Review of Reality Check: The Unreported Good News About America (Hardcover)

As John Adams famously said, "facts are stubborn things..."The purpose of this piece is to debunk certain items of common knowledge about America as she enters the 21st Century.The traditional mass-media often presents various beliefs more or less as truths, which they support with selectively derived anecdotal evidence.The approach taken in the book is to isolate a common (usually media-driven) belief, and then examine it in light of actual statistical data.The dismayingly common result is that we find that many common notions about America's place in the world are simply wrong.

Also by way of disclosure, I went to college with, and was friends with, author Dennis Keegan at UCLA and we both served in the US Army in Germany in the late 1970s.Both of us were tank commanders during that time.

For example, during most of the Bush Administation (of which I am no great fan, I state by way of disclosure), the media has incessantly informed the citizenry that the United States is in recession, with dangerously high unemployment, anemic job creation, and an economy that is losing competitiveness to other countries.Only problem is--this is not so.The authors present statistics that show that the US ranks in the top five countries for GDP growth during most of the past eight years (dropping to number 12 during 2007 only, as the unwinding of the mortgage lending and housing bubble takes a toll).Average GDP growth of the American economy also must be viewed, as the authors point out, in light of what it is that is growing--many economies that have higher growth than America are relatively small.Put in context, during the last eight years the growth component alone of the American economy is larger than the *entire* Chinese economy.Similarly, as the authors point out, America's share of global GDP is greater, not less, than it was 12 years ago.This is not an indicator of a country in decline.

The authors take on many other media-driven myths, and show that such myths do not withstand scrutiny.For example, the notion that tax cuts only benefit the rich, who are not paying "their fair share" of taxes.Hard to reconcile this with the statistic that 1% of taxpayers pay 40% of all Federal taxes, and 86% of the taxes is paid by the top 25% of wage earners.Put simply, persons of modest means in the United States pay far less of their earnings in taxes, in percentage terms, than those in the top earnings strata. One would not know this from the unending media drumbeat about how tax cuts favor the wealthy.

The last example of a debunked media myth that I will mention in this review is the canard that America's industrial base is disappearing.There is no more frequently heard media myth.Problem is, the US exports more manufactured goods than any other country, at least most years. (Further, a lot of European exports constitute trade between relatively small and adjacent European economies; analogous to trade among states in the USA).

Mr. Keegan's particular strength is economics, but the book also contains numerous chapters dealing with more political issues.My favorite is the analysis of Hurricane Katrina.Not surprisingly, here the authors make a strong case that it was the corruption and incompetence of the Louisiana local and state authorities, not FEMA incompetence, that caused the problems that got so much media play.(And of course many of the "problems" were simply media myths.)It is noteworthy that other locations of Katrina devastation fared much better, e.g. Texas and Mississippi.The authors cite a 2006 bipartisan report on the disaster which notes that "It is clear [that] accurate reporting was among Katrina's many victims.If anyone rioted, it was the media."

The real problem that this book tries to take on is the fact that the media usually has an agenda, and if objective facts conflict with that agenda, the media will rely on carefully selected anecdotal evidence rather than objective facts.This is a very real danger to the American republic, which over the long run requires a reasonably well-informed electorate in order to function well.Fortunately, the rise of the internet has begun to supplant, or at least challenge, the traditional media.Aided by books like this one.Recommended.










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