In October, the inevitable was announced: Struggling
Newsweek magazine would be finished as a print publication as of the end of the year. But the last mass newsweekly left,
Time, also made an announcement of sorts: It was out of the factchecking business.
“Who Is Telling the Truth? The Fact Wars,” read
Time’s
October 15
cover. With a setup like that, one might have hoped for a bold break
from the campaign pack, an acknowledgment that facts matter, and that
politicians who run on a record of resisting reality should be exposed.
Instead
Time told a more familiar story, one in
which both major parties commit comparable “factual recklessness,”
because
accuracy—and
reality—are less important than the appearance of
evenhandedness. In the article, and a subsequent response to critics,
the magazine essentially waved the white flag in the journalistic war
against political deception.
The
cover story
by Michael Scherer kicked off with some anecdotes meant to be
representative. On the one hand, Obama complained about Romney’s
repeated, highly publicized claims that the White House is doing away
with work requirements under welfare. This was, at certain moments, a
central part of the Republican campaign strategy. Scherer correctly
noted Romney’s claims were false.
But then, hewing to the idea that one must find political lying in
equal measure, he pivoted to a claim from the Obama camp—a campaign
strategist’s offhand remark that, if Romney had misrepresented himself
to securities regulators, that would be “a felony”—“a conditional
accusation, but an accusation nonetheless,” Sherer explains, and
justification enough for Romney’s team to “take its turn playing
truth-teller.”
The two issues, though juxtaposed, are not remotely equivalent,
illustrating one of the most common problems with
media factchecking:
the need to always be balanced, no matter how unbalanced reality might
be. The losers in the
Fact Wars, ironically, are the facts themselves.
Indeed, an entire sidebar piece by
Alex Altman (“Who Lies More? Yet Another Close Contest”) seemed
inspired by the same notion about perfectly symmetrical political lying.
The feature chose 10 statements from each side to evaluate. It made for
unusual comparisons, considering that one Romney claim was the
hyperbolic “We are only inches away from no longer being a free
economy.” Not to worry, Altman rated that “highly misleading.”
The equivalent Obama claim—“We do not need an outsourcing pioneer in the Oval office”—was a “distortion,” in
Time’s
judgment, because while Bain “invested in companies that outsourced
jobs, it was not the first to do so,” and Romney was not “directly
responsible” when this occurred. Altman got this wrong, actually—Romney
was actively running Bain when it “owned companies that were pioneers in
the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call
centers and factories making computer components,” as the
Washington Post (
6/21/12) reported—but in any case, it’s hardly the same as declaring that the U.S. is on the verge of socialism.
Confronted by the obvious evidence that Romney’s lies and
exaggerations were of a different order, Altman came up with a novel
explanation:
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.
(No, Obama's lies are more sinister. Praising whistleblowers as heroes, then prosecuting more of them than ALL the presidents before him combined. Saying that marijuana legalization is a states' right, and that state law trumps federal law, then working on a way to overturn the recent Washington and Colorado elections which legalized marijuana use. It's one thing to report on the lack of factchecking, but saying both parties don't lie in similar ways to the same ends is being willfully ignorant.--jef)
This kind of analysis allows Scherer to confidently and categorically equate the two campaigns when it comes to reckless disregard for the truth:
Both of the men now running for the presidency claim that their
opponent has a weak grasp of the facts and a demonstrated willingness to
mislead voters. Both profess an abiding personal commitment to honesty
and fair play. And both run campaigns that have repeatedly and willfully
played the American people for fools, though their respective
violations vary in scope and severity.
In the last phrase, actually, Scherer acknowledges that one side may
specialize in lying more than the other—but nowhere in the piece does he
give
any indication which side that might be. It’s an exercise for the reader, apparently.
Scherer does seem troubled by the sheer volume of political lying he
detected in the campaign, and thinks he knows who’s to blame: the
people. He wrote:
So what explains the factual reck-lessness of the campaigns? The most
obvious answer can be found in the penalties, or lack thereof, for
wander-ing astray. Voters just show less and less interest in punishing
those who deceive. (because they are only allowed to vote for candidates from just 2 political parties, and they are both corrupt. So we the voters only get to decide from corrupt candidate A or corrupt candidate B. How does change presume to begin when its champions from which we are limited to choose are both corrupt to begin with?--jef)
Scherer concludes 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.”
Blaming a lazy or partisan public for politicians’ lies seems more
than a little odd, especially since there are people whose job it is to
hold politicians accountable: Those people are called “journalists.” And
if they do not make politicians pay a price for lying, those
politicians are not likely to stop any time soon.
To hear Scherer tell it, though, that’s exactly what
journalists have been doing. Unlike in previous campaign seasons, the
press “has largely embraced the cause of correcting politicians when
they run astray.” This year’s campaign “witnessed a historic increase in
fact-checking efforts by the media, with dozens of reporters now
focused full time on sniffing out falsehood.”
Some of that sniffing has been partisan, though, so Scherer offers this bizarre advice:
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.
Sure—if you want some factchecking of Barack Obama, watch an hour of
Sean Hannity. It’s bizarre, but it’s what you’re left with once you buy
the premise that it’s impossible to discern fact from fiction and the
only option is to read coverage equally skewed in opposite directions.
The problem, Scherer explains, is that voters doesn’t want to hear
the “other side’s” factchecking: “Instead the public increasingly takes
issue with those who deliver the facts.”
Ironically, he quotes former
Al
Gore press secretary
Chris Lehane making the exact opposite point: “In
the past, the press effectively played the role of umpire.... Now they
are effectively in the bleachers.”
So 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.
Reporters appear to be wedded to a set of “rules” that say they are not allowed to convey reality to their readers and viewers. On the
Time Swampland blog (10/9/12), Scherer wrote in response to complaints about his cover story:
I would love to be able to tell you that Mitt Romney is misleading
more than Barack Obama or vice versa.... The problem is that there is no
existing mechanism for carrying this sacred duty out in real time....
There are just too many subjective judgements that have to be made to
come to any conclusion.
This point of view, as
Extra! editor Jim Naureckas responded (
FAIR Blog,
10/9/12),
should not be called
impartiality or
objectivity. It’s really “
radical
post-modernism—a denial that anything can ever really be known about the
world, that all we really can do is report various
claims about the world.”
For Scherer, the biggest fear seems to be that the facts might pile up on one side. He approvingly quotes Brooks Jackson of
FactCheck.org,
who explains that truth-evaluating operations like his are only
pretending to try to set firm standards by which political dishonesty
can be measured:
Even if we could come up with a scholarly and factual way to say that
one candidate is being more deceptive than another, I think we probably
wouldn’t just because it would look like we were endorsing the other
candidate.
So long as the fear of being seen as unfair defines the corporate
media’s approach to factchecking, they will not be “those who deliver
the facts.” Rather, they are people who carefully arrange each chip in
an effort to create the illusion that they let the chips fall where they
may.
