Stenography and accountability
A laudable attempt to fact-check the politicians on TV
Stenography and accountability
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
Kudos to ABC News for a great idea. Its Sunday morning chat show has hired some astute fact-checkers who will determine, week by week, whether the guest politicians are telling the truth or lying like Pinocchio.
The Washington press corps has long been restrained by its own "objectivity" standards, which too often allow politicians to dissemble without fear of being corrected. Under these traditional rules, journalists are simply supposed to report what is said, and leave it up to the readers and viewers to determine truth or falsity. Politicians have long appreciated this tradition, which has often reduced journalists to the status of stenographers - switching off their brains, out of concern that truth-squadding might be criticized as "bias."
Fortunately, the people at ABC's This Week have decided that the old rules are not sufficient, that true "objectivity" requires holding the politicians accountable by proactively comparing their words to the empirical record. Which is why they've tapped PolitiFact.com, a Pulitzer Prizewinning website based at The St. Peterburg Times, to scour the Sunday remarks for evidence of BS.
Seven hours after the show this past Sunday, the website concluded that Defense Secretary Robert Gates had uttered a half-truth about nuclear policy under George W. Bush, and that GOP Senator John Kyl had told the truth when he said that then-Senator Barack Obama once tried to filibuster a Bush high court nominee. All told, it was a quiet debut for the online watchdogs, who will undoubtedly have meatier fare in the months ahead.
This development is long overdue, given the plethora of unchallenged verbal bamboozlement, especially on the Sunday shows. To cite just one recent example: South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, the Republican who famously said last year that breaking Obama on health care would be his "Waterloo," appeared on the ABC show this past January and insisted, "I did not want this to be the president's Waterloo" - and the host, Terry Moran, didn't challenge him.
On occasions too numerous to mention, back when the Bush administration was selling the Iraq war, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld would show up on Meet the Press and spin like tops, and not even Tim Russert could slow them down. And the print reporters were typically no better. During the summer of '06, Rumsfeld told a Senate commitee that, with respect to Iraq, "I've never painted a rosy picture...and you'd have a dickens of a time trying to find instances when I've been excessively optimistic" - yet even though this assertion was a lie easily refutable via 30 seconds on Google (among many examples, here's Rumsfeld, April 2003: "It could last six days, six weeks, I doubt six months"), The New York Times and Washington Post didn't even report his false assertion, much less challenge it. AP and the NBC Nightly News reported the assertion, but didn't challenge it.
We're not just talking about Republicans, of course. Bamboozlement has always been a bipartisan practice. I well remember an episode in September 2007, when Hillary Clinton was running for president. She was trying to fend off the embarrassing news that one of her major fundraising guys, businessman Norman Hsu, had been jailed as a felon. She had been forced to refund $850,000 to 260 donors - the largest chunk of money ever returned by a candidate - and she was asked on Meet the Press whether this scandal had undercut her bid to be the candidate of change.
She told Russert: "Well, I’m very much in favor of public financing, which is the only way to really change a lot of the problems that we have in our campaign finance system. You know, as soon as my campaign found out what I and dozens of other campaigns did not know, that he was a fugitive from justice, we took action. And out of an abundance of caution, we did return any contribution that we could in any way, no matter how indirect, link to him. And I believe that we’ve done what we needed to do based on the information as soon as it came to our attention....We have got to solve this (problem of big money in politics). It is not good for our political system. It is certainly not the way that most people I know who run for office and want to try to do something good for their constituents and their country want to be spending all of their time. And we’ve got to figure out how we’re going to address it, and there has to be a way that public financing becomes the law of the land."
Russert, who was famously tough on his guests, failed on this occasion to challenge the Clinton assertions that contradicted empirical fact. She had actually responded to the Hsu scandal with all the speed of a turtle trundling through molasses, and she was slow to return the Hsu money (if you're really interested, I said so at the time); more importantly, contrary to her claim on the show that she was "very much in favor of public financing," the truth was that as senator she had never expended time or energy on that issue, and that, indeed, she was the first-ever Democratic presidential candidate to skip the public financing rules and privatize her primary campaign. Yet Russert didn't bring up any of that.
Not to rattle on about ancient history, but this is why more fact-checking is essential, and why the ABC News experiment is so worthy. In defense of journalists, it's often difficult to challenge a whopper in real time, if only because it's nearly impossible to prepare in advance for every conceivable whopper. Still, when I think of the traditional objectivity standard, I harken back to the time when it was most egregiously abused, during the '50s heyday of red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy.
On slow news days, reporters would bug McCarthy for news, and he would happily oblige, by claiming that he had just uncovered 60 or 80 or 100 or whatever number of communists in the State Department or in the Army or wherever. The reporters would write up the latest charge as objective news, simply because a prominent senator had said it. Finally, as a lot of innocents' careers were bring wrecked, and some were being driven to suicide, a New York Times editorial sought to defend the traditional objectivity standard: "It is difficult, if not impossible, to ignore charges by Senator McCarthy...The remedy lies with the reader."
Actually, no. As the ABC News' hiring decision rightly demonstrates, the remedy lies with the journalists.
The window dressing of the nuclear summit is amusing. I give it two yawns and a sigh. Hasn't the cold war ended? Perhaps, Barack can doing a re-enactment of the surrender agreement with the Empire of Japan for his next trick .— Alvenada- I still can't believe that Jerseyites haven't rebelled before this, or that Christie didn't win by a landslide. The taxes you guys pay for relatively little in service is insane.— JimR
- JimR- There are too many municipalties in NJ. That is the real reason the property taxes are so high. I moved over from the Main Line so the tradeoff was you could get a new house on a generous acre for a fraction of the cost of Wayne Pa.
- Mike Welbourn: SORT was a good thing, but the key word is DEPLOYED warheads. To comply with the treaty (not that there were any verification mechanisms), warheads just needed to be put into storage, not dismantled or destroyed. Again, it wasn't a bad thing, but it didn't really accomplish a whole lot.— still_independent
- Smike, I have family in South Jersey and a tone of friends in central NJ - I worked there for a long time-and it seems that everyone made the same decision (more house and land for the money) but there's these little kingdoms everywhere. The taxes seemed nuts 20+years ago and I was amazed at how little they got in Hunterdon amd Middlesex for the money. Christie really seemed to be the right guy for the time. He should have had more of a mandate. He isn't taking prisoners. Hopefully it will force all those municipalities to get real about taxes. The well is dry.— JimR
- swedesboromike : and I thought my taxes were bad (they are, they just aren't quite that bad). Do the trashmen at least come into your house and pick up the trash for you? Recycling four times a week? Lawn mowed by the township? Something ?— still_independent
- Does anyone listen to Mitch McConnell? He was reading carefully from written remarks on financial reform, concentrating hard so he wouldn’t forget which way he had flopped on his most recent position. It’s hard to keep all those lies straight. You have to give him credit, though, for keeping the Party of Fools in line in the Senate. Of course, that’s a lot easier when you’re leading sheep.— Djoko Pritza
- Maybe it's the Flock of Fools.— Djoko Pritza
- Phil Checchia, regarding Obama's affirmative action lack of qualification. Do you have something to verify that? I've heard that a number of times here and other places but have never seen or heard a basis for it, other than his color.— JimR
- djoko, what exactly has Obama accomplished? Unemployment is still just below 9.7% (it would be higher but the federal government has hired thousands of workers since January 2009). Healthcare reform, being the emergency legislation it is since it was needed to save lives, does not go into effect until 2014. Financial reform is stalled, as all Obama wants is the ability to take over any company he deems too big to fail. He now wants mortgage companies to reduce principal balances on loans for those who have been unemployed, yet they will not be able to raise them once those people start working again. This summit was fascinating in the fact that Obama did not mention either Iran or North Korea in his closing remarks but did answer questions about them, and then said sanctions may not work against Iran (there are those who believe he has already accepted the fact of a nuclear armed Iran). We have had 15 months of outreach to Iran and North Korea...what has it accomplished except getting them closer to nuclear capability. We have had the apology tour, a "re-set" of relations with Russia, and bowing to the Chinese, Japanese and Saudi rulers. Yet we still have no agreement on sanctions and the Muslims extremists are still trying to kill us (sorry, that phrase is no longer allowed by this administration to show them we really do not dislike them). So tell us, what exactly has this president accomplished?— tom - wilmington, de
- JimR... I base it on his refusal to release his education records, his IQ and my observation of him off monitor. He is a dope, and got to where he is through Affirmative Action. Maybe you have a thought of why he appears stupid when asked off the cuff questions, and some of his statements (57 states in USA, inability to spell Syracuse, unable to answer who his favorite Chisox player is, mispronouncing the word corpsman, and on and on. ) But you as a liberal are aghast that such a charge be leveled at the first black president. Well, maybe you can explain all the gaffs. My take is he is stupid.— Phil Checchia
- Wait, he did accomplish something. He has accumulated more debt and spent more money in his first 15 months than any president before him. He has flip flopped on mandates for health insurance and the debt commission. He came out in favor of drilling for oil, but really delayed the leasing of sites off Virginia from 2011 to 2012 and cut off large swaths of reserves in off Alaska. He gave George Soros' Brazilian company $2 Billion to drill for oil and they discovered the largest reserves ever found. His stimulus has created thousands of jobs in China, and also allowed states to put off budget decisions from 2009 to 2010. He has alienated Israel and Great Britain, perhaps our strongest allies. He sided with a would be dictator in Honduras after their Supreme Court and Congress followed the rule of law as outlined in their Constitution. He sat silent while protesters in Iran were slaughtered, saying he wanted to negotiate with the rulers who stole an election and were killing pro-democracy protestors. He has so ridiculed our ally in Afghanistan the he is criticizing us in public speeches. So he has accomplished a lot in his first 15 months.— tom - wilmington, de
- How about his 2500 word 17 minute answer of a week ago when asked if Americans were pehaps being taxed too much. He sorely missed his teleprompter then. No wonder he has not had an open press conference since July, longer than even George W Bush went between pressers (for which he was roundly criticized in the media).— tom - wilmington, de
- Still Independent- the recycling and trash is once a week. Other than that there isn't anything spectacular that they do to be awared with over $ 12,000 dollars a year of tax money ( soon to be $ 14,000). 3 of the elementary schools were built in the last 5 years. We have the Taj Mahal of municipal buildings- it was just opened in December. I think the problem is too many municipalites or lack of shared services.
- A top Senate Democrat proposed Tuesday to give unemployed people jobless benefits through Memorial Day instead of risking another cutoff in just three weeks. Max Baucus, D-Mont., proposed the additional time as the Senate officially began debate on legislation to revive a federal unemployment insurance program for people who have been out of a job for more than six months. This will 16 billion to the deficit. Funny how they want to add unemployment benefits while telling us how the economy is turning around. These people can't help but spend money not of their own.
Cited by the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the nation's top political reporters, and lauded by the ABC News political website as "one of the finest political journalists of his generation," Dick Polman is a national political columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is on the full-time faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as "writer in residence." Dick has been a frequent guest on C-Span, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and the BBC. He covered the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential campaigns.
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