Corporate Media Gives Up on Factchecking

Friday, December 7, 2012 by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)

How even a Time magazine cover story on factchecking can't find a way to tell the truth

by Peter Hart

 

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.

The Corporate Media Crisis

Everything Old is New Again
by ROBERT JENSEN

(This essay is excerpted from the foreword of  Prophets of the Fourth Estate: Broadsides by Press Critics of the Progressive Era, editors Amy Reynolds and Gary Hicks.)

The managers of commercial news organizations in the United States love to proclaim their independence from the corporate suits who sign their paychecks. Extolling the unbreachable “firewall” between the journalistic and the business sides of the operation, these editors and news directors wax eloquent about their ability to pursue any story without interference from the corporate front office.

“No one from corporate headquarters has ever called me to tell me what to run in my paper,” one editor (let’s call him Joe) told me proudly after hearing my critique of the overwhelmingly commercial news media system in the United States.

I asked Joe if it were possible that he simply had internalized the value system of the folks who run the corporation (and, by extension, the folks who run the world), and therefore they never needed to give him direct instructions.

He rejected that, reasserting his independence from any force outside his newsroom. I countered:

“Let’s say, for the purposes of discussion, that you and I were equally capable journalists in terms of professional skills, and we were both reasonable candidates for the job of editor-in-chief that you hold. If we had both applied for the job, do you think your corporate bosses would have ever considered me for the position given my politics? Would I, for even a second, have been seen by them to be a viable candidate for the job?”

Joe’s politics are pretty conventional, well within the range of mainstream Republicans and Democrats – he supports big business and U.S. supremacy in global politics and economics. In other words, he’s a capitalist and imperialist. I am on the political left, anti-capitalist and critical of the U.S. empire. On some political issues, Joe and I would agree, but we diverge sharply on the core questions of the nature of the economy and foreign policy.

Joe pondered my question and conceded that I was right, that his bosses would never hire someone with my politics, no matter how qualified, to run one of their newspapers. The conversation trailed off, and we parted without resolving our differences.

I would like to think my critique at least got Joe to question his platitudes, but I never saw any evidence of that. In his subsequent writing and public comments that I read and heard, Joe continued to assert that a news media system dominated by for-profit corporations was the best way to produce the critical, independent journalism that citizens in a democracy needed. After he retired from the paper, he signed on as a “senior adviser” with a high-powered lobbying/public relations firm, apparently without a sense of irony, or shame.

The collapse of mainstream journalism’s business model has given news managers less time to pontificate as they scramble to figure out how to stay afloat, but the smug, self-satisfied attitude hasn’t changed much.

As a former journalist, I certainly understood Joe’s position. When I was a working reporter and editor, I would have asserted my journalistic independence in similar fashion, a viewpoint that reflected the dominant assumptions of newsroom culture. We saw ourselves as non-ideological and uncontrolled. We knew there were owners and bosses whose political views clearly were not radical, and we knew we worked in a larger ideological system. But we working journalists were convinced that we were not constrained.

It was not until I got some critical distance from the daily grind of journalism that I learned there were compelling analyses of the news media that questioned those assumptions I had taken for granted. That media criticism, which had taken off in the 1970s on the heels of the progressive and radical social movements of the ‘60s, was a rich source of new insights for me, first as a graduate student and later as a professor.

But that was only part of my education about the political economy of journalism. As is so often the case, I needed to look to the past to better understand the present. While I had immersed myself in contemporary criticism, I had been slow to look at history, and turning to the critiques of journalism from the progressive/populist era of the early 20th century proved fruitful. Early critics of the commercial news media were pointing out the ways that media owners’ interest in profit undermined journalists’ desire to serve the public interest. Owners and managers are interested in news that serves the bottom line, while journalists are supposed to be pursuing news that serves democracy.

The writings collected and analyzed in this volume provide that historical context. This material is important for the ways it reminds us of a simple truth: An overwhelmingly commercial, for-profit media system based on advertising will never adequately serve citizens in a democracy. But while history helps us recognize simple truths, it does not lead to simplistic predictions – we study history not only to identify the continuities, but also to help us understand the effects of the inevitable changes in institutions and systems.

Indeed, news media and society as a whole have changed over the century. Most obvious are the recent economic changes that have undermined the business model of commercial media. Newspapers and broadcast television stations were wildly profitable through the 20th century, which subsidized an annoying cockiness on the part of owners, managers, and working journalists. Competition from digital media has wiped that smug smile off the face of mainstream journalism, leaving everyone scrambling to come up with a new model. But to focus only on the recent economic crisis would be to miss other trends in the past century that are at least as important.

Reporters who were once members of the working class have become quasi-professionals, and that professionalization of journalism has had effects both positive (elevating ethical standards) and negative (institutionalizing illusory claims to neutrality). Too often journalists in the second half of the 20th century acted as part of the power structure rather than critics of it, as reporters and editors increasingly identified with the powerful people and institutions they were covering rather than being true adversaries.

In the 21st century, the idea of professional journalism – whatever its problems and limitations – is under assault from a pseudo-journalism driven by right-wing ideology. The assertion that the problem with media is that they are too liberal is attractive to many ordinary people who feel alienated from a centrist/liberal elite, which appears unconcerned with their plight. But the right-wing populism offered up by conservatives obscures the way in which elites from that perspective are equally unconcerned with the struggles of most citizens.

So, we sit at a strange time: Professional journalism is inadequate because of its ideological narrowness and subordination to power, but the attacks on professional journalism typically are ideologically even narrower and are rooted in a misguided analysis of power. Some of us are tempted to applaud the erosion of the model of professional journalism we find inadequate for democracy, but a more politicized model for journalism likely will follow the right-wing propaganda that has dominated in the United States in recent decades.

Does history offer insights as we struggle to create a more democratic news media? My reading of the past century leaves me focused on two points.

First, we have to be clear about what we mean by “democracy.” The elites in the United States prefer a managerial conception of democracy based on the idea that in a complex society, ordinary people can participate most effectively by choosing between competing groups of political managers. A participatory conception understands democracy as a system in which ordinary people have meaningful ways to participate in the formation of public policy, not just in the selection of elites to rule them.

Second, we must recognize that expansions of individual freedom do not automatically translate into a deepening of democracy. Though legal guarantees of freedom of expression and political association are more developed today, there is less vibrant grassroots political organizing compared with the United States of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In other writing I have referred to this as the “more freedom/ less democracy” paradox, and it is central to understanding the perilous political situation we face. (see Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2004), Chapter 4, “More Freedom, Less Democracy: American Political Culture in the Twentieth Century,” pp. 55–76.)

The lesson I take away: Real democracy means real participation, which comes not from voting in elections or posting on blogs, but from a lifelong commitment to challenging power from the bottom up.

The problem, in short, is not just a media that doesn’t serve democracy, but a political, economic, and social system that doesn’t serve democracy. Paradoxically, radical movements have over the past century won an expansion of freedom, but much of the citizenry has become less progressive and less politically active at the grassroots. Concentrated wealth has adapted, becoming more sophisticated in its use of propaganda and skillful in its manipulation of the political process.

Journalism’s claim to a special role in democracy is based on an assertion of independence. The corporate/commercial model puts limits on journalists’ ability to follow crucial stories and critique systems and structures of power. Flinging the doors open to a more ideological journalism in a society dominated by well-funded right-wing forces will not create the space for truly independent journalism that challenges power.

The simple truth is that a more democratic media requires a more democratic culture and economy. The media critics in this volume articulated that idea in the context of their time. We need to continue that tradition.