The National Corridors Initiative, Inc.
MA Office: 59 Gates Street, Boston MA, 02128 |
Press Release - October 2, 2006
Voice: 617-269-5478
James P. RePass |
|
The National Corridors Initiative, Inc.
MA Office: 59 Gates Street, Boston MA, 02128 |
Press Release - October 2, 2006
Voice: 617-269-5478
James P. RePass |
News wire services write about Amtrak wrong
How misleading statements propagate
The world of journalism is not a happy one, right now. Public opinion polls regularly rank journalists below even lawyers in the public’s estimation; newsroom cuts in staff have become so egregious that even company-paid officers, such as the Los Angeles’ Times publisher, are in open rebellion against their corporate parents about the next round of reductions ordered to protect the bottom line. Many independently-owned and family newspapers have been scarffed up by chains, and then gutted of staff, creating what looks like a newspaper but what is really just an advertising flyer surrounding a few stories. The Internet, with Craigslist, eBay, Monster.com, and other venues for on-line advertising, has pretty much wiped out the best and most lucrative source of newspaper revenue, the want ads, which were once upon a time, by themselves, almost enough to support a newspaper’s costs. Gone.
So, given the environment, we hesitate to criticize. But we’re going to have to do it.
For many years, America’s newspapers have been served by what are anachronistically called “wire” services, which were delivered to local papers by the radical use of privately-owned telegraph networks --- notably United Press International and the Associated Press in America, and Reuters “overseas.” Those in the news business for more than a few decades will remember the wire room, with its clacking teletype machine, and the system of alarm bells that “ding-ed out” the relative importance of each story as it came ponderously across the wire, line by line by line. The wire services themselves were spawned by a brand new technology – the telegraph --- in 1846, when the New York Sun opened up access to its telegraph dispatches of the Mexican war to other New York city newspapers, for a fee (see the Associated Press Archives, www.ap.org/pages/about/whatsnew/wn_013106a.html)
The problem faced by wire services is similar to that faced by newspapers themselves, but for different reasons: although its customers, the newspapers and broadcasters, pay a fee, and are as noted under economic pressure from the Internet, the problem for the wire services is time-related: the old “news cycle” has been compressed, from weeks, to days, to hours, to seconds.
As a consequence, a typical wire story (emergencies excluded) that years ago would have been updated three or four times at most in a day must now be updated almost by the minute, putting tremendous pressure on wire service reporters to write fast and furiously to keep up with the insatiable demand for “new” news.
When that happens, reporters resort to catch phrases and stock verbiage, to provide enough bulk to a story to justify its re-broadcast.
In the case of the AP’s coverage of Amtrak, unfortunately, that pressure has lead to the incessant repetition of factoids about Amtrak that re-enforce the [false] impression that Amtrak is an especially egregious Washington “subsidy-hound”.
That repetition took the following form this week, in a story by Washington AP writer Donna de la Cruz. Covering the testimony of New Amtrak President, Alexander Kummant, de la Cruz reported some of his remarks, but then dropped in a paragraph that appears in virtually all her Amtrak stories and, therefore, time and again in virtually all the newspapers in America --- and there are hundreds – that use the AP wire service:
“Amtrak has debt of more than $3.5 billion and its operating loss for 2005 topped $550 million. It has never made a profit in its 35 years of operation.”
All perfectly true. And completely misleading.
The fact is that Amtrak 1) has a debt; 2) gets a subsidy; and, 3) has never made a profit. And taken together, time after time, week after week, story after story, those facts paint and then re-enforces a sad picture of a woebegone, mismanaged mess of a company, always looking for public handouts, and always coming up short. Indeed, that’s the way the right-wing pundits talk about Amtrak. The AP’s coverage just gives them a fig leaf to hide behind. Perhaps that’s what the AP reporter believes, too. It would certainly seem to be the case.
The right way to write about Amtrak, we believe, is to tell the whole truth, not half of it. If in every Amtrak story you summarize its existence the way the AP’s Donna de la Cruz does, then put the facts in context. We’ve put them in italics:
Amtrak is in debt $3.5 billion, a result of a more than $6 billion shortfall in capital appropriations by Congress since 1970, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Amtrak, like every transportation system in existence, makes no profit. However, while every year, it must go to Congress to ask for a subsidy, other modes of transportation get their [far larger] subsidies automatically, or in ways that are hidden from the public.
Highways get $30 billion a year in Federal tax subsidies, from a highway bill written by Congress every six years, and spent by state DOT’s whose professional staffs consist almost 100 per cent of highway engineers. Highways also get more than $100 billion a year in state and local tax-subsidized funding. Amtrak gets perhaps 1% of that amount every year, yet is expected to operate trains over a 25,000-mile national system.
Airlines are heavily subsidized by tax-payer funded agencies. The Federal Aviation Administration supports airline operations as does Congress, with frequent Congressional bailouts. And of course billions of dollars in airplane R&D are spent every year by the Defense Department, since new technologies almost always appear first on warcraft. Inland canals systems and levees are built by the US Army Corps of Engineers and their subcontractors, and are almost 100% taxpayer subsidized. While Amtrak is indeed subsidized, it gets the smallest subsidy, by far, of any national transportation system, and compared to Europe and Asia, is the least costly rail system of any major country in the world.
Do we make our point? Please, Associated Press, if you want to report Amtrak’s need for subsidies every time you write about Amtrak, then cover the rest of the story, too. Otherwise, you are slanting your coverage in a way that feeds the ignoramuses and the highway shills who would dismantle Amtrak, at a time when, more then ever, we need an alternative to highways that is strong and affordable, and that all can use.