At NewsHour, Insulating Facts with Fog
Judy Woodruff carefully avoids offending Paul Ryan with reality.
PBS NewsHour (10/1/14) brought on Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) to explain how deep spending cuts on social programs combined with tax breaks for the wealthy can be an “anti-poverty” program. It helps, of course, when his proposals are described in vague, euphemistic language that obscures rather than reveals, as when a NewsHour segment (8/13/12) described Ryan’s idea of slashing Medicare benefits as a plan to “impose changes for future Medicare recipients to hold down costs.”
The NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff epitomized this obfuscatory approach to journalism in her question to Ryan:
You talk about the Republican Party, how it needs to open up. But I guess one of the questions to you is, how hard is that to do, when many–certainly Democrats, some independents–see the Republican Party as a party that has at least in the past been perceived as against doing programs for the poor, against expanding Medicaid health benefits?
Let’s see: “Many” people, especially partisan opponents, “see” the GOP as having “been perceived,” “at least in the past,” as opposing programs for the poor like Medicaid expansion. But these aren’t some people’s perceptions about the past; these are facts about the Republican Party of today. As USA Today (12/5/13) reported, “All 20 of the states choosing not to expand Medicaid have Republican governors.”
Teaching Harper’s Not to Mess With PBS
Harper’s Magazine (10/14) took a tough look at PBS and how far the system has strayed from its intended mission. What was supposed to be a forum for the underrepresented has become just another outlet for elite, establishment-oriented views, wrote The Baffler’s Eugenia Williamson: “Today, the only special-interest group the network clearly favors is the aging upper class: their tastes, their pet agendas, their centrist politics.”
PBS reportedly distributed talking points to station managers that, rather than refuting Williamson’s claims, touted awards and ratings data to show that it is actually doing a great job. But that wasn’t PBS’s only reaction. As the New York Post (9/25/14) reported, PBS pulled ads for one of its shows from the next two issues of Harper’s—so an outlet established on the principle that advertising exerts undue pressure on media outlets used advertising pressure to retaliate against an outlet that dared to suggest it had lost touch with its principles.
Matthew Dowd to Martha Raddatz: “Everybody has the right to say what they want to say…”
ISIS in Mexico? Hard to Say
“I know that at least ten ISIS fighters have been caught coming across the Mexican border in Texas,” declared Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), adding that “dozens more” had evaded capture. There was no evidence at all to back up Hunter’s claims—when asked for proof, Hunter’s office asserted that future press coverage might one day prove him correct (Politifact, 10/10/14). This should have made it a slam-dunk factcheck —but ABC News (This Week, 10/13/14) had trouble simply saying it wasn’t true.
ABC’s Martha Raddatz teased the story: “Up next, were ISIS terrorists caught sneaking across our southern border? Why one congressman’s claims are raising alarms.” Yes, why? Because they were true, or because an elected official was spouting nonsense? Raddatz seemed to find it hard to clarify. She got a denial from the head of Homeland Security, but balanced that with Hunter’s assertion that Homeland Security hasn’t known what it was doing “for a long time.”
Then Raddatz sat down with former Bush administration flack Matthew Dowd, who offered this head-scratcher: “I think everybody has the right to say what they want to say, but they have the responsibility to say what maybe they believe to be factually correct. The congressman says he believes it to be factually
correct.”
It’s not wrong if someone “says he believes it was factually correct”—if that’s ABC’s standard for factchecking, it really ought to give up on the practice.
The Race for the Traditional House
Under the headline “In South, Clinton Tries to Pull Democrats Back Into the Fold,” New York Times reporter Amy Chozick (10/16/14) recalled that Hillary Clinton won the 2008 Democratic primary in Kentucky thanks to “a huge advantage among white working-class voters.” A paragraph later, Chozick described this as a sign of Obama’s “trouble in attracting traditional Democratic voters.”
So is a “traditional Democratic voter” really a white voter? In the general election in 2008, exit polls showed Obama getting only 36 percent of the Kentucky white vote—just like John Kerry got 35 percent of that vote in 2004.
The piece included a Kentuckian who said he’s “just nostalgic for when Democrats were different than Obama.” You know—“traditional” Democrats.
Best, Smartest, Whitest, Malest
Asked by the group Media Matters (10/22/14) why 62 percent of the guests on Meet the Press were white men, host Chuck Todd suggested it was out of his hands:
I can’t control, sometimes, the fact that 90 percent of the generals and the military experts out there–you know what I mean? Some of this stuff is out of your control. At the end of the day, you want to put the best people on. You want to put the best, smartest people on.
Todd did not offer an explanation as to why the show finds 62 percent of the “best, smartest people” to be white men.
‘This Is War, Dude! Civilians Die!’
Another thing we got to get over, this nonsense about there can’t be any civilian casualties! War is ugly, sloppy and messy, and sometimes there are civilian casualties, especially when your enemy uses human shields. If you’re going to go after ISIS, you got to suck it up and do what’s right!… My contacts within the chain of command, people involved in this operation, are furious that Obama’s put incredible targeting restrictions on them, doesn’t want any civilian casualties! This is war, dude! Civilians die! They’re going to die! You minimize the casualties, but people are going to die.
—Fox News analyst (and retired US Army officer) Ralph Peters (Hannity, 9/23/14; 9/30/14)
