The Worcester Telegram ran a super-weird “guest column” (i.e., op-ed) on Thursday on the Worcester Red Sox‘ new stadium, which as you may recall was the recipient of $150 million in tax money and the subject of a bitter battle between economists Victor Matheson and Andy Zimbalist, only one of whom turned out to have been paid $225 an hour by the team for his opinions. First off, the op-ed was unsigned, except by the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce; second, it asserted that, contrary to what Matheson and other economists had projected, “the ballpark is indeed paying for itself, and [is] a major success for the city”:
It was clearly demonstrated that the revenues from the [District Improvement Financing] – taxes, parking, permits and the team’s rent – are more than covering the expenses related to the park, just as they have done every year, without taking from the municipal general fund.
Sure, if you count kicked-back taxes from a stadium district as “covering expenses,” then it’s easy to get a stadium to pay for itself: Just keep drawing the lines around the district bigger and bigger until you have enough tax revenue to call it profitable — and never mind if you’ve now siphoned off a bunch of tax money that would have come to the city with or without a stadium.
The unnamed authors, though, went a step further, taking a dig at Matheson’s Holy Cross economics department colleague Robert Baumann and Kennesaw State College economist J.C. Bradbury for their paper projecting that the Worcester stadium would cost the city a net loss of $40-60 million:
The recent report that called the park a net loss to the city leaned heavily on the outdated pro forma and the application of an academic notion called a “crowding out effect,” which essentially states that stadiums crowd out existing spending for businesses in the area since people have limited entertainment budgets and tend to choose one activity over the other.
The vast majority of academic literature analyzing the crowding out effect uses case studies of massive projects that host major league events like SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California; Truist Park in Cobb County, Georgia; or when cities construct stadiums to host the Olympics or World Cup. These are not the same conditions that apply to Worcester.
Oh, noooo, you do not want to pick a public fight with a man with the Twitter bandwidth of Bradbury, especially not without doing all your research first. Which, as Bradbury has been tweeting for several days now, neither the Worcester chamber nor the Telegram editorial page appears to have done:
The Worcester Telegram & Gazette has run a guest column from the local chamber of commerce (no names on the byline) that includes incorrect assertions about our work. Neither my coauthor nor I were contacted for comment, nor was the piece fact checked. https://t.co/4AC1sLLvAb
— J.C. Bradbury (@jc_bradbury) June 16, 2023
This really just burns me up, because I have a lot of work to do. Now I have to choose between doing that work or writing a response to @telegramdotcom to correct the inaccuracies a simple fact check would have caught. How was this allowed to go to print? https://t.co/mjADi33w5s pic.twitter.com/dVvOl5J8Cn
— J.C. Bradbury (@jc_bradbury) June 16, 2023
@MikeElfland @telegramdotcom Please acknowledge that you are handling my concern regarding your newspaper's unprofessional and unethical conduct. https://t.co/dzdwHmZz8q
— J.C. Bradbury (@jc_bradbury) June 16, 2023
As someone with a fair bit of experience with op-ed pages of my own, I think it’s fair to say that it’s not unusual for them to have two different fact-checking standards, one for opinions that the editorial page editors agree with, and one for those written by naysayers with no ties to the local political-business leadership. Yes, this is a violation of basic newsroom ethics, but so is letting sources express opinions behind the cover of anonymity, and newspapers do that all the time as well for friends in high places, so this should really come as no surprise. An outrage if you think that accurate journalism is an important necessity for a functioning democracy, sure; a surprise, not so much.
Anyway, this probably still isn’t bad enough to displace that horrible Philadelphia Inquirer column on the proposed 76ers arena as worst pro-sports-subsidy op-ed of 2023, but it might win special notice in the minor-league stadiums division. If only we could know who to send the trophy to…
Whoa, poke the bear! Oh yea!
Re: [T]he Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce … asserted that … “the ballpark is indeed paying for itself, and [is] a major success for the city”
Aw how cute. I also tried to get away with some Proof by Assertion handwaving in some of my graduate Analysis assignments when I was stuck. Didn’t work there either.
The CoC’s op-ed amounts to, “Do you want to know the terrifying truth, or do you want to see me sock a few dingers?”
I enjoy reading Bradbury’s twitter posts. I suspect that I would enjoy reading his papers even more!
First rule of reporting facts: The facts have to be acceptable to the boss and/or paymaster.
It’s a sad time.