C0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print
• http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0DE6DB143AF936A25756C0A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print
• http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9806E4DA1739F937A35752C1A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print