I think you mean that if we learned it from the news we know what Obama said - we just don't know that he said something deceptive and manipulative.

??

I'm skeptical here, as it seems that New York Magazine is also playing a bit of a semantic game with us. This paragraph is key:

"Obama is not proposing that families making up to $250,000 a year keep their tax cuts while families making more than that don't. He's proposing that every family keep their tax cuts on their first $250,000 of taxable income."

The issue, here, is whether or not the average American understands marginal tax rates. The NYM article suggests (though it does not explicitly state) that Obama actually wants everyone's Bush-era tax cuts to continue. The paragraph I quoted explains, in as quick and cursory a manner as possible, that bazillionaires will still get to keep their tax cuts on the FIRST $250,000 of their taxable income. But that's just how the marginal tax system has always operated, and I think most major media outlets assume that people know this. Although many (like Fox, for example) take advantage of people's ignorance by neglecting to explain this fact when they seek to demonize higher marginal tax rates.

In attempting to correct the national media's sleight of hand, which often misrepresents Obama's take on the Bush tax cuts as some sort of socialist class warfare, this article only obfuscates the issue further, throwing Obama under the same bus by explaining the whole thing as a political maneuver. Actually, it's just how marginal tax rates work. A person making $1,000,000 pays a much different percentage on the first $26,000 than they do on everything after $385,000, and the point of letting the Bush tax cuts expire on the wealthiest has never been to hike their taxes or "stick it to the man" by suddenly making someone with a $280,000 income pay 50% income taxes on all their earnings. The point, rather, is to provide a needed corrective to a market that tends toward frightening imbalances and inequalities while maintaining a sufficient level of government revenue in order to fight off the deficit and debt crisis that has been the legacy of every administration (except for Clinton's) since Reagan-era "trickle-down" theory became the status quo for American economics.