The thing is that press doesn't simply tolerate lies, they grant additional authority to the lie and the liar. Hosts and reporters who fail to correct lies implicitly bless them, adding their credibility to it.Fernholz (TAPPED): THERE IS NO PENALTY FOR LYING.
Howard Kurtz moans that the "death panels" wouldn't die in spite of journalistic efforts to debunk the ridiculous notion, writing that "even when they report the facts, [journalists] have had trouble influencing public opinion" and calling the experience "a stunning illustration of the traditional media's impotence." Let me identify a problem that has helped create this impotence: a lack of follow-through.
Having identified Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Chuck Grassley, John McCain and, today, Michael Steele, as spreading falsehoods about health care reform even after they have been broadly discredited, will the journalists Kurtz mentions offer them any sanction? Or will these public figures continue to be extensively quoted in newspapers and on television?
Recall the 2000 narrative that sprung up around Al Gore, painting him as untrustworthy. For some reason I don't think Grassley et. al. will face any questions about their honesty the next time they appear on Meet the Press. In fact, none of these people will. The next time some wild misinformation spreads about a public policy issue, Kurtz will wring his hands about how no one trusts the press, and that's because the press is content to trust liars.
Ezra Klein: Reporting the Lies
Benen: CHRIS MATTHEWS PONDERS FACT-CHECKING...
Every day, my inbox fills with dozens of press releases, tips and advisories. Most of them tell of something that is already happening, or that is scheduled to happen in the near future. My involvement isn't necessary for the thing to occur. Rather, my role is to decide — and it is a decision — whether people will know about it.
Monday's Washington Post features a disheartened Howard Kurtz ruminating on the apparent impotence of the media in the face of the lies, smears and demagoguery that has afflicted the health care debate. "For once," Kurtz says, "mainstream journalists did not retreat to the studied neutrality of quoting dueling antagonists." It didn't much matter. Recent polls show that Americans believe all sorts of untruths about the health-care bills traveling through Congress. "Even when they report the facts," sighs Kurtz, "[the media] have had trouble influencing public opinion."
But before the media reported the facts, they hyped the lies. There are a lot of things the average American doesn't know about. Before Sarah Palin talked about death panels, for instance, no one knew about Sen. Johnny Isakson's quiet crusade to help families afford end-of-life counseling. It did not lead every newscast and it was not reported in every paper. This despite the fact that Isakson (R-Ga.), unlike Palin, has a vote on health-care reform.
It is true that Palin's statements eventually got fact-checked. The New York Times, in particular, spoke clearly and forcefully, albeit well after the controversy had begun dominating the coverage. But the world is full of lies. There aren't enough reporters on the planet to fact-check them all. That's okay, as most lies aren't reported. Stories about the Obamas heading to Martha's Vineyard do not have to contend with stories about a crank who thinks they're really heading to a secret rejuvenation chamber in the Himalayas.
Long before the media ever fact-checks a debate, they construct it. Piece by piece, bit by bit. There is not, however, a whole lot of substantive news on any given day, even as health-care reform remains the central issue before Congress. So they cover the controversy. They cover the lies and the untruths and the angry ads. Sometimes they fact-check these documents and sometimes they don't, but it probably doesn't much matter in the long run: For the past few weeks, the casual consumer of news has heard about death panels and illegal immigrants and skyrocketing deficits and violent town halls. They may not believe all those things. But they assume they're part of the national conversation for a reason, and, quite naturally, they recoil from the center of it.
On Thursday, Jon Stewart invited Betsy McCaughey onto the Daily Show. McCaughey is a professional liar who specializes in lying about health-care reform. Stewart wanted to embarrass her, and some even thought he did. But what he really did was secure her a forum. Viewers saw a segment asking whether health-care reform will kill their grandmothers. Maybe they agreed that Stewart effectively debunked the claims. But more likely, they wondered how good a bill could be if there literally had to be an argument over whether or not it would kill grandma.
Reporting the facts is important. But so too is not reporting — or at least not focusing, day after day — on the lies. The average voter doesn't take their cues from the fifth paragraph in our articles, the one that explains that the quote in the first paragraph isn't necessarily true. They form fuzzy impressions from the shape of the overall conversation. The occasional fact-check isn't nearly so powerful as the aggregate impression conveyed by the coverage. And even if, as Kurtz says, the media has made some admirable efforts to combat specific lies, they — we — have allowed lies and chaos to emerge as the subject of the health-care reform debate.
Over the weekend, on "The Chris Matthews Show," the host and his panel pondered the importance of journalistic fact-checking. It led to this exchange between Matthews, Gloria Borger, and Joe Klein.Matthews: Who's going to fact check for you?
Borger: We fact check, our editors...
Matthews: Online who's going to fact check?
Borger: There are still, it depends.
Matthews: The bloggers don't fact check.
Klein: Nobody fact checks. We still do, the print magazine and Time Magazine still has elaborate fact checkers...
Borger: We fact check.
Klein: ...but Time.com, no.
Jamison Foser noted that Chris Matthews "is the poster child for the punditocracy's habit of endlessly repeating falsehoods that happen to mesh with their worldview.... Is a television reporter who is wrong so often he has to admit 'I keep saying it, and I keep being wrong on this' really in any position to complain about anyone else's fact-checking?"
It is an odd complaint for Matthews to raise. How often do either of Matthews' shows -- "Hardball" or "The Chris Matthews Show" -- run corrections? Or even clarifications? Is there anyone -- outside the blogs, that is -- who checks the accuracy of Matthews' work?
Indeed, as Matt Corley explained, "It's ironic that a cable news host such as Chris Matthews would attack bloggers for supposedly not checking their facts, considering the amount of falsehoods and factually inaccurate statements he regularly utters on the air -- which have all been fact-checked by bloggers."
DougJ: Don’t worry about the government
John Cole: Some Background Would Be NiceNone of you seem to mind my obsession with Ambergate, so I’m going to give it one more whack. Ambinder wrote:
And yet—we, too, weren’t privy to the intelligence. Information asymmetry is always going to exist, and, living as we do in a Democratic system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt, even having learned lessons about giving the government that benefit.Talk to anyone who’s handled raw intelligence and s/he will tell you something on the order of this: “I thought it would be like a secret newspaper, but instead what’s already available in open-source materials is often more useful.” Rarely is there ever a clear policy option “implied” by intelligence—that’s a category error. Policymakers read intelligence, use it or discount it in whole or in part, and then make decisions. Intelligence is a text to be interpreted, not a compass pointing to true north. What’s more, those who acquire and analyze intelligence on a discrete subject use the same body of open-source information to shape their judgments as the rest of us do.
Which implies choices for journalists. We can choose to treat intelligence as more definitive than it is and enable the presumption of deference to those who say, Well, if only you saw the intelligence I saw… Or we can choose to treat intelligence-based claims as valuable but not definitive, and contextualize such claims within larger bodies of evidence.
In other words, “we weren’t privy to the intelligence” is the new “no one could have predicted”.
This shit never changes. Governments like to bamboozle people. One way they can do this is by claiming there is top secret intelligence proving whatever it is that they people to believe. In Ambinder’s world, even if this stop secret intelligence turns out not to mean what the government said it meant, we were still wrong to question it.
How is that not contrary to the first principles of journalism?
Update. Speaking of Marc Ambinder, this analysis of Fran Townsend’s remarks in an interview with Ambinder is spot on (from Michael Scherer, of all people):
In an interview with Marc Ambinder, Fran Townsend, a former Homeland Security adviser to Bush, says that the White House provided the language to Ridge only because he previewed his speech internally. “So I called him said, here’s what I think should go in it,” Townsend tells Ambinder. “It wasn’t an order. I didn’t regularly see his speeches in advance. He made speeches all the time without running it by us.” This is less of a denial than a startling admission: Townsend, whose job profile had nothing to do with politics, is admitting that she wanted political language praising the President inserted into an election-year statement about new measures to protect against terrorist attack.Scherer’s whole piece, based on an advance copy of the book, is worth reading.
The NY Times talks about all the vacancies in the Obama admin:
While career employees or holdovers fill many posts on a temporary basis, Mr. Obama does not have his own people enacting programs central to his mission. He is trying to fix the financial markets but does not have an assistant treasury secretary for financial markets. He is spending more money on transportation than anyone since Dwight D. Eisenhower but does not have his own inspector general watching how the dollars are used. He is fighting two wars but does not have an Army secretary.I wonder why that is? Secretary of the Army seems kind of important. Have no fear, the Times will get to it 15 paragraphs later:
And Republican senators are holding up nominees like John McHugh for Army secretary to influence what happens to the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.Remember a year ago when something like that would have been called treason? At the very least, I’m sure it would have inspired a couple dozen “they’re just on the other side” posts.
- from the comments,
DougJ
It’s worse than that in terms of context. Later, it is revealed that Obama has a higher proportion of positions staffed than previous administrations had.
Unfortunately for Beck, it turns out that Fortune 500 companies don't think calling the president a racist is particularly good for business.A total of 33 Fox advertisers, including Walmart, CVS Caremark, Clorox and Sprint, directed that their commercials not air on Beck's show, according to the companies and ColorofChange.org, a group that promotes political action among blacks and launched a campaign to get advertisers to abandon him. That's more than a dozen more than were identified a week ago.
While this is certainly a positive development, what took them so long? Saying Obama has a "deep-seated hatred for white culture" is disgusting (what is 'white culture' anyway?), but is it objectively worse than say, likening him to Hitler?
But this passage in the AP story is just stupid and lazy.
The Clorox Co., a former Beck advertiser, now says that "we do not want to be associated with inflammatory speech used by either liberal or conservative talk show hosts." The maker of bleach and household cleaners said in a statement that is has decided not to advertise on political talk shows.
The shows present a dilemma for advertisers, who usually like a "safe" environment for their messages. The Olbermanns, Hannitys, O'Reillys, Maddows and Becks of the TV world are more likely to say something that will anger a viewer, who might take it out on sponsors.
Shorter Rachel Maddow: the Republicans are lying about health care reform.
Shorter Glenn Beck: Obama's a fascist Manchurian Hitler Nazi white hater.
Same thing!
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