Syriza Wins in Greece: NYT and WSJ Still Get Their Re-Writes Wrong
By William K. Black
Bloomington, MN: January 26, 2015
I wrote a column Sunday, January 25, 2015 as the Greek election results became sufficiently clear to know that Syriza was receiving a strong plurality from the voters and as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal posted on their websites the first reaction news columns. I criticized the dishonest nature of both paper’s coverage (actually non-coverage) of what austerity inflicted on the Greek people. Both of those initial columns have now been modified, so I have looked to see whether they improved their candor in their re-writes. The updated NYT column still contains this clunker.
“Syriza’s victory is a milestone for Europe. Continuing economic weakness has stirred a populist backlash from France to Spain to Italy, with more voters growing fed up with policies that require sacrifice to meet the demands of creditors but that have not delivered more jobs and prosperity.”
The NYT’s EU economic correspondents remain hopeless on austerity. It isn’t that austerity has “not delivered more jobs and prosperity to Greece” – it is austerity that destroyed hundreds of thousands of Greek jobs and forced the Greeks into a Great Depression that is more severe and has lasted longer than Greece’s Great Depression of 80 years ago. It isn’t that austerity has “not delivered … prosperity,” it is that austerity pushed Greece to a 25% loss of GDP. The NYT knows these facts, but refuses to link them to austerity.
“Greece has endured a historic collapse since 2009; economic output has shrunk by 25 percent, and the unemployment rate hovers near 26 percent.”
in full: http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2015/01/syriza-wins-greece-nyt-wsj-still-get-re-writes-wrong.html
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