Is There are Clearer Case of Media Bias? Gas Prices under Bush and Obama

The Times’ March 1 news piece Tensions Raise Specter of Gas at $5 a Gallon reflects an obvious media bias. As the Times news piece claims, rising gas prices are the result of international events over which President Obama has no control. I cite the first paragraph:

With no clear end to tensions with Iran and Syria and rising demand from countries like China, gas prices are already at record highs for the winter months — averaging $4.32 in California and $3.73 a gallon nationally on Wednesday, according to AAA’s Daily Fuel Gauge Report. As summer approaches, demand for gasoline rises, typically pushing prices up around 20 cents a gallon. And gas prices could rise another 50 cents a gallon or more, analysts say, if the diplomatic and economic standoff over Iran’s nuclear ambitions escalates into military conflict or there is some other major supply disruption.

Under Bush, the “rising gas price” news story would invariably mention  Bush by name, Big Oil, and his long-standing ties to the oil industry.

I was about to document this media bias by searching news archives, when I found an excellent blog of March 1 by Julia Seymour, whose main results I cite below:

The Business & Media Institute examined all the broadcast network news reports mentioning gas prices during each of those time periods and found ABC, CBS and NBC aired more than 2 ½ times more stories (63 stories to 24) in 2008 than they did in 2011.

But it was more than just the amount of coverage that showed the media's willingness to spin gas prices one way under Bush, and another way under Obama. In 2008, network reporters mentioned "Bush," the "president" or "government" in gas price reports 15 times more often than in 2011 under President Obama (15 stories to 1).

Congratulations to Julia Seymour for excellent reporting and analysis.

Kaddafi and His Ilk Are Not Crazy: Are Dictators Predictable?

As Kaddafi machine guns demonstrators, we are told these are acts of an insane man. We must be careful what we say or do because the criminally insane are erratic and unpredictable. Using such logic, the U.S. was among the last to call for his ouster. Examples of insanity are his public rants, the ordering of the bombing of Pan Am 103 (for which he thought he would never be caught), the ludicrous philosophizing in his Green book, the pitching of his tent in New Jersey, and his refusal to ride elevators. Other dictators are pictured in the same way: Iran’s ruling mullahs are religious fanatics; Stalin was a psychotic paranoid.

Insanity is the easiest explanation of dictatorial atrocities for Western minds to fathom. That “criminally insane” dictators follow a common pattern, transcending time and place, argues however that they share a common goal and use the same instruments and practices to achieve it. Just as we can explain business behavior through the profit motive, so can we understand and even predict dictatorial behavior by analyzing how they generate and use political power. If their actions consistently promote the paramount goal of power, their actions are completely “rational,” no matter how morally repugnant or obscene. Rational behavior can be analyzed; insane behavior cannot.

None of these dictators was offered power on a silver platter. They “had to earn it” as a famous brokerage house commercial used to say. Kaddafi gained power as a young military officer by skillfully outmaneuvering rivals and manipulating one tribe against another. Iran’s ruling mullahs won a fierce and bloody power struggle in which a large number of the ruling elite were assassinated. Stalin was the victor in one of the bloodiest succession struggles in history against better know and seemingly superior rivals. Kaddafi, Iran’s ruling mullahs, and Stalin won because they were better at accumulating and using power than their rivals. These were not accidental victories. They held on to power by skillfully playing one rival against the other and using ideology, propaganda, patronage, and religion to their advantage.

There is a growing theoretical literature that provides systematic insights into the behavior of dictators. It assumes, quite unobjectionably, that dictators aim to accumulate sufficient political power to hold on to power. They “produce” power by combining loyalty and repression (the carrot and the stick). They keep the secret police or army in check by appointing relatives or incriminated associates as its head and by removing intermediate links between operatives and the dictator. Some results are non-intuitive, such as the greater stability of dictatorships (due to the incumbent’s immense advantages) and the fact that a rational dictator will kill innocent people (a practice often used as proof of insanity).

Democratic rulers must offer platforms that please the median voter, thus the scramble to the middle in elections. Dictators can offer their platform and then “eliminate” (by jail, execution, disenfranchisement, or exile) those who disagree with it.

Public demonstrations reflect general disaffection with the dictator’s “platform.” The dictator can respond by “reforms” that move his platform closer to the public’s, by ramping up repression, or by a combination of the two. In general, public demonstrations threaten to weaken the dictator’s power below the threshold necessary to stay in power. The dictator must do something to prevent this from happening.

The response of “constrained” (Mubarak) and “unconstrained” (Iran and Kaddafi) rulers has been strikingly different in the Middle East. The former have unsuccessfully used limited repression, concessions and material rewards in a vain effort to boost their political power. The morally-unconstrained have used as much repression as necessary while offering targeted material incentives (such as increased army pay and according to recent reports handing out cash). This strategy will likely work in Iran but fail in Libya.

For unconstrained dictators such as Kaddafi, there are eventually diminishing returns to repression. At some point, more and more segments of the population understand that they themselves are at risk and withdraw their loyalty. As the loyalty of the neutral or even loyal population collapses, the regime falls below the threshold necessary to stay in power and the dictator is overthrown. This is Kaddafi’s likely impending fate.

Notes: Research conducted in the Hoover Institution Soviet State and Party Archives over the past decade has aimed at applying the theory of dictatorship to the Stalin period. For those interested in our results, see: Paul Gregory, Terror by Quota (Yale –Hoover, 2009), Paul Gregory and Norman Naimark (eds.), The Lost Politburo Transcripts (Yale-Hoover, 2008), Paul Gregory and Valery Lazarev eds., The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag (Hoover, 2003); and Eugenia Belova and Valery Lazarev, Funding Loyalty (Yale-Hoover, forthcoming). The theory of dictatorship has been developed, among others, by Ronald Wintrobe, Bruce Bueno de la Mesquita, James Robinson and Daron Ademoglu.

The Good News That No One Is Telling About Iraq

A map of the Middle East shows two countries untouched by uprisings against the established regime: Israel and Iraq. (another exception is Turkey, an Islamic country but not in the Middle East). Israel is no surprise. It is a democracy. If its citizens are upset with the government, they devote their energy to the political process. The fact that Iraq has been spared a general popular uprising is proof that it has arrived as a democracy. I have heard no reports of Iraqi authorities mustering troops and riot police to quell a general uprising.

Despite the huge imperfections of Iraqi democracy, Iraqis understand that they must channel their discontent into supporting political figures and parties that they feel represent their interests. They understand that they must resolve their grievances through the political process, not through revolution.

There is another untold story about Iraq. Studies of newly formed democracies (primarily in areas that were once part of the Soviet empire) reveal that true democracies have been created only in those nations that did not allow the former bureaucracy and party elite to continue their jobs. Only after a lustrification (Latin originally meaning religious purification) were they allowed to reenter the mainstream and hold public office. In countries where lustrification did not occur, the old elite became the new elite and prevented a democracy from being created.

In the light of this history, the much-criticized decision to cleanse the state and military of Baath party elite was correct.

Quite often obvious things like this escape notice. I think that silence on this story goes beyond the practice of not reporting what is going right. In the case of Iraq, there has been a great reluctance on the part of the democratic party and the press to accept positive news about Iraq. We must also accept the fact that democracies, both old and new, are messy and often chaotic. It is only in times like these, when we clearly see the consequences of authoritarianism and dictatorship and the peoples’ hatred of them, that we can see democracy’s advantages in proper perspective.

Straight Talk: Why Would a Dictator “Reform?”

Dictators in the Middle East are advised by Western politicians that they should introduce democratic reforms if they want to stay in office. This might work for the most moderate of rulers, such as in Jordan. It worked in Spain and Portugal, but only after the death or incapacitation of the dictator made a smooth transition possible. For other dictators, there is no way to split the difference between a dictatorship and a democracy. No brutal dictator can navigate the fine line between meaningful reform and remaining in office. True reform requires transferring or sharing power with others. Once your democratic partners have some degree of power, they will make sure that you will be out of office. Pinochet tried to protect himself by parliamentary immunity and spent the final years of his life fighting off criminal charges. The “power sharing arrangements” in Iran and Zimbabwe have been shams in which the democratically elected partner (Khatami and Tsvangirai) is rendered powerless by the Mullahs or Mugabe.

Any brutal dictator who allows a meaningful reform is, in effect, committing political suicide. There was no chance for a Mubarak to continue in office in a “reformed” Egypt. Under the best of circumstances, he could have been a transitory figure head. At the worst, he would have been put before a firing squad like Ceausescu. Mubarak had no way of winning once the democratic genie was let out of the bottle. It was in his interest to keep the genie firmly locked in the bottle.

The current reform advice to dictators reminds me of earlier advice to Soviet rulers to allow meaningful reform of their political-economic system. The aging Soviet leaders after Stalin were not particularly bright, but they understood one basic fact: Real reform meant the end of the system as they knew it. It was not until Gorbachev – the first Soviet leader too young to be part of Stalin’s coterie – that the USSR was led by a communist party leader who did not understand that real reform would destroy the pillars of the entire system, which it did.

I presume that brutal dictators throughout the Mid East -- Kaddafi, Assad, the Iranian mullahs -- understand better than Gorbachev that meaningful reform means the end of their careers. Our pleas for them to become “democrats” will go unheeded. From their perspective, this is very bad advice.