Thu, October 28, 2004
Lies, Damned Lies, and the "Global Test"
I generally enjoy Jonathan Alter's columns in "Newsweek", and this week is no exception. In a piece entitled "The Science of Scare Tactics" he makes the case that it's the responsibility of the news media to do more than just mention that both presidential campaigns are straining the facts in their last-minute attacks. He says, as Jon Stewart and I often do, that journalists can't stop at, "Hey, they're both throwing some wild claims around!" They should be parsing those charged statements and explaining the factual basis, if any, รก la factcheck.org. Alter takes a stab at deconstructing some of the most common claims on each side, and in doing so, touches upon the fact that the Bush campaign tends to employ this tactic more than the Kerry team, making more dramatic attacks and stretching the truth thinner – in some cases, lying outright.
Sure, Alter is a pot-smoking, baby-murdering hippie. He's not just part of the (liberal) media; he's at "Newsweek", for crying out loud. But the point remains: Bush says Kerry will sign over the White House to al Qaeda, and Kerry says Bush will push for the privatization of Social Security.
What's interesting to me about this is that journalists seem generally antsy about allowing themselves to point out something like this. Like Jon Stewart said on Crossfire, they think they're responsible for devoting equal time to the talking points of both candidates, rather than investigating and transmitting to their audience the most informative story. Alter only grazes on the subject with this one sentence: "Kerry's scare tactics against Bush are more justified but less effective." The rest of the column is informative and eloquent, but this is the real point. Nobody's mentioning the simple fact that Bush's distortions are more numerous and more misleading, because they don't want to seem partisan. That's silly. If Bush were to murder someone, they wouldn't report it unless they could also show Kerry killing a guy? Maybe this is why the media typically avoid parsing the campaign claims: to do so would necessarily expose this imbalance.
A few weeks ago, a mid-level producer at ABC News named Mark Halperin circulated a memo that said, in effect, "don't be afraid to hold the Bush campaign more accountable for their exaggerations and mistruths in the campaign; they're doing it more." All he meant was that it doesn't make sense to only expose one exaggeration from BC04 with one exaggeration from KE04 – if the Bushies make twice as many misleading claims, they get away with half of them for free under that model. Halperin's point was, report reality, don't deputize yourself to patrol equal time. Of course, conservative pundits (those who weren't too busy describing elaborate dildo fantasies over the phone) fell over each other making hay out of this, but all he really tried to say was, "Be journalists. Tell the story and find the truth." Impartiality comes from objectivity, not from some precisely metered equilibrium of opposing, unverified viewpoints.
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