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There was a tug-of-war along Pennsylvania Avenue over top spot on the day's agenda. The White House wanted the guidelines for its mortgage foreclosure prevention plan, unveiled at the Treasury Department's financialstability.gov, to make most news. Sure enough, all three newscasts led with those details. On Capitol Hill, the Senate wanted porkbarrel spending to grab headlines. Sure enough, all three Congressional correspondents covered the 9,000 earmarked projects in the continuing resolution for last year's budget. The foreclosure plan costs $75bn; the porkbarrel spending costs $7.7bn. By a faction of a minute, the pork qualified as Story of the Day.

No matter that not a single earmark amounted to as much as one quarter of 1% of the $410bn omnibus legislation, all three Capitol Hill reporters--ABC's Jonathan Karl, NBC's Kelly O'Donnell and CBS' Nancy Cordes (no link)--peppered their reports with pet projects. There was the touristic: a convention center in Myrtle Beach (Karl), canoe tours in Hawaii (O'Donnell). There was the infrastructural: water taxis in Connecticut (Cordes). There was the educational: a planetarium in Chicago (O'Donnell). There was the historic: lighthouses in Maine (O'Donnell); a landmarked baseball stadium in Detroit (Cordes and O'Donnell). There was the agricultural, of course. All three correspondents quoted Sen Tom Harkin defending funds to fight the stench of swine manure as "not frivolous." Let that correspondent who is forced to live next to a porcine cesspool be the first to gainsay the Iowa senator.

ABC's Karl, as he did last week, misled us into thinking that all these earmarks amounted to more than a trivial portion of the legislation. "The bill would raise government spending by a near record 8%," he declared, referring to the entire package, before introducing Sen John McCain's condemnation of "unnecessary and wasteful earmarks." Thus Karl left the false impression that the "wasteful" earmarks and the "near record" increase happen to be one and the same.

So why is pork hard news rather than another jokey collection of zany schemes? Candidate Barack Obama had promised to excise earmarked spending on the campaign trail. "There is a small group of senators from both parties who are asking President Obama to veto it," reported NBC's O'Donnell. The White House is backing down from that pledge, calling the FY09 bill last year's business and will leave it intact.

While the Senate was debating, the Department of Transportation was writing checks. "It has greenlighted $1.5bn in road work across 20 states. They have got $25bn more for roads and bridges," ABC's David Muir told us, being careful not to use the term "porkbarrel." He showed us projects in Iowa and Maryland and Indiana and Ohio. His focus, instead, was on the hiring those federal funds are already setting in motion.


Andrew Tyndall 3/6/09 12:29:18 am

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