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.
Wow, what a concept - objective journalists calling a liar a liar! Here's hoping it catches on. If it does, the Republican party is even more doomed than I already thought it was, since most their messages are based on falsehoods. And it won't hurt if the Democrats have to pay attention to objective truth, either.— yoda
pretty soon they'll have to be hooking pols up to polygraph machines for interviews.— potus- I would advise the President not go on the show when speaking about how healthcare reform will create jobs, lower the deficit and strengthen Medicare all at the same time:)— NEPhilly
- I would much prefer our journalists, particularly in Washington, not hew to the hands off approach that has served us so poorly over the last 30 years and instead take a lesson from the presenters on the BBC who when they find a politician dissembling on air call them on it. I think it's time for politicians to become a little more uncomfortable when they lie outright to the people.
Good. Another gauge to show media bias (if there wasn't already enough evidence). I'll pull a Nostradamus and predict Republicans will be held to a much higher standard of what constitutes fact than our Democratic friends.— jmc- Seriously. How do you fact check statements with opinions in them? "Bill Ayers is not a friend of mine" define friend. "This will be the best thing for our country" define best.— Ramon
- The Beltway press and pundits, along with Fox Opinion Media, have done more to influence the proliferation of misinformation and partisan talking points and shameful spin than any other entity. They are not journalists in any way, shape or form – they are influence peddlers. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. While I do not watch the Sunday political shows on any regular basis, I may check out this new gimmick. Will there be a need to fact-check the ABC fact-checkers? If their record is any indication, yes indeed. I’ll still be going to my own reliable, independent news sources, thank you very much. They haven’t steered me wrong yet.— ValerieHarper_NoRelation
I predict that Terry Schiavo prayer fests and Dinosaur debunking were a waste of the POTUS and the US Senate's time. I predict that tens of millions Americans, some of whom get sick, who get health care will be glad they are still alive. I predict that whenever Sarah Palin or John McCain's lips are moving, they will be proven wrong. I predict the standard of showing that the republicans are always lying is a redundant exercise better used for finding a good draft pick for the Sixers.- Fernando, for an intellectually superior liberal, you sure don't communicate very well. What did you just say?— RonaReagan
- hi rhoda, would you mind sharing some of those 'reliable, independent news sources'?— NEPhilly
- I think it's great ABC is doing this as long as they apply it fairly to both poliical parties. But I think the credit for first coming up with the idea of challenging guests on what they say rather than just letting them say whatever they want goes to Bill O'Reilly. He's been doing that on the No Spin Zone for years.— Phillysub
- Gimme a break. This has been tried already and is a joke. For example, see CNN's fact checker. It is just a way that the drive by media trys to self-validate themselves.— CD75
- You have to want to believe the truth for it to matter.— HandNik
- ***Real personal income for Americans - excluding government payouts such as Social Security - has fallen by 3.2 percent since President Obama took office in January 2009, according to the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis. For comparison, real personal income during the first 15 months in office for President George W. Bush, who inherited a milder recession from his predecessor, dropped 0.4 percent. Income excluding government payouts increased 12.7 percent during Mr. Bush's eight years in office. "This is hardly surprising," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist and former director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. "Under President Obama, only federal spending is going up; jobs, business startups, and incomes are all down. It is proof that the government can't spend its way to prosperity." According to the bureau's statistics, per capita income dropped during 2009 in 47 states...The bureau, which doesn't compile statistics on "family" income, reported that per capita income rose during Mr. Bush's two terms, from $29,159 to $32,632 (using 2005 dollar values as a base). During Mr. Obama's 15 months in office, per capita income has dropped nearly 1 percent to $32,343.*** http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/apr/13/personal-income-falls-32-during-obamas-15-months/— NEPhilly
- Rona, I didn't know you underwent total gender reassignment, how refreshing.
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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