5/11/2005
A lesson in balance
Many modern, well-meaning journalists follow the principle of “balance” — a little bit of this, a little bit of that. That can help illuminate both sides of a story, but all too often the easily-practiced ideal of “balance” overrules the more difficult jobs of fairness and accuracy, leaving the truth somewhere in the dark.
Annenberg Political Fact Check at the University of Pennsylvania — famously name-dropped by Dick Cheney in the VP debate, although instead of “dot org” he said “dot com,” which might as well have been a porn site — claims to be a “‘consumer advocate’ for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics.” Last night, they sent out an email to their no-doubt massive list indicating some “deception and confusion” going on:
Millions are being spent on rival ads supporting and opposing two of President Bush’s most controversial judicial selections. Neither ad is completely accurate.
An ad by the pro-Bush group Progress for America implies that Texas judge Priscilla Owen has been endorsed by a newspaper that actually says she’s biased in favor of large corporations and “often contorts her rulings” to conform with her conservative outlook.
A rival ad by the liberal People for the American Way quotes Texas [sic -- California] judge Janice Rogers Brown as saying seniors “are cannibalizing their grandchildren,” without making clear she was speaking metaphorically of debt being passed on to future generations by entitlement programs.
Now, you don’t even have to read their article on “duelling, distorted ads” to see something is wrong. On the one hand, a conservative group is running an ad that claims newspapers endorsed one of these judicial nominees, when in fact they didn’t. On the other hand, a liberal group is running an ad which quotes an another one of these nominees, but fails to explain the obvious.
You can see the People for the America Way ad here. It shows a picture of Janice Rogers Brown with the narration, “Her? She’s so radical that she says, with programs like Social Security and Medicare, seniors are cannibalizing their grandchildren!”
Now, these ads are being placed, according to FactCheck, in “Alaska, Arkansas, Maine, Nebraska, North Dakota, [and] Rhode Island.” I don’t know precisely how dumb FactCheck thinks people in Arkansas are, but do these self-appointed guardians of “balance” really think that some poor sop is out there picturing grandma literally eating her baby grandchild? You would have to be insane to think that is literal. And the dangerous, misleading, failing-to-painstakingly-explain-metaphor party isn’t even PFAW, it’s Brown herself.
This isn’t the first “report” by FactCheck, mimicking the hard-nosed style of a disinterested centrist, to come up wildly distorted. In fact, each “report” since the election — when the “voters” went home — has been kind of weirdly wrongheaded. For example, their “report” on Bush’s “progressive price indexing” plan for Social Security is completely and utterly bogus, both in premise and in execution. It seems to be reading directly from the president’s talking points. I don’t blame Brooks Jackson, the ex-journalist who runs the operation, for not understanding very much about Social Security. I do blame him for being a pompous ass who touts his ignorance as superior truth, above the “deception.”
Why does FactCheck tilt so far to the right? It could be over-compensation for perceived self-bias, or it could be riding the crest of credibility from the Dick Cheney endorsement. More likely it’s just that, for some reason, the site only wants to look at advertisements, completely ignoring the disinformation coming from the White House and the press itself. That model might have worked in a way for the “balance” of a two-man presidential campaign, but it is simply broken for the media environment we have right now.
