A real example of Fair and Balanced

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
A real example of Fair and Balanced
4
Tue, 05-25-2004 - 9:54pm
As I read this New York Times article on the way to work this morning, I was struck by how much the Times is maligned by posters here as the king of the so called "liberal media" and yet here's a front page article which so clearly exhibits the journalistic standard of fair and balanced (not the Fox News version of that standard) that I had to post it. If anything, I think it comes down harder on Kerry.

And that issue aside, it's an interesting article that could have been much, much longer. The "I'm so and so and I approve of this ad" rule has done absolutely nothing to stop attack ads. I would say that I don't understand how candidates aren't downright embarassed by these falsehoods, but according to the article, attack ads work like a charm. The only antidote I see is right here - the web.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/25/politics/campaign/25ADS.html

Campaign Ads Are Under Fire for Inaccuracy

By JIM RUTENBERG

Published: May 25, 2004

ASHINGTON, May 24 — A record year for political advertising has brought with it a hail of televised exaggerations, omissions and mischaracterizations that pollsters say seem to be leaving voters with mistaken impressions of Senator John Kerry and President Bush.

The degree to which the advertisements push the facts, or go beyond them, varies by commercial. While Mr. Bush's campaign has been singled out as going particularly far with some of its claims, Mr. Kerry's campaign has also been criticized as frequently going beyond the bounds of truth.

In three of its advertisements, Mr. Bush's campaign has said Mr. Kerry would raise taxes by at least $900 billion in his first 100 days in office. Mr. Kerry has no such plan.

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In an advertisement for Mr. Kerry, an announcer said, "George Bush says sending jobs overseas makes sense for America." Mr. Bush never said that. A report to Congress by his top economic adviser said cheaper production of goods overseas had long-term benefits but did not make the plain case that domestic job losses were a good thing.

Outside groups are getting into the act as well.

The League of Conservation Voters, which has endorsed Mr. Kerry, is running an advertisement in Florida warning that "President Bush opened up Florida's coast to offshore drilling." But the drilling area that was opened under Mr. Bush is 100 miles off the coast, much farther than it would have been under a Clinton administration proposal.

Of course, it is a time-tested practice to make one's opponent look as bad as possible in a political campaign, whether the race is for town council or the presidency of the United States. And the campaigns and outside groups say they are under no obligation to present defenses for their opponents in their own advertisements, all of which are at least tenuously based in fact.

But this campaign season, with total advertising spending at roughly $150 million since early last summer, the number of distortions and omissions is worrying some good-government groups, which say they fear that the big money behind the claims is leaving indelible impressions.

"Even people who don't think there is much information in these ads and say they don't learn anything from them tell us they believe factoids they could only have gotten from these ads, and they're wrong," said Brooks Jackson, director of Factcheck.org, an Annenberg Public Policy Center Web site that vets political advertisements for accuracy. "It's beyond subliminal — it's something else I haven't come up with a name for."

This month the Annenberg Center, at the University of Pennsylvania, released a poll of voters in battleground states that found many believed misleading statements made in the advertisements.

In a survey conducted from April 15 to May 2, 61 percent of the 1,026 voters questioned in the 18 swing states where most of the advertising has run said they believed Mr. Bush favored sending jobs overseas. And 72 percent said they believed that three million jobs had been lost during Mr. Bush's presidency. Mr. Kerry made that claim in a spot in late February, when the most commonly used Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed the actual net job loss to be closer to 2.3 million, down from 2.7 million in late summer. That number is now less than 1.6 million. (Mr. Kerry's figures did not include government jobs.)

In the same survey, 46 percent of those questioned said they believed Mr. Kerry "wants to raise gasoline taxes by 50 cents a gallon." Three spots for Mr. Bush have said that Mr. Kerry supported a 50-cent-a-gallon tax hike on gasoline, an assertion based from comments Mr. Kerry that appeared in two newspapers 10 years ago regarding a position he never acted on and has long since abandoned.

More than half of those surveyed also said they believed Mr. Kerry had "voted for higher taxes 350 times." That idea, Annenberg researchers concluded, is based on a commercial for Mr. Bush in which an announcer said, "Kerry supported higher taxes over 350 times." While Bush campaign aides say the contention is accurate and have made public a list of instances to which it refers, they acknowledge that in several of these cases Mr. Kerry had in fact either voted to maintain tax rates or even to cut them, but not by as much as Republicans had proposed.

"Each of these votes amounted to higher taxes than an alternative," said Terry Holt, a spokesman for the Bush campaign. "We expect that voters will reach the obvious conclusion that John Kerry will increase your taxes or will oppose efforts to cut taxes."

Asked why the spot did not simply say that Mr. Kerry has consistently voted for higher taxes than Republicans have proposed, which even the Kerry campaign would not dispute, Mr. Holt said, "We said `supported higher taxes,' as provably true and totally accurate."

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Several other commercials this year have been criticized for pushing past the facts when they could have indisputably conveyed similar points with less sensational-sounding claims.

For instance, one of Mr. Kerry's new commercials boasts that he provided "a decisive vote" for President Bill Clinton's 1993 economic plan, which, it maintains, "created 20 million new jobs." The bill passed by a single vote in the Senate, giving anybody who voted for it a claim to have provided a decisive vote. But at the time, it was the last-minute support of Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat of Nebraska, that was considered decisive. And even economists who credit the plan with playing a significant role in the 1990's boom say Mr. Kerry's spot goes too far.

"To say that any one economic package was responsible for all of the stuff going on in the 90's is kind of ridiculous," said L. Douglas Lee, president of Economics From Washington, an economic policy analysis firm. Still, Mr. Lee said, the 1993 package was an important factor in the boom.

Asked why the spot did not simply say Mr. Kerry voted for a package credited with helping to set the conditions for the boom, Michael Meehan, a Kerry spokesman, said: "That's why we have elections. People get to decide. We said it created 20 million jobs. If people don't believe that, they should vote for someone else."

Aides on both sides said privately that it was hard to fit all the nuance of complex policies into a vehicle designed to convey thoughts no more complex than "Tastes Great, Less Filling."

"There's only so much you can do in a 30-second ad," said an aide to Mr. Kerry, making a point that was echoed by a senior strategist for the Bush campaign.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, does not accept that. "When they could make the 30-second ad accurate and they don't, you've got to believe that they're intentionally misleading you," she said.

Kenneth M. Goldstein, an associate professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, said it was to be expected that the campaigns would take liberties, and that with both Mr. Kerry and Mr. Bush flush with cash, there was plenty of time for them to answer each other's claims.

"Politics is about putting your best foot forward and putting the other person in the worst light," Mr. Goldstein said. "Do we expect someone who's advertising to say, `You know, I really don't want to put this person's record in the worst light because that's not fair'?"

In the end, Mr. Jackson of Factcheck.org said, all that can be done is to continue to vet commercials for accuracy and try to set the record straight as publicly as possible. That, he said, is an occasionally thankless task:

"I've had consultants tell me, `Your ad watch runs once, my ad runs many times; who's going to win?' "




iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Wed, 05-26-2004 - 8:34pm

Here is the link mentioned in the article.............


http://www.factcheck.org/


>"The only antidote I see is right here - the web."<

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Fri, 05-28-2004 - 11:27am
For some time I have been living with conflicted views of the media. On the boards they are referred to, with much disdain, as "liberal media," yet when I read these same papers I am disappointed at their reluctance to look beneth the surface and ask hard questions or even ask questions at all. Recently,"very liberal" NYT has been reporting a mia culpa about it's stories leading up to the Iraqi war and it's failure to do research. Finally! the shock and awe may be wearing off and soon the cons may have a liberal media to really complain about. I hope--I cross my fingers--and want to cheer them on. I will be so happy when the liberal media roars.

To Tell the Truth

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: May 28, 2004

Some news organizations, including The New York Times, are currently engaged in self-criticism over the run-up to the Iraq war. They are asking, as they should, why poorly documented claims of a dire threat received prominent, uncritical coverage, while contrary evidence was either ignored or played down.

But it's not just Iraq, and it's not just The Times. Many journalists seem to be having regrets about the broader context in which Iraq coverage was embedded: a climate in which the press wasn't willing to report negative information about George Bush.

People who get their news by skimming the front page, or by watching TV, must be feeling confused by the sudden change in Mr. Bush's character. For more than two years after 9/11, he was a straight shooter, all moral clarity and righteousness.

But now those people hear about a president who won't tell a straight story about why he took us to war in Iraq or how that war is going, who can't admit to and learn from mistakes, and who won't hold himself or anyone else accountable. What happened?

The answer, of course, is that the straight shooter never existed. He was a fictitious character that the press, for various reasons, presented as reality.

The truth is that the character flaws that currently have even conservative pundits fuming have been visible all along. Mr. Bush's problems with the truth have long been apparent to anyone willing to check his budget arithmetic. His inability to admit mistakes has also been obvious for a long time. I first wrote about Mr. Bush's "infallibility complex" more than two years ago, and I wasn't being original.

So why did the press credit Mr. Bush with virtues that reporters knew he didn't possess? One answer is misplaced patriotism. After 9/11 much of the press seemed to reach a collective decision that it was necessary, in the interests of national unity, to suppress criticism of the commander in chief.

Another answer is the tyranny of evenhandedness. Moderate and liberal journalists, both reporters and commentators, often bend over backward to say nice things about conservatives. Not long ago, many commentators who are now caustic Bush critics seemed desperate to differentiate themselves from "irrational Bush haters" who were neither haters nor irrational — and whose critiques look pretty mild in the light of recent revelations.

And some journalists just couldn't bring themselves to believe that the president of the United States was being dishonest about such grave matters.

Finally, let's not overlook the role of intimidation. After 9/11, if you were thinking of saying anything negative about the president, you had to be prepared for an avalanche of hate mail. You had to expect right-wing pundits and publications to do all they could to ruin your reputation, and you had to worry about being denied access to the sort of insider information that is the basis of many journalistic careers.

The Bush administration, knowing all this, played the press like a fiddle. But has that era come to an end?

A new Pew survey finds 55 percent of journalists in the national media believing that the press has not been critical enough of Mr. Bush, compared with only 8 percent who believe that it has been too critical. More important, journalists seem to be acting on that belief.

Amazing things have been happening lately. The usual suspects have tried to silence reporting about prison abuses by accusing critics of undermining the troops — but the reports keep coming. The attorney general has called yet another terror alert — but the press raised questions about why. (At a White House morning briefing, Terry Moran of ABC News actually said what many thought during other conveniently timed alerts: "There is a disturbing possibility that you are manipulating the American public in order to get a message out.")

It may not last. In July 2002, according to Dana Milbank of The Washington Post — who has tried, at great risk to his career, to offer a realistic picture of the Bush presidency — "the White House press corps showed its teeth" for the first time since 9/11. It didn't last: the administration beat the drums of war, and most of the press relapsed into docility.

But this time may be different. And if it is, Mr. Bush — who has always depended on that docility — may be in even more trouble than the latest polls suggest.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/28/opinion/28KRUG.html





Edited 5/29/2004 9:07 am ET ET by hayashig

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-31-2003
Fri, 05-28-2004 - 10:41pm
I read that Krugman piece today too, and found this line to be especially alarming...

"The answer, of course, is that the straight shooter never existed. He was a fictitious character that the press, for various reasons, presented as reality. "

Is the press really this powerfull? If the press created a "straight shooter" President Bush and was still viewed by conservatives as too liberal, how much more partisan will this country become once they change their story line? When will this pack press mentality stop? How is it affecting the 2004 election? I've read many stories about how the press in 2000 got bored on their press plane and decided that Al Gore was just a dull blowhard. You can just feel them figuring out what their story on Kerry will be through the fall. Is any of this serving the American people? Obviously, I've got alot of questions about this, and I guess only time will tell.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2003
Sat, 05-29-2004 - 9:19am
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IMO, Karl Rove created the 'straigth shooter' but the press failed to look beyond the image. The press is ineffect guilty of dereliction of duty; they just passed on the word rather than reporting it, aka puppets to be manipulated.

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There are probably many with questions. I wonder how long Bush can continue this masquerade before his actions unmask him. Do people really not want to know the truth; do they really want to believe in lies? I may be wrong, it may be the case that the press reports what the people want to hear.