In Time magazine’s new cover story (“Blue Truth, Red Truth,” 10/3/12), Michael Scherer attempts to sort out the puzzle of campaign season factchecking. But while the cover promises to tell us which candidate is telling the truth, it mostly manages to capture some of the corporate media’s worst factchecking tropes.
The article kicks off with a hefty helping of false balance—the tendency to see all problems as coming more or less equally from both sides.
Obama complains about Romney’s sustained, false claims that the White House is doing away with work requirements under welfare. Scherer notes this is false—and then pivots to a false claim coming from the Obama side, something having to do with a campaign strategist’s criticism of Romney over his confusing statements about when he relinquished control of Bain Capital.
The two issues are not remotely equivalent, but one of the most common problems with media factchecking is the need to always be balanced—no matter what is happening in reality.
That tendency was on display in a separate Time piece by Alex Altman (“Who Lies More? Yet Another Close Contest”) that ostensibly attempted to figure out which candidate was most deceptive:
To find out who shaded the truth most, Time asked each campaign for a list of its rival’s worst deceptions. After examining those claims and consulting independent factchecking websites, we selected some of the most prominent falsehoods and prevarications of the 2012 campaign—at least so far. Compared with the Obama campaign’s, the Romney operation’s misstatements are frequently more brazen. But sometimes the most effective lie is the one that is closest to the truth, and Obama’s team has often outdone Romney’s in the dark art of subtle distortion.
So, to summarize: Romney lies more, and bigger. But Obama tells the more effective kind of lies: the ones that are more accurate. Got that?
Scherer seems troubled by the sheer volume of political lying in the campaign, and he thinks he knows who’s to blame: the people. He writes:
So what explains the factual recklessness of the campaigns? The most obvious answer can be found in the penalties, or lack thereof, for wandering astray. Voters just show less and less interest in punishing those who deceive.
Indeed, some of the most prominent campaign lies succeed because we apparently want them to:
There was no Obama “apology tour,” but the canard flourished because some voters are wary about his sense of American exceptionalism. If you read the whole paragraph, the president’s “You didn’t build that” riff seems a lot more reasonable, but context fell victim to a perception that Obama disdains free enterprise.
So Romney (and others) lie about an Obama apology tour, and it works because some people are apt to believe it. Of course, that impression has more impact when journalists fail to challenge the lie. (The recent Washington Post headline “Obama, Romney Differ on U.S. Exceptionalism” would seem to endorse that Romney worldview.)
On the other example, saying that “context fell victim” to a false perception removes the agency of the people doing the lying—not to mention the people whose job it is to separate truth from falsehood.
Scherer writes near the end that “until the voting public demands something else, not just from the politicians they oppose but also from the ones they support, there is little reason to suspect that will change.” But, as we’ve long argued, there are people who have more direct access to politicians, and who can challenge political lies. Those people are called journalists. And if they do not make politicians pay a price for lying, they’re not likely to stop anytime soon.
A more aggressive media would be nice, but Scherer offers the public some bizarre advice instead:
The pundits on MSNBC, the Huffington Post and the editorial page of the New York Times do a fine job of calling out the deceptions of Romney, but if you want to hear where Obama is going wrong, you might be better served on the Drudge Report, Fox News or the Wall Street Journal editorial page.
So go check media outlets that have a terrible record when it comes to accuracy. Yep, an hour of Sean Hannity will help you sort out who’s telling the truth. For bonus irony, this point is fleshed out with some quotes from discredited Republican pollster Frank Luntz, whose job involves manipulating political language to obscure the truth.
And not only is the public to blame for all that lying—they’ve taken it out on journalists!
Instead the public increasingly takes issue with those who deliver the facts. Gallup recently recorded the highest levels of distrust in the media since it began measuring this sentiment in 1998. Only 40 percent of the country, including just 26 percent of Republicans and 31 percent of independents, express a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. “In the past, the press effectively played the role of umpire,” explains Chris Lehane, a Democratic campaign consultant who served as press secretary of Al Gore’s 2000 campaign. “Now they are effectively in the bleachers.”
But maybe the real problem isn’t that the public has no love for “those who deliver the facts.” It might be—as Lehane says—that they don’t think journalists actually do that.
Time wants us to think long and hard about political lying, that much is clear. And they want us to conclude that the apparent increase in political lying is basically our fault.
The pot calls the kettle black
And then blames it all on the skillet
It never ceases to amaze me how they can turn it around and it’s always them getting the short end. The always did their half perfectly. It was someone making them fail…
They never take an ounce of credit for their failures, so they can never advance beyond that.
The candidates fight for position within the in-crowd while excluding other competition on the basis of the sanctity of property. So Whiggish of them.
The debate commission abides by the commonly held bipartisan contention of the worthlessness of opinion of those without substantial worth in property.
With two corporate parties who have colluded to keep the third party candidates out of the debates by setting up the phony Commission on Presidential Debates, the biggest casualty in this campaign is the truth.
No matter who wins this election the ruling elite will win because the American people will not hear about Global Warming, drone attacks, NDAA, the military budget, the engineers of Glass-Steagall being put back in charge of correcting their own mess by Obama, massive giveaways to Wall Street, health insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies, etc.
@ FreeSpirit: It appears that you are in that wee minority who realize the corporate elite now control the federal government, which has made the presidential debate currently on everyone’s lips utterly meaningless. I’m not very optimistic, but it does appear that more people are beginning to get it, as can be seen on this site, so please hang in there, ie. here.
@John Q: You ain’t rid of me yet! I like this blog and learn a lot from you guys. There are some informed, clever, and witty commentators here!
In order to PROVE that their media is not bias to the democrats, they have to rip into the dems. Why can’t they just be truthful. What they are doing doesn’t help.
I don’t know. People insist on electing Republicans and Democrats almost exclusively (as in 1 or 2 independents in the 20th and 21st century), who have told lies continually for 100 years. By validating the behavior unconditionally, why can’t the public be at fault? Sorry, lots of big words!
This sort of “balance” is completely fake and itself reeks of bias. To equate White House criticism of Romney’s fudging the date of his departure from Bain with Romney’s outright lies and misrepresentations Administration policies on welfare and so-called entitlements is hardly balanced. It is more accurate to characterize this kind of journalism as obfuscation. Worse yet, it feeds into the perception that all politicians lie, and therefore are all alike. That perception is a gift to those who see democracy as an evil, because it discourages participation in the democratic process.
We are experiencing, almost entirely from the Republican side in this election year, an avalanche of fact-free Republican assertions about the shortcomings of President Obama’s policies, without any, I repeat, any specific, fact-based proposals that Romney et al. might advance that would offer a better chance of success.
In the debate the other night, Romney avoided offering a single specific change he would make to the tax code. Which loopholes would he close? He continues to throw around broad statements without weighing them down with factual details and explanations. That should make real journalists curious, and lead them to demand factual answers that they, as real journalists, can check and then report to their readers or viewers.
These Time articles avoid the labor required to produce thoughtful analysis of the facts. These articles evidence lazy, cowardly pseudo-journalism: evade the responsibility to report and analyze the facts by finding a way to heap dung on both sides. Anybody who has been really listening to the two campaigns and the candidates knows which campaign has a stranglehold on fanstasyland — you know, the place where Pinocchio lives.
If you’re interested in hearing from more-representative candidates, watch the debates on DemocracyNow.org, where the other presidential candidates are given the opportunity to participate. #ExpandTheDebate
There was a time when journalism was an honorable profession for most, and you could trust a real reporter to get the facts pretty straight. That has changed , particularly with the so-called main stream media. I chase it back to about midway in the Vietnam/Apollo Eleven era. The consolidation of the networks owned by big corporatons, the top incomes of the Star Reporters, and last, but not least, the Fox effect for all of them. Then their is also the GOP who have been working the refs for years. This gets a little long winded, but back in the day of the Apollo 11, I was part of the recovery team on Hornet. We had the so called cream of the crop of journalists on board, since not only was this the Walk on the Moon, but Nixon was coming. One of the big wigs from Washington Post explained how they we changing their way of covering major stories–with various business interests getting input–but he assured us that the News side would be protected by a FireWall. In a wardroom of very conservative Naval Officers, the laughs and chuckles were so heavy that the CO had to remind us that we were being disrespectful to our guest. Well, the Posts’ coverage has proven we were right to laugh at him in SPADES. Hopefully, the public is finally starting to see what we saw way back then.
Somebody, please! Make the Stupid stop hurting!! I want to live in a world with REAL journalists, not these lying, pretty-boy glamour-puppies that pollute the news media today!
Maybe it would help to have more and more voters register as Independents. Also, I like to say that I won’t decide whom to vote for, until Election Day, and until I am inside the voting booth. We are not required to say whom we are going to vote for, or whom we did vote for. Thank you.
No doubt FAIR has covered the Journalism Crisis elsewhere, but the prevarication by Time and others reflects the interests of big business, who now own the news media.
Compare with 30-40 years ago when the media was dominated by, well, media companies.
David’s point about people voting the same liars in from both parties however gives the true historical extent of this problem.
Fair News laws, anyone?
John, the monthly newsletter Ballot Access News has the numbers for you on how many people HAVE pulled away from the Republican and Democratic parties.
Information from the 29 states that keep records- on who is registered and in what party- were gathered and published on page 4 of the June 1, 2010 issue.
Please take a look at how many people are giving up on the parties, often giving up their ability to choose the lesser of two evils within a party, at primary balloting. Each state has a revealed personality, the most interesting being Massachusetts, which had 1.5m Dems, 47o thousand Reps, and 2.1MILLION miscellaneous independents. And 13 thousand Libertarians and 5 thousand Greens.
BAN is the project of San Francisco lawyer Richard Winger.
A second project is at George Mason University, Professor Michael McDonald presiding. Its multi-year multi-category online spreadsheets show each state’s voting statistics, including such info as the number of felons who may not vote.
Demobilizing the vote: All that remains is to drown it in the bathtub.
Seems many national “news” rags are attempting to hang onto subscribers at any cost – thus don’t want to alienate through exercising journalistic honesty. For many decades I subscribed to Time and Newsweek. I cancelled Time about a decade ago. Then Newsweek about five years ago. Both of them pander to anyone/everyone they think will continue to shell out for subscriptions – thus they’ve reduced themselves to mediocrity – the kind of opinion based fluff we can read for free on third rate blogs.
Yes, it’s shameful that we must choose the lesser of two evils – why not choose the least of 4, or 5 evils? Deciding which liar is the better person is one more twist in the story, and a satisfactory answer to this is not assured. In a functional system, this is the time that a third-party candidate should be selected. However, in our corrupted system, I’m inclined to pick the candidate whose lies are more obvious, rather than the candidate telling the more insidious, and elaborate deceptions.
It always amazes me that people, even intelligent people, continue to read Time and Newsweek. I was never enamoured with them, but flipped through them until about 10 years ago they began to read like People and some other magazines that are just idiotic. Of course, reading real news from real newspapers (try the Guardian or Toronto Star) requires some thought and effort. Americans seem want the easy soundbite way to learning about the world for news. The “tell me what to think” variety of bias. I’m hoping the internet will eventually take over and people who really want to be informed will use it to learn what’s happening and to check to see if they’ve been told the truth. Time and Newsweek? Both are pretty worthless.
I think it was Michael Parenti who said that the underlying goal of the Right’s strategy of continually referring to “the liberal media” is that it causes the media to move more to the right in order to “prove” that they’re not biased. Of course, with the mainstream media being owned by giant corporations, there may be individual reporters who are liberal, but overall the messages put out to the public are far from fair, balanced or liberal.
Even outright lies are not labeled as such by the media, they’ll be called “assertions” or “contentions”, with the caveat (sometimes) that they’ve been found to be inaccurate. Honest politicians – if there are any anymore – should be mad as hell about this nonsense. The Dems need to get mad! Liberals can be so wishy-washy and overly concerned about propriety and equanimity, while the GOP/Tea Party just goes for the throat and spews whatever made up nonsense they choose.
I would much rather be aligned with righteous truth-tellers and fighters for justice, that is all fine, but the Left needs to do a much better job of really and truly calling out the lies and manipulations of the Right, whose sole goal in the last 20 or so years has to be in power and remain in power, so that when they are not their only agenda is to obstruct and obfuscate and lie to make the Dems look “bad”.
However their blatant dishonesty and contemptable, reprehensible obstructionist behavior seems to work. No matter what they do they find people to vote for them and cheer with gusto. We are not long for this world if this is the level of stupidity that we are dealing with.
Well AF in this free country we on the right have a right to say what we believe.I have always said for instance that MSNBC is a liberal shill/shrill agency.On this sight I have had “facts” flung at me to prove how wrong I was.Take a listen to this and tell me again how wrong I was http://youtu.be/-wgJoepQmS4
Yeah this is not a station in bed with the president.Listen I really have no problem with the liberal bias in the drive by media.Or the conservative bias on FOX news or Rush,Hannity,Bill O,Beck or any of the other talking heads.What is funny is how you deny it.WE deal with it and call it as we see it.Now tell me again after watching that “meltdown”how wrong I was about MSNBC
It is the corporations that have an agenda for bringing about the next great solution to the problems of disease, poverty, disability, insanity, unemployment, and over-population, and who apply the sophisticated methods of propaganda that have been developed steadily since the early 20th century to prepare the ground for the seeds of whatever crop they are planting. They are the new saviors of the world, and will do what nations have been unable to do. I came across a book by accident by the title, “Dead Even Before Death: The Holocaust and the Human Person” by Gerald Darring. A review of the attitude of the political and religious leaders of the time and the methods they used to “solve” the problems listed above compared to the attitude of many present corporate, military, political and religious leaders and the methods that are now available, will make it clear that a holocaust, including a world war, could happen again sooner rather than later. Of course, like the Nazi leadership at the Nurenberg trials, everyone involved in the propaganda machine will deny any culpability for whatever terrible disaster results, and the perpetrators of the horror will survive while those who try to resist will perish. This book is available on Kindle.
Greg….when you read these books just substitute unions for corporations and you will see how silly this all is.There is no corporate boogy man.No union boogy man.Just groups of people working hard, represented by people who are sometimes good and sometimes bad.Most have the best interests of those they represent at heart.
Off the mark here but anyone seeing the CIA and the state dept running for cover saying they told the president Libia was a terrorist attack?Who in the hell is he listening to?Why did he lie about it for a week?Will the press dig deep?
And how about that pic the press ran of a little girl looking at what seems to be Mitts ass in the AP?Press gonna deplore that?
And how about the rising overwhelming facts coming to light that the books were cooked on the jobs numbers?Gonna write about that?We got an avalanche of presidential BS flowing about us.We need to air this out BEFORE the election!