The Context Black Hole

Jason Stein has an article in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that compares the potential impact on individuals of Romney's and Obama's tax proposals. Of course, more can be said about the president's proposal because that proposal exists, in full detail, in current time, in a way that Romney's does not.

Stein's reporting is, first of all, an example of what good campaign reporting can be. The candidates do have real different positions on issues, and if implemented, their preferred policies would have different impacts. So comparing the impacts is a great use of newspaper real estate.

There is a problem here, though, which illustrates the general pattern of missing context in newspaper reporting. This line jumped out at me:

"To boost the nation's struggling economy, Romney would renew all of the Bush tax cuts, including those for the wealthiest Americans."

This phrasing takes as given (1) Romney is proposing the tax cuts in order to boost the economy, and more importantly (2) that renewing the tax cuts would in fact boost the economy.

The supposed benefits of the tax cuts must be broken down in a better way, but can this be done without resorting to either the dreaded "but Democrats disagree" or by taking a brief foray into macroeconomics? Giving readers information about how cutting taxes is supposed to spur growth and the evidence for and against that expectation seems to be the best solution, but must all that info supplement any claim about tax cuts? And do readers need a backgrounder on the importance of the budget deficit, the value of a payroll tax cut, etc?

Thus we have the context black hole of journalism, where more information is always desirable for readers to have a better (if not complete) understanding of an issue, combined with the fact that daily reporting on an issue -- like the Arab/Israeli conflict or arguments about tax policy -- would require all that context to be re-reported every day.