I don’t believe in objective journalism, in that I don’t think it exists. I’ve long ranted against expecting objective journalism, which these days, essentially results in “he said, she said” and “balanced” reporting. One of the biggest gaps to result is the fact that very, very rarely will the media call out people as liars. Over the years, various political campaigns have taken advantage of this fact. This year, it has jumped to a whole new level.
As Atrios says, political campaigning is always going to take liberties with the truth. Sometimes you don’t have to go very far: after all, Kerry was really for it before he was against it. Even the “Al Gore invented the internet” line, wrong as it was, had a teeny tiny kernel of truth within it. And there are times when a statement may be made for effect, and is not literally true. “Putting people in chains” was figurative: it did not mean that shackles were about to be slapped on people’s wrists. Sometimes, quotes get taken out of context to make people look bad. Those are expected in a campaign, and when they go too far, they probably should be slapped down.
That is quite different from outright falsehoods, however, those things that are testable, literal, and are found to be 100% false. This is what the Romney campaign is starting to engage in with increasing gusto. The welfare work requirements is a huge example: it’s just wrong. Not a little bit wrong, not wrong. Or the charge that Janesville’s GM plant closed down on Obama’s watch. Dates are pretty hard to mix up, and this plant closed in 2008 before Obama was president. Another one from Paul Ryan’s speech (and there were a lot) was the claim that the stimulus was the biggest expenditure in government history. Not even close.
It’s hard to recall a campaign that had as many falsehoods central to its message as this one. It’s probably impossible. And it’s something that, in the past, journalists have had a hard time dealing with. Sure, we have “fact checkers” whose job it is to fact check statements, and hopefully do it in a balanced way so as not to be accused of bias, but shouldn’t all journalists be fact-checkers? Shouldn’t all stories be vetted for truth? It gets even harder to deal with when one side is doing it far more than the other, because again, the media is reluctant to say, “In this contest between two people, one of them is lying a lot more than the other”. They just don’t go there normally.
However, there is some proof that, perhaps, the media is finally getting over this reticence. Sure, most are dancing around it, saying things like “factual shortcuts” and “opportunities for dispute”, but they are there. Time will tell two things: whether the Romney campaign continues down this path, and whether the media will start to call it for what it is.
Let’s also remember that the media should call this out whenever it happens, and not to explicitly take sides. If Obama were to make as a central part of his campaign the argument that Romney, say, signed a bill banning abortion when he was governor of Massachusetts, of course the media would be compelled to call out this lie. But there is nothing coming close from the Obama campaign. It’s laughable to even try to come up with a similar lie.
James Downie of the Washington Post implores his fellow members of the media not to let these falsehoods get the same horserace coverage that is so common in media coverage of political campaigns. Unless we want to live in a world where fact-checkers, and facts themselves, do not matter, let’s hope the media fulfill their role.