Krugman: A Reckoning for the Media Machine

NEW YORK – "I try to write only about economics," says Paul Krugman with a smile and a shrug. But in the next breath, Krugman admits that his best-selling book, The Great Unraveling, "is really about politics and not economics."

The same may be said of Krugman's scathing Op-Ed columns in The New York Times, which have undoubtedly earned him a high place on the White House's media enemy list.

Krugman is an unlikely radical. The Princeton economist identifies himself as a "moderate liberal," and a "free-market Keynesian," and swears he didn't plan things this way. "The original idea for my column came in 1999 from (ex-Times editor) Howell Raines," he remembers. "Howell explained it to me like this – 'We have five guys writing about the Middle East and no one writing about the economy!'" But Krugman was soon radicalized by events, and what he calls persistent and deliberate lies by the Bush Administration.

"I had a bad feeling about Bush, from an economic standpoint, as far back as the 2000 presidential campaign," says Paul Krugman, "I just felt – My God, he's lying through his teeth!"

Krugman, who worked as a staffer at the Council of Economic Advisers during the Reagan administration, says his government experience taught him that "What you see in one agency or area can usually be applied to an entire administration." In other words, if they are lying about the budget, they're probably lying about other things as well – like, say, the presence of WMD in Iraq, or 'links' between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.

"It came into particular focus right after 9/11," says Krugman, "When I began hearing spin and political explanations of the attacks while the buildings were still burning." We now know, of course, that what Krugman was hearing was the beginning of the buildup to the Iraq War. "I had no special background in this stuff," he says. "But to me, it sounded exactly like the selling of the tax cuts! I said to myself, 'They're pulling the same stuff again!'

"And then along came this political nightmare," he says. "And for a while it looked like I was one of the only people who could say what was really happening."

Krugman admits that the right's vituperative reaction to what he wrote, and the aggressive and personal attacks that resulted, "were very scary for a while." He feels fortunate that he is not a professional, career journalist. "I had another job to go back to," he says thankfully – which was a good thing, since "the New York Times was beginning to get nervous!"

Krugman's writing – like all noteworthy journalism – consistently makes publishers nervous. That's what happened to his book publishers when he handed them The Great Unraveling, complete with a fiery introduction he had finished the day after Baghdad fell to U.S. forces.

As he notes in the introduction to the new paperback edition (which features three new chapters, consisting of columns he wrote after the war 'ended,') he had gone "out on a limb" with the book: "I wasn't just extremely critical of the Bush administration at a moment of triumph, when TV screens were showing, over and over again, scenes of the toppling of Saddam's statue. I went beyond criticism of specific policies to argue that the Bush administration poses a challenge to America as we know it."

And like all noteworthy journalism, Krugman's writing is as much about the media as it is about the events they cover, uncover, mis-cover and ignore. As he wrote in The Great Unraveling, "I was also saying that much of the public and most of the media were missing the real story of what was happening in America.

"When the book first came out, it was pretty crazy," says Krugman. "I was saying the same things I had been saying for several years – but now people began telling me, 'Thank God someone is finally being honest!'"