Mainstream Media Critics Start Pressuring Big News Orgs To Tell Their Readers The Truth
December 4, 2007 -- 9:48 AM EST // //
Okay, it needs to be said that there's been a positive media development: The in-house media critics at the major papers are finally beginning to ratchet up the pressure on their own papers' editors and reporters to start getting much more aggressive in scrutinizing the claims of candidates. There really seems to be a bit of a drumbeat building on this right now.
Here, for instance, is New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt, devoting his whole column this week to this quaint notion:
Last Monday’s Times reported that Rudolph Giuliani had accused Mitt Romney of having a bad record on crime while governor of Massachusetts.And here is Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz in a chat with readers, again criticizing his own paper's front-page piece recycling the bogus Obama-is-a-Muslim smear without declaring it false:“Violent crime and murder went up when he was governor,” Giuliani said of his Republican rival.
In time-honored journalistic fashion, the newspaper noted the Romney campaign’s response: No, violent crime, which includes murder, actually went down during Romney’s tenure.
If you were like me, you wondered, impatiently, why the newspaper didn’t answer a simple question: who is telling the truth? I wanted the facts, and, not for the first time, The Times let me down.
Post editors say they were trying to knock down the Obama-is-a-Muslim rumor, but I don't believe the piece was well executed. It didn't read like a debunking piece. There was too much about Obama "denying" or "disputing" allegations rather than just branding them false. This was particularly true in the case of the madrassa he allegedly attended as a child. That charge is bogus, as a CNN interview with a top official at the Indonesian school demonstrated, and the Post story failed to make that clear, in my view.It's good to hear these journalistic worthies saying this stuff, and quite clearly, such declarations are largely driven by pressure from the blogosphere. So all the yelling and foot-stamping we're doing is beginning to pay off.
That said, I want to second Matthew Yglesias' assertion that the only way aggressive fact-checking will make a real difference is if the big news orgs make a regular habit of it and start calling out falsehoods and lies for what they are again and again and again. The point here is that the reason someone like Karl Rove keeps lying about what happened in the runup to the Iraq War is precisely because he knows that big news orgs won't call him out on it often enough for there to be any serious downside to doing it. But if they did do this regularly, the cost of telling this lie would begin to outweigh the benefit and Rove would stop doing it.
On this score, I submit that our goal here should be nothing less than seeing a day when calling out the falsehoods and lies for what they are on a regular basis, day after day, in article after article, in paragraph after paragraph, becomes a regular convention of daily journalism at the big news orgs -- one that is as faithfully obeyed as the inverted pyramid format of hard news writing. That may seem very far off, but I'm going to strike a wildly optimistic pose here and assert that the traditional news orgs can eventually be cracked on this point.
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