Establishment journalists are creatures of a highly ideological world and often cause ideology to masquerade as neutral fact.
by Glenn Greenwald
Numerous commentators (including me) were complimentary of the performance of Martha Raddatz as the moderator of Thursday night's vice presidential debate (http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/12/transcript-vice-presiden...). She was assertive, asked mostly substantive questions, and covered substantial ground in 90 minutes. That's all true enough, but the questions she asked reveal something significant about American journalism in general and especially its pretense of objectivity.
For establishment journalists like Raddatz, "objectivity" is the holy grail. In their minds, it is what distinguishes "real reporters" from mere "opinionists" and, worse, partisans. As they tell it, this objectivity means they traffic only in straight facts, unvarnished by ideology or agenda. This journalistic code obligates them to speak only from what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, citing the philosopher Thomas Nagel, derides as "the View from Nowhere" a term Rosen explains this way (http://pressthink.org/2010/11/the-view-from-nowhere-questions-and-answers/):
"Three things. In pro journalism, American style, the View from Nowhere is a bid for trust that advertises the viewlessness of the news producer. Frequently it places the journalist between polarized extremes, and calls that neither-nor position 'impartial'. Second, it's a means of defense against a style of criticism that is fully anticipated: charges of bias originating in partisan politics and the two-party system. Third: it's an attempt to secure a kind of universal legitimacy that is implicitly denied to those who stake out positions or betray a point of view. American journalists have almost a lust for the View from Nowhere because they think it has more authority than any other possible stance."
Leave aside whether that is even a desirable mindset. The reality is that, as desperately as they try, virtually no journalists are driven by this type of objectivity. They are, instead, awash in countless highly ideological assumptions that are anything but objective.
These assumptions are almost always unacknowledged as such and are usually unexamined, which means that often the journalists themselves are not even consciously aware that they have embraced them. But embraced them they have, with unquestioning vigor, and this renders their worldview every bit as subjective and ideological as the opinionists and partisans they scorn.
(In fact, one could reasonably make the case that those whose thinking is shaped by unexamined, unacknowledged assumptions are more biased than those who have consciously examined and knowingly embraced their assumptions, because the refusal or inability to recognize one's own assumptions creates the self-delusion of unbiased objectivity, placing those assumptions beyond the realm of what can be challenged and thus leading one to lay claim to an unearned authority steeped in nonexistent neutrality. That is why I believe that journalists who candidly acknowledge their opinions are better at informing others than those who conceal their opinions: conceal them either from others or, as is often the case, even from themselves.)
At best, "objectivity" in this world of journalists usually means nothing more than: the absence of obvious and intended favoritism toward either of the two major political parties. As long as a journalist treats Democrats and Republicans more or less equally, they will be hailed - and will hail themselves - as "objective journalists".
But that is a conception of objectivity so shallow as to be virtually meaningless, in large part because the two parties so often share highly questionable assumptions and orthodoxies on the most critical issues. One can adhere to steadfast neutrality in the endless bickering between Democrats and Republicans while still having hard-core ideology shape one's journalism.
The highly questionable assumptions tacitly embedded in the questions Raddatz asked illustrate how this works, as does the questions she pointedly and predictably did not ask. Let's begin with Iran, where Raddatz posed a series of questions and made numerous observations that she undoubtedly believes are factual but which are laden with all sorts of ideological assumptions. First there is this:
RADDATZ: Let's move to Iran. I'd actually like to move to Iran, because there's really no bigger national security...
RYAN: Absolutely.
RADDATZ: ... this country is facing.
Ryan's interruption made it difficult to hear whether Raddatz said that there is "no bigger national security threat the country is facing" or "national security issue". Either way, the very idea that Iran poses some kind of major "national security" crisis for the US - let alone that there is "really no bigger national security" issue "this country is facing" - is absurd. At the very least, it's highly debatable.
The US has Iran virtually encircled militarily (http://www.juancole.com/2011/12/iran-has-us-surrounded-all-right.html). Even with the highly implausible fear-mongering claims earlier this year about Tehran's planned increases in military spending, that nation's total military expenditures is a tiny fraction of what the US spends. Iran has demonstrated no propensity to launch attacks on US soil, has no meaningful capability to do so, and would be instantly damaged, if not (as Hillary Clinton once put it) "totally obliterated" if they tried. Even the Israelis are clear that Iran has not even committed itself to building a nuclear weapon.
That Iran is some major national security issue for the US is a concoction of the bipartisan DC class that always needs a scary foreign enemy. The claim is frequently debunked in multiple venues. But because both political parties embrace this highly ideological claim, Raddatz does, too. Indeed, one of the most strictly enforced taboos in establishment journalism is the prohibition on aggressively challenging those views that are shared by the two parties. Doing that makes one fringe, unserious and radical: the opposite of solemn objectivity.
Most of Raddatz's Iran questions were thus snugly within this bipartisan framework. At one point, she even chided Biden for appearing to suggest that Iran may not be actively pursuing a nuclear weapon: "You are acting a little bit like they don't want one" (Biden, of course, urgently disclaimed any such view: "Oh, I didn't say - no, I'm not saying that"). To the extent that she questioned the possibility of attacking Iran, it was purely on the grounds of whether an attack would be tactically effective, citing former defense secretary Bob Gates' warning that that such an attack "could prove catastrophic, haunting us for generations," and then asking: "Can the two of you be absolutely clear and specific to the American people how effective would a military strike be?"
Note what Raddatz did not ask and never would. Even after both candidates re-affirmed their commitment to attacking Iran to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon (Biden dismissed Gates' warning about an attack by saying that "it could prove catastrophic, if we didn't
do it with precision"), there were no questions about whether the US would have the legal or moral right to launch an aggressive attack on Iran. That the US has the right to attack any country it wants is one of those unexamined assumptions in Washington discourse, probably the supreme orthodoxy of the nation's "foreign policy community".
Worse, even after Biden boasted about the destruction of the Iranian economy from US sanctions - "the ayatollah sees his economy being crippled. . . . He sees the currency going into the tank. He sees the economy going into freefall" - there was no discussion about the severe suffering imposed on Iranian civilians by the US, whether the US wants to repeat the mass death and starvation it brought to millions of Iraqis for a full decade, or what the consequences of doing that will be.
In sum, all of Raddatz's questions were squarely within the extremely narrow - and highly ideological - DC consensus about US foreign policy generally and Iran specifically: namely, Iran is a national security threat to the US; it is trying to obtain nuclear weapons; the US must stop them; the US has the unchallenged right to suffocate Iranian civilians and attack militarily. As usual, the only question worth debating is whether a military attack on Iran now would be strategically wise, whether it would advance US interests.
One can say many things about the worldview promoted by her questions. That it is "objective" or free of ideology is most certainly not one of them.
Exactly the same is true of Raddatz's statements and questions about America's entitlement programs. Here is the "question" she asked to launch the discussion:
"Let's talk about Medicare and entitlements. Both Medicare and Social Security are going broke and taking a larger share of the budget in the process."
"Will benefits for Americans under these programs have to change for the programs to survive?"
That Social Security is "going broke" - a core premise of her question - is, to put it as generously as possible, a claim that is dubious in the extreme. "Factually false" is more apt. This claim lies at the heart of the right-wing and neo-liberal quest to slash entitlement benefits for ordinary Americans - Ryan predictably responded by saying: "Absolutely. Medicare and Social Security are going bankrupt. These are indisputable facts." - but the claim is baseless.
As the Pulitzer Prize winning former New York Times economics reporter David Cay Johnston has repeatedly explained (http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/04/column-dcjohnston-socialsecuri...), this is the primary demonstrable myth being used by the DC class - which largely does not need entitlements - to deceive ordinary Americans into believing that they must "sacrifice" the pittances on which they are now living:
"Which federal program took in more than it spent last year, added $95 billion to its surplus and lifted 20 million Americans of all ages out of poverty?
"Why, Social Security, of course, which ended 2011 with a $2.7 trillion surplus.
"That surplus is almost twice the $1.4 trillion collected in personal and corporate income taxes last year. And it is projected to go on growing until 2021, the year the youngest Baby Boomers turn 67 and qualify for full old-age benefits.
"So why all the talk about Social Security 'going broke?' . . . . The reason is that the people who want to kill Social Security have for years worked hard to persuade the young that the Social Security taxes they pay to support today's gray hairs will do nothing for them when their own hair turns gray.
"That narrative has become the conventional wisdom because it is easily reduced to a headline or sound bite. The facts, which require more nuance and detail, show that, with a few fixes, Social Security can be safe for as long as we want."
That Medicare is "going broke" is as dubious and controversial a claim as the one about Social Security. Numerous economists and fact-checking journalists have documented quite clearly why this claim is misleading in the extreme.
Yet this claim has also become DC orthodoxy. That is because, as the economist Dean Baker has explained (http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/robert-samuelson-show...), "Social Security and Medicare are hugely important for the security of the non-rich population of the United States," and "for this reason" many Washington media outlets and think tanks "hate them".
Nonetheless, Raddatz announced this assertion as fact. That's because she's long embedded in the DC culture that equates its own ideological desires with neutral facts. As a result, the entire discussion on entitlement programs proceeded within this narrow, highly ideological, dubious framework. As Jonathan Schwarz put it after the debate:
"Who won the debate? Billionaires, when Martha Raddatz said SS & Medicare are going broke, and Biden didn't argue..."
That is what this faux journalistic neutrality, whether by design or otherwise, always achieves. It glorifies highly ideological claims that benefit a narrow elite class (the one that happens to own the largest media outlets which employ these journalists) by allowing that ideology to masquerade as journalistic fact.
These establishment journalists are creatures of the DC and corporate culture in which they spend their careers, and thus absorb and then regurgitate all of the assumptions of that culture. That may be inevitable, but having everyone indulge the ludicrous fantasy that they are "objective" and "neutral" most certainly is not.
Read the full article with updates at The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/12/raddatz-debate-objec...
© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited
Glenn Greenwald is a columnist on civil liberties and US national security issues for the Guardian. A former constitutional lawyer, he was until 2012 a contributing writer at Salon. His most recent book is, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. His other books include: Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics, A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency, and How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok. He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism.
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The Vice Presidential Debate: Joe Biden Was Right to Laugh
'You should laugh, because this stuff is a joke, and we shouldn't take it seriously.'
by Matt Taibbi
I've never thought much of Joe Biden. But man, did he get it right in last night's debate, and not just because he walloped sniveling little Paul Ryan on the facts. What he got absolutely right, despite what you might read this morning (many outlets are criticizing Biden's dramatic excesses), was his tone. Biden did absolutely roll his eyes, snort, laugh derisively and throw his hands up in the air whenever Ryan trotted out his little beady-eyed BS-isms.
But he should have! He was absolutely right to be doing it. We all should be doing it. That includes all of us in the media, and not just paid obnoxious-opinion-merchants like me, but so-called "objective" news reporters as well. We should all be rolling our eyes, and scoffing and saying, "Come back when you're serious."
The load of balls that both Romney and Ryan have been pushing out there for this whole election season is simply not intellectually serious. Most of their platform isn't even a real platform, it's a fourth-rate parlor trick designed to paper over the real agenda – cutting taxes even more for super-rich dickheads like Mitt Romney, and getting everyone else to pay the bill.
The essence of the whole campaign for me was crystalized in the debate exchange over Romney's 20 percent tax-cut plan. ABC's Martha Raddatz turned the questioning to Ryan:
MS. RADDATZ: Well, let's talk about this 20 percent.
VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Well – (chuckles) –
MS. RADDATZ: You have refused yet again to offer specifics on how you pay for that 20 percent across-the-board tax cut. Do you actually have the specifics, or are you still working on it, and that's why you won't tell voters?
Here Ryan is presented with a simple yes-or-no answer. Since he doesn't have the answer, he immediately starts slithering and equivocating:
REP. RYAN: Different than this administration, we actually want to have big bipartisan agreements. You see, I understand the –
"We want to have bipartisan agreements?" This coming from a Republican congressman? These guys would stall a bill to name a post office after Shirley Temple. Biden, absolutely properly, chuckled and said, "That'd be a first for a Republican congress." Then Raddatz did exactly what any self-respecting journalist should do in that situation: she objected to being lied to, and yanked on the leash, forcing Ryan back to the question.
I'm convinced Raddatz wouldn't have pounced on Ryan if he hadn't trotted out this preposterous line about bipartisanism. Where does Ryan think we've all been living, Mars? It's one thing to pull that on some crowd of unsuspecting voters that hasn't followed politics that much and doesn't know the history. But any professional political journalist knows enough to know the abject comedy of that line. Still, Ryan was banking on the moderator not getting in the way and just letting him dump his trash on audiences. Instead, she aggressively grabbed Ryan by his puppy-scruff and pushed him back into the mess of his own proposal:
MS. RADDATZ: Do you have the specifics? Do you have the math? Do you know exactly what you're doing?
So now the ball is in Ryan's court. The answer he gives is astounding:
REP. RYAN: Look – look at what Mitt – look at what Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill did. They worked together out of a framework to lower tax rates and broaden the base, and they worked together to fix that. What we're saying is here's our framework: Lower tax rates 20 percent – we raise about $1.2 trillion through income taxes. We forgo about 1.1 trillion [dollars] in loopholes and deductions. And so what we're saying is deny those loopholes and deductions to higher-income taxpayers so that more of their income is taxed, which has a broader base of taxation –
Three things about this answer:
1) Ryan again here refuses to answer Raddatz's yes-or-no question about specifics. So now we know the answer: there are no specifics.
2) In lieu of those nonexistent specifics, what Ryan basically says is that he and Romney will set the framework – "Lower taxes by 20 percent" – and then they'll work out the specifics of how to get there with the Democrats in bipartisan fashion.
3) So essentially, Ryan has just admitted on national television that the Romney tax plan will be worked out after the election with the same Democrats from whom they are now, before the election, hiding any and all details.
So then, after that, there's this exchange.
VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: Can I translate?
REP. RYAN: – so we can lower tax rates across the board. Now, here's why I'm saying this. What we're saying is here's a framework –
VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: I hope I'm going to get time to respond to this.
REP. RYAN: We want to work with Congress –
MS. RADDATZ: I – you'll get time.
REP. RYAN: We want to work with Congress on how best to achieve this. That means successful – look –
MS. RADDATZ: No specifics, yeah.
Raddatz did exactly the right thing. She asked a yes-or-no question, had a politician try to run the lamest kind of game on her – and when he was done, she called him on it, coming right back to the question and translating for viewers: "No specifics."
Think about what that means. Mitt Romney is running for president – for president! – promising an across-the-board 20 percent tax cut without offering any details about how that's going to be paid for. Forget being battered by the press, he and his little sidekick Ryan should both be tossed off the playing field for even trying something like that. This race for the White House, this isn't some frat prank. This is serious. This is for grownups, for God's sake.
If you're going to offer an across-the-board 20 percent tax cut without explaining how it's getting paid for, hell, why stop there? Why not just offer everyone over 18 a 1965 Mustang? Why not promise every child a Zagnut and an Xbox, or compatible mates for every lonely single person?
Sometimes in journalism I think we take the objectivity thing too far. We think being fair means giving equal weight to both sides of every argument. But sometimes in the zeal to be objective, reporters get confused. You can't report the Obama tax plan and the Romney tax plan in the same way, because only one of them is really a plan, while the other is actually not a plan at all, but an electoral gambit.
The Romney/Ryan ticket decided, with incredible cynicism, that that they were going to promise this massive tax break, not explain how to pay for it, and then just hang on until election day, knowing that most of the political press would let it skate, or at least not take a dump all over it when explaining it to the public. Unchallenged, and treated in print and on the air as though it were the same thing as a real plan, a 20 percent tax cut sounds pretty good to most Americans. Hell, it sounds good to me.
The proper way to report such a tactic is to bring to your coverage exactly the feeling that Biden brought to the debate last night: contempt and amazement. We in the press should be offended by what Romney and Ryan are doing – we should take professional offense that any politician would try to whisk such a gigantic lie past us to our audiences, and we should take patriotic offense that anyone is trying to seize the White House using such transparently childish and dishonest tactics.
I've never been a Joe Biden fan. After four years, I'm not the biggest Barack Obama fan, either (and I'll get into why on that score later). But they're at least credible as big-league politicians. So much of the Romney/Ryan plan is so absurdly junior league, it's so far off-Broadway, it's practically in New Jersey.
Paul Ryan, a leader in the most aggressively and mindlessly partisan Congress in history, preaching bipartisanship? A private-equity parasite, Mitt Romney, who wants to enact a massive tax cut and pay for it without touching his own personal fortune-guaranteeing deduction, the carried-interest tax break (http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/01/24/mitt-romneys-sweetest-tax-break-t...) – which keeps his own taxes below 15 percent despite incomes above $20 million?
The Romney/Ryan platform makes sense, and is not laughable, in only one context: if you're a multi-millionaire and you recognize that this is the only way to sell your agenda to mass audiences. But if you're not one of those rooting gazillionaires, you should laugh, you should roll your eyes, and it doesn't matter if you're the Vice President or an ABC reporter or a toll operator. You should laugh, because this stuff is a joke, and we shouldn't take it seriously.
© 2012 Rolling Stone
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/the-vice-presidentia...
As Rolling Stone’s chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.
The Danger of False Equivalency in the Media
Objectivity Does Not Mean Neutrality: The Danger of False Equivalency in the Media
by David Gutman
What happens when public officials don’t tell the truth? Traditionally it’s been the role of the media to point this out. It is the role of the media not only to uncover hidden deceit, but also to point out deceit in plain sight. The media should not and cannot hide behind the phony gauze of neutrality. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously quipped, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.”
It is the job of the media to distinguish between the two, and to clearly and blatantly point out the discrepancies to the public.
And yet, too often, they do not. The media, too often, reports what officials say and how they say it, and doesn’t delve into the substance and accuracy of the statements.
The truth is objective, a presentation of both sides of an argument is not necessarily objective.
When a topic is noisily debated, journalists go to pains to present, with equal space and import, both sides of the topic. Usually this is a good thing. The public should know the arguments from all sides of a contentious issue.
But sometimes, and this may sound overly simplistic, but it remains true, there is only one credible side to a debate.
The earth is getting warmer, and man-made carbon emissions are causing it.
Humans evolved from apes. You cannot cut taxes by 20 percent and close enough loopholes to be revenue neutral without raising taxes on the middle class.
Study after reputable study has shown these statements to be true. (Admittedly there have been fewer studies of the last claim because it is so much newer, but every reputable study has found the above statement accurate). Yet we still see news stories in which “experts” from both sides of the argument are called upon and given equal standing to make their case.
Paul Krugman, the Nobel-winning economist and unabashedly liberal New York Times op-ed columnist, wrote about this phenomenon in 2000.
“If a presidential candidate were to declare that the earth is flat, you would be sure to see a news analysis under the headline ‘Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.’ After all, the earth isn't perfectly spherical.
That analysis is equally applicable today. The mainstream media (with the exception of nakedly partisan outfits like Fox News and MSNBC) are so desperate to appear unbiased that they go out of their way to point out inconsistencies on both sides of the political spectrum even when it may not be appropriate.
This false equivalency, the effort of the news media to remain at the political center of an argument, no matter the merits or truthfulness of either side of the argument, is sometimes labeled as a bias towards objectivity. This is a false and misleading turn of phrase.
Journalists should always exhibit a bias towards objectivity. Being objective -- dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings -- is always the goal. The trouble comes when objectivity is confused with neutrality.
It is fine to be partial, indeed it is imperative if, after a careful examination of the facts, one concludes that the truth lies on one side of the argument. This is being objective. Examining the facts on their merits and presenting the truth is a journalist’s job.
Granted, on many issues there is legitimate debate and disagreement, but this is not always the case, and the media should not treat every issue as if both sides have equally valid points.
The truth does not always lie in the center. In fact, it rarely does.
A journalist’s job is to report the truth, not to neutrally report what both sides say and stake out a safe position in the middle.
This insidious practice of false equivalence takes two general forms.
First, and most obviously, journalists act as spokesmen for both sides of an argument without delving into the substance of what either side is saying. Or, in an effort to appear unbiased they’ll point out the obvious flaws in one side’s argument while nit-picking questionable claims or secondary inconsistencies in the other side’s argument.
The second form is tougher to spot. It involves giving equal time and equal billing to both sides of a technical argument when, among those in a position to know, there really is no disagreement. There are issues--abortion, gay marriage, the role of government, etc.--on which reasonable people can disagree. These are issues in which one does not need technical knowledge or expertise to have an informed opinion. Of course, more knowledge always helps. But you don’t need to be an obstetrician to have a valid opinion on abortion. You don’t need to be a pastor to have a valid opinion on gay marriage. You don’t need to be a senator or a political science professor to have a valid opinion on the role of government.
But some arguments--arguments that have great political import--cannot be productively waged by average citizens, political pundits, or even elected officials.
Some arguments are highly technical, and when they’re waged in a political forum, the only opinions that should be cited are those of actual experts.
The topic where uninformed opinions are most egregiously cited in an attempt to give equal footing to a specious argument is global warming.
If you are arguing about global warming and climate science, you need to talk to climate scientists.
And, among climate scientists, there is no argument, there is no debate.
The earth is getting warmer. Humans are causing it with their carbon emissions. And there will be negative, and likely grave, consequences for humanity.
The facts: A 2010 paper, “Expert Credibility in Climate Change,” conducted a broad study of the climate science community to see if there was any sort of consensus on climate change. It was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors, William R.L. Anderegg, James W. Prall, Jacob Harold, and Stephen H. Schneider, analyzed the data and publications of 1,372 climate scientists. They had two primary findings: First, 97-98 percent of climatologists support the “tenets of anthropogenic climate change” (human caused global warming). Second, “The relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC [anthropogenic climate change] are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.”
In essence: nearly the entire relevant scientific community believes in global warming, and those that don’t are significantly less accomplished than the rest.
There is almost no issue which gets 98 percent agreement on one side.
The research and consensus on human-caused global warming is as conclusive and convincing as any scientific subject of our time.
And still neither the public nor, more importantly for our purposes, the media is convinced.
One of the most egregious examples of false equivalence with regards to climate change came just a month ago from one of the media organizations most often accused of having a liberal bias, PBS.
On Sept. 17, the PBS NewsHour ran a story on Richard Muller, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who is a self-described “converted skeptic” on climate change. Muller publicly renounced his skepticism in a July op-ed in The New York Times after analyzing the results of a multi-year study that he ran, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project. Incidentally, the Berkeley project was funded in large part by the Charles G. Koch foundation, normally no friend to climate science. Muller’s conclusions are striking in their lack of ambiguity:
Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.
By itself, this seems like a modestly interesting story. One of the few (2-3 percent) remaining, reputable climate skeptics has come full circle. But instead of running a story on Muller’s conversion to the mainstream, PBS felt the need to “balance” Muller’s story with an “expert” from the other side. And thus, about four minutes of the 10-minute story are given to an interview with Anthony Watts, a television meteorologist with no scientific background.
So basically, PBS has a story about one of a tiny, tiny minority of climatologists who are skeptical about climate change who has changed his mind and embraced the majority view. For some reason PBS felt the need to balance this story with nonsense from an irrelevant and non-accredited source.
It gets worse. At the end of the broadcast segment, anchor Judy Woodruff directs viewers to the PBS website for more video on the subject. On the website is a 10-minute interview with Watts. If we’re just going by time, that’s 14 minutes of video for Watts (who represents the views of 2-3 percent of the scientific community, despite not being a scientist) and about six minutes for Muller, the convert.
The online interview, conducted by Spencer Michels, is outrageous.
Michels begins: “Let’s start out with the basic idea that there’s debate in this country over global warming. There’s some people who call it a complete hoax. There are some people who completely embrace it. So where do you stand in that spectrum?”
The basic premise for the interview, which Michels lays out himself, is entirely false. There is no debate over global warming! Anyone who calls it a “complete hoax” is either a crackpot or woefully uninformed. The percentage of climate scientists who deny global warming is so small that it is literally statistically insignificant.
And who cares where Anthony Watt stands? He’s a TV weatherman! Why does he have any authority to speak on this subject?
We’re not done yet.
PBS, predictably, took heavy criticism for the piece. The day after it aired, PBS responded on its website with this quote: “Spencer will have another blog post today offering the views of other scientists in the broadcast concerned about the threats of climate change.”
In case you missed the misleading innuendo in that statement, here it is: Other scientists? Watts is not a scientist. For that sentence to read truthfully, PBS would need to replace the word “other” with “actual” or “real.”
A subsequent correction on the PBS website included this statement: “Editor's Note: An earlier version of this post implied that Anthony Watts is a scientist. As we reported on the broadcast last night, he is not.”
Great, thanks for clearing that up. So why was he given 14 minutes of airtime in a piece about complex scientific issues?
Other examples of climate change false equivalence are less blatant, but perhaps more insidious for their subtlety.
Every time the tiny minority of deniers is giving equal standing, they’re given undeserved credibility, even if it’s just subconscious, in the eyes of the public. The more the media says or even implies that there is an argument, the more the public believes that there actually is one.
Every time the Washington Post publishes a sentence about global warming like this one: “For years there were only a handful of researchers on both sides of the debate,” the idea of a debate is legitimized in the public consciousness.
Not only is that sentence completely inaccurate--the overwhelming consensus of scientists on the side of man-made climate change is not at all a recent development--but it presupposes that there is a debate to be had.
That sentence was published on March 5, 2012, so false equivalence is still very much an issue in the media.
On March 13, 2012, The New York Times published an article that reported rising sea levels caused by global warming pose a risk to coastal communities. The headline, the lead and the bulk of the article are informative and do a good job of presenting the issue without feebly resorting to presenting the opinion of the “other side.”
But the 11th paragraph of the 21 paragraph article contains this nefarious statement:
The handful of climate researchers who question the scientific consensus about global warming do not deny that the ocean is rising. But they often assert that the rise is a result of natural climate variability, they dispute that the pace is likely to accelerate, and they say that society will be able to adjust to a continuing slow rise.
Myron Ebell, a climate change skeptic at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington research group, said that “as a society, we could waste a fair amount of money on preparing for sea level rise if we put our faith in models that have no forecasting ability.”
The author has succumbed to his worst journalistic instinct, the need to air both sides of an argument, even when no argument exists. Not to belabor the point, but a view held by 2 percent of experts does not deserve equal time.
What’s worse, the phrasing and sequencing of these two paragraphs makes one believe that the quoted skeptic, Myron Ebell, is a climate researcher. He is not. He is a spokesman at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a think tank advocating free markets and limited government. Why he’s qualified to rebut the research and analysis of climate scientists is a mystery.
A look at Ebell’s biography on his employer’s website, confirms that false equivalence is alive and well. Ebell has given his inexpert opinion on ABC, NBC, PBS, the BBC, CNN, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Sky TV, Al Jazeera, Fox News, NPR, and Air America, among others.
It’s worth noting that the three examples I’ve cited (with thanks to Joe Romm on thinkprogress.org who brought them to public attention) come not from Fox News or the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but from PBS, The Washington Post, and the New York Times, three of the organizations most often mentioned when people complain of a liberal bias in the media.
Journalists are not stenographers. Journalists should not just report what officials say, they should critically analyze and evaluate statements and put them in the context of a broader story. When statements are false, journalists should say so.
More and more these days the task of evaluating the veracity of what officials say is being delegated to specialized “fact-checkers.”
It’s a bit disconcerting that regular journalists are no longer able to do this in the course of their work. The rise of fact-checkers seems like it could lead to a slippery slope of journalists no longer being expected to fact-check the information they report.
As evidence, witness the conservative uproar when Candy Crowley fact-checked Mitt Romney’s false claim about President Barack Obama’s statement on Libya in the last presidential debate. That’s not her role, we were told. Well, of course it is. She’s a journalist, so when she hears a lie she should inform the public.
Romney said Obama did not refer to the attack on our consulate in Benghazi as an act of terror. Actually, he did, and Crowley told the audience as much.
Just because she didn’t call out every misstatement doesn’t mean she shouldn’t call out any. She should point out as many as she can.
Even if it’s not a great idea to give them a separate title and distinguish them from journalists at large, fact-checkers still perform a crucial role. But too often they abandon objectivity in a misguided pursuit of false balance. They assume that the center is always the right place to be, and therefore there must be an equal number of misstatements and lies on both sides of the political spectrum.
In 2009 and 2010, PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-check organization from the Tampa Bay Times, chose Republican claims (2009: Obamacare includes death panels; 2010: Obamacare is a government takeover of health care) for its “Lie of the Year.” So, apparently, they felt the need to appear neutral (not objective) and in 2011 PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year” was the Democratic claim that “Republicans voted to end Medicare.”
Neutrality is nice, but not at the expense of objectivity. The Democratic claim wasn’t even a lie, much less the lie of the year.
The claim refers to Rep. Paul Ryan’s 2011 budget which House Republicans voted for by a spread of 235-4. The budget would change Medicare--for everyone 55 and younger--from a program covering a prescribed number of medical benefits into a program that essentially gives seniors a check and tells them to buy health insurance on the private market. Every independent analysis said that the check would not grow fast enough to keep up with medical costs.
Republicans did vote to end Medicare. Medicare is a program that guarantees public health insurance for seniors. The program that Republicans voted for would give seniors a (likely insufficient) check to try to buy insurance on the open market. It’s an entirely different program.
Granted the program would still be called Medicare, but that’s just nomenclature, not substance.
Writing on NPR’s website, Frank James explained: “PolitiFact’s logic, distilled to its essence, is that if a program continues to exist with the same name, albeit in radically changed form, it is inaccurate to describe the original program as having been ended.”
By this logic we could turn Yosemite and Yellowstone into parking lots and it would be a lie if anyone said that the National Parks program had ended.
We could disband the CIA and give everyone a check to pay for their own private intelligence and it would be a lie to say the CIA had ended.
PolitiFact defended their “Lie of the Year” by saying that Democrats, “ignored the fact that the Ryan plan would not affect people currently in Medicare.” So what? That doesn’t change the fact that Republicans actually did vote to end Medicare as it has existed for its entire 46-year existence.
If there’s one thing that almost everyone can agree on (other than humanly caused global warming) it’s that political statements are far too often false, misleading, or outright lies. For PolitiFact to choose a true statement, which at best is modestly misleading, as its “Lie of the Year” smacks of the worst form of false equivalence.
PolitiFact is not alone among fact-checkers fitfully searching for falsehoods from both sides so as to appear neutral.
After a Romney campaign ad about welfare work requirements was roundly debunked as false, Romney spokesman Neil Newhouse infamously said, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”
During his speech at the Democratic National Convention, former President Bill Clinton referenced Newhouse’s statement: "I couldn't have said it better myself,” Clinton said. “I just hope you remember that every time you see the ad."
The AP’s fact-checkers, apparently desperate to find something to refute in Clinton’s speech, responded with this:
THE FACTS: Clinton, who famously finger-wagged a denial on national television about his sexual relationship with intern Monica Lewinsky and was subsequently impeached in the House on a perjury charge, has had his own uncomfortable moments over telling the truth. "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," Clinton told television viewers. Later, after he was forced to testify to a grand jury, Clinton said his statements were "legally accurate" but also allowed that he "misled people, including even my wife."
In an hour-long speech notable for its heavy emphasis on policy and detail, the AP responded to an uncontroversial statement by bringing up a nearly 15 year old scandal that is completely irrelevant to any current topic. Exactly which fact was checked here?
The AP fact-checking example is truly idiotic and is the dregs of the dregs of false equivalency. But, again, sometimes less blatant examples of false equivalency can be just as insidious as the laughable ones.
After the most recent presidential debate, The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler fact-checked three claims by Mitt Romney: Romney claimed his jobs plan would create 12 million jobs in four years--as Kessler reported, that number is cobbled together from three different studies that both do not assess Romney’s plan specifically and look at a longer time period than four years.
Romney claimed President Obama would raise taxes on the middle-class by $4,000 per year--simply false.
Romney says middle-income taxpayers will no longer pay any tax on interest of capital gains—but the middle-class already pays virtually no taxes on interest or capital gains.
So we have three blatantly false or misleading claims which Kessler does well to refute. But, in the name of balance and neutrality, Kessler also attempts to debunk three claims that Obama made in the debate: Obama said that he bet on American workers while Romney said we should let Detroit go bankrupt--Romney wrote an op-ed with that very phrase in the headline and repeated it on television interviews. Romney argues that G.M. did go through bankruptcy, but it did so with $80 billion in federal backing, a crucial difference especially at the time, when credit markets were frozen.
Obama said they’ve built enough pipeline to wrap around the earth--Kessler admits this is true but quibbles about the kind of pipeline and says that, percentage wise, that’s not that much pipeline.
Obama said: “I said I would cut taxes for middle-class families, and that’s what I’ve done, by $3,600.” Kessler complains that Obama cut taxes by $3,600, but not in one big tax cut, in a few smaller ones. He also says that some of the tax cuts may expire, none of which refutes Obama’s claim.
If there isn’t an equal amount of mendacity on both sides of a political campaign, then efforts to make it look otherwise obfuscate the truth and do the reader no service.
Journalists should not be bound by tenets of neutrality, but by tenets of objectivity. If those overlap, that’s great, it makes a reporter’s job that much easier and less controversial. But if the interests of objectivity and neutrality diverge, a journalist’s loyalty lies with the truth, not with the political or rhetorical center.
http://www.commondreams.org/author/david-gutman
David Gutman writes for the Capital News Service in Maryland
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