Our polarized national debates have been made worse by growing disagreement as to whether the media can be trusted. This distrust is particularly vivid on the right; only 14 percent of Republicans trust the media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. Is this just frustration? Or do those voicing these complaints have a point?
This question struck with particular force last fall while reading coverage of President Biden’s unprecedented proposal to “forgive” $400 billion in federal student debt by shifting the burden from borrowers to taxpayers. On Aug. 24, citing the COVID-19 pandemic, Biden claimed the unilateral authority to act via a novel reading of the 2003 HEROES Act (originally enacted to ease burdens for military families during the post-9/11 War on Terror).
While Biden’s move was hugely controversial — with serious questions about its legality, cost, fairness, potential inflationary impact — many news accounts seemed more intent on helping borrowers take advantage of Biden’s proposal than helping readers assess its legality or merits. Stories carried headlines like “Here’s how you can apply for student loan forgiveness” and “Follow these steps to get your student loan forgiveness.” Such “how to” coverage is markedly different from how major media outlets typically report on tax cuts, school voucher programs, or controversial executive actions.
Curious whether these headlines reflected something more systematic, we examined a randomly selected sample of 100 stories from news accounts published in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal regarding student loan forgiveness last year. (Note that the analysis included onlynews coverage, excluding editorials, op-ed columns, and the like.)
We found that the coverage of this controversial move was both remarkably biased and inattentive to important questions about its legality, cost, fairness, and potential inflationary impact. Of the 459 quotes included in the 100 news accounts, 62 percent supported loan forgiveness and just 24 percent were critical. While public opinion on Biden’s loan forgiveness was modestly positive, the gap was far narrower than this massive 62-to-24 skew would suggest.
In the stories analyzed, more than two-thirds of quotes were provided by Democratic officials, progressive advocates, or borrowers. Just 12 percent of quotes were drawn from Republican officials or those identified as taxpayer advocates.
Public officials account for nearly half of all quotes. Among those elected and appointed officials, Democrats were quoted more than four timesas often as Republicans, with Biden administration sources quoted more often than all other public officials combined. Moreover, if one removes the Biden administration quotes from the analysis, coverage still favored other Democrats 57 to 42 percent.
And the issue wasn’t just partisan bias. After all, plenty of progressive authorities raised serious concerns about the proposal’s fairness or desirability. As Jason Furman, former chair of the Obama administration’s Council of Economic Advisers, put it: “Once you frame it as 320 million people paying for a benefit for 30 million people, it makes you think a lot harder. You’re giving a benefit to someone making $200,000 a year.”
Coverage also fell short on addressing key concerns about the policy: its legality, cost, fairness, or inflationary impact. For instance, fewer than one-in-five news accounts even mentioned the 2003 HEROES Act, which the White House used to justify its unprecedented action; only 34 percent alluded to its regressive nature, and just 24 percent its inflationary impact. The cost of loan forgiveness was mentioned in fewer than half of the news accounts, while barely half mentioned that there was already a pandemic-inspired pause in loan repayments that’s been in effect since March 2020.
For beneficiaries, the upside of the Biden proposal is obvious and easy to understand. The same holds true, of course, when Republican officials propose tax cuts or school voucher programs. This obviousness is probably why coverage of proposed tax cuts or voucher programs rarely features a lot of quotes from would-be beneficiaries and instead tends to focus on substantive disputes. Yet, with loan forgiveness, coverage featured substantially more quotes from borrowers or progressive advocates than legal and policy experts of all stripes.
In a polarized, contentious nation, the press has a crucial role to play in promoting healthy civic discourse — but that must start with a good-faith effort to explain the issues and present competing perspectives. Unfortunately, in the case of the Biden administration’s controversial loan forgiveness proposal, the press failed to meet that standard.
Caitlyn Aversman, research assistant in education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, contributed to this op-ed.
Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
They are the authors of “The Media’s Slanted Coverage of Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Plan.”