How the media made Krugman an unperson

Not just him, but Stiglitz and others as well. From Paul Krugman:

One of the mysteries of the way issues are covered in much of the news media is how certain views get ruled “out of the mainstream” and just don’t get covered — even when many well-informed people hold those views.

The most notorious example was during the buildup to the Iraq war: skepticism about the case for war was treated as a fringe view, even though the evidence being presented by the hawks was flimsy on its face, and the ranks of the skeptics included a number of people with excellent national-security credentials.

But in a way, the implicit censorship on the stimulus debate is even stranger. During the initial discussion of the stimulus, the debate was framed almost entirely as a debate between Obama and those who said the stimulus was too big; the voices of those saying it was too small were largely frozen out. And they still are...

Chris wrote yesterday about how the administration is starting to suggest that we may need a second stimulus bill because the first was too small. What you don't find in the coverage of this new fact is that lead economists, such as Nobel laureates Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz, screamed at the top of their logs that in fact the stimulus was too small, and their opinions were not just ignored by the administration, they were largely ignored by the media (well, to be fair, Krugman got coverage, but he was treated as some extreme anomaly, not as a legitimate voice in opposition to the limited size of the stimulus). And now that the media is covering Stimulus the Sequel, you again see no mention of Krugman or Stiglitz or anyone else who predicted all of this would happen.

As a practical matter, this is far more important than whether Krugman and Stiglitz got their feelings hurt. The last stimulus package got watered down precisely because the debate was over whether Obama's stimulus proposal was too high or not - not whether Obama's proposal might have been too small.