The Cult of Balance (Again)

Now that the Grey Lady (The New York Times) has taken up the discussion and developed new guidelines for its reporters regarding balance and false equivalence, it’s likely to become a very hot topic in mainstream journalism.

The analogy I like best, to explain false equivalence, is the one where someone (like, for instance, Michelle Bachman, although she did NOT say this) says “the earth is flat”, and the person running against her says “the earth is round”, and the news story is headlined “Opinions Vary on the Shape of the Earth” – as if both the flat earth statement and the round earth statement were of equal truth and value.

I’ve ranted several times in the past about the cult of journalists who believe every story must be balanced, particularly when politics is the topic, and they accept the nonsense being spewed by one person/candidate is being as valid as whatever’s being said by the opposition.

Complicating the issue in this Presidential election cycle is the fairly recent phenomenon that as Americans, we now have our own sets of “facts”.  We don’t agree and what is and what isn’t a fact, and we have the ability to expose ourselves to only one set of “facts”: Fox News and its ilk have one take on what’s fact and what isn’t; MSNBC and its ilk have a different, and often opposite take on what’s fact. We can select the information we consume to fit our bias.  Case on point: the birther issue.

It seems as a result of this recent “my facts aren’t your facts” phenomenon, fewer Americans, particularly those with deficient education, are not able to make an independent determination of what’s fact and what’s not.

Suppose you’re a reporter doing an interview with Tommy Thompson (or Paul Ryan), and he trots out the line about repealing Obamacare, which he characterizes as a government takeover of health care.  Do you let it slide? Politfact and many other reputable watchdog groups have clearly exposed the “takeover” line as bunk – Politfact called it “the biggest political lie of 2010”.  The Affordable Care Act is nothing near a “government takeover” – the government will not take over hospitals and clinics, the government will not put doctors and caregivers on the federal payroll, and on and on.  Do you stop Thompson (Ryan) and challenge him on the line right then and there?  Do you point out when reporting the story that the ACA is not a government takeover of health care?  Or, do you do what 99.445% of reporters do, and simply let the tape roll, because, after all, as your journalism professors taught you, it’s not YOU that’s making the false assertion, it’s the candidate?

When Paul Ryan spun his lie about the Janesville GM plant in his speech at the Republican Convention, he was caught immediately.  But today’s political tactic is to continue to tell the lie, again and again, regardless of how many times reporters call you on it.  Piers Morgan’s interview with Scott Walker the night after Ryan’s convention speech is quite instructive: Morgan essentially said to Walker “why the lie?” – and Walker simply repeated it – twice.  Is “Obama promised to keep the GM Janesville plant open” a true or false statement?  Now, the Ryanites have doubled-down on the falsehood, and are running a TV ad which infers Obama broke  promise to keep the plant open - even though the context of CANDIDATE Obama's quote clearly indicates the plant could stay open another hundred years IF General Motors would re-tool to make more fuel-efficient vehicles - an option GM decided not to take.

That’s why we don’t – and can’t – have political discourse any more.  We can’t agree on what’s a fact and what isn’t.

As a varsity debater in college, I learned the importance of defining terms.  Seems now we have to define facts.  And, since we can’t seem to agree on facts, we’ll remain divided and gridlocked.

The image at the top of this post is Copyright PolitiFact.

You Want The Truth? You Can't Handle The Truth

Paul Ryan is not going to stop saying it was President Obama’s fault that Janesville GM shut down; he’s not going to stop saying President Obama broke a promise to keep the plant going; and it appears talk show hosts and TV interviewers of all stripes are not going to stop calling him on it (as they did on CBS again this morning).

Ryan does not care what the fact-checkers say, and is not ever going to “cave” in an interview and say “OK, maybe you’re right; GM shut the plant down because it was the oldest GM plant in the nation, and it made gas-guzzling SUV’s, for which demand has been down since gas prices went north” or anything of the sort.

Paul Ryan doesn’t care what YOU think; he’s sending a message to the so-called “low-information” voters to implant and reinforce the idea that President Obama is bad and wrong.  He couldn’t care less that the fact-checkers can nail him to the cross on so many of the things he said in his acceptance speech.  He’s staying on-message and on-target to reach the 10 percent (or fewer) people who will swing the November election.

The technique is effective.

We are now a nation of people who operate with our own notion of what a “fact” is.  We cannot have discussion or compromise or move forward together, because we simply don’t agree on underlying problems.  Facts.

Here’s how well the technique works:  take the acceptance speech (and stump speech) line that goes something like “Under President Obama, America’s Credit Rating was downgraded; under Governor Romney, Massachusetts’ Credit Rating went up”.  This is a factual statement.

But then there’s that pesky “truth, whole truth, nothing but the truth” thing.  The whole truth of the credit downgrade during the Obama presidency, according to the agencies that determine the nation's credit rating, is that it happened because Paul Ryan and the House Republicans, fronted by John Boehner, played chicken with the debt ceiling, and refused for days on end to raise the ceiling (which they did their best to infer meant “more borrowing, more debt”).  Ths made our creditors very nervous, and that's what caused the downgrade. But this “whole truth” aspect has no bearing whatsoever on low-information voters.

There was a textbook case on point last night on one of the local TV news channels, when the anchorette repeated the Ryan line about the credit rating went down under Obama but Massachusetts’ went up under Romney, as she was doing narrative over some footage of Ryan campaigning somewhere or other.

Al Gore’s famously misquoted line about the internet meant the fact-checkers hounded him during that campaign, digging up other stuff Gore said that was more “interpretation” than fact, particularly his comments about global warming (before it became “global climate change”).  Ryan’s recent episode of faulty memory about his marathon time, so easily fact-checked and contradicted, might be a more clear signal that he’s not at all concerned with “objective truth”….and may be the “little white lie” that puts the fact-checkers on double-secret overtime duty to check every Ryan utterance from that point on.

But, Ryan won’t care.  You want the truth (to quote a line made famous in “A Few Good Men”)?  Well, let me paraphrase a few lines from the Paul Newman movie “The Verdict”: the truth isn’t that easy to come by.  Sometimes you have to look pretty hard for it.

Truth and fact are not the same thing.

In this, and so many other cases, it’s fair to say a lot of people really can’t handle the truth.

Getty Images holds the copyright to the picture of Paul Ryan at the top of this post.

How People Like George W. Bush Get Elected

The short answer, and the obvious one, is that people liked W.  He was more likeable than his opponent.  He was the guy you wanted to sit down with and have a beer.  He had no credentials for the job he sought, leading the free world.  But people ‘liked’ him, kind of like “liking” a friend’s post or picture on Facebook.

That’s how Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are going to get a bunch of votes.  They’re handsome.  They smile a lot.  And, should they get elected, it will be due in no small part to people “liking” them.

 Mitt made his choice for VP official this weekend, standing in front of the U.S. S. Wisconsin (BB-64) at its permanent berth in Norfolk.  (Sidebar: I’ve been aboard the Wisconsin, and it’s an impressive ship, like all the WW2 battlewagons.  The Wisconsin was being refurbished at the Avondale Shipyards in New Orleans when I lived in the big easy in 1986, and I managed to snag an “invite” to board and tour the ship through my part-time job at WWL-AM.  The folks at Avondale couldn’t say no to a Wisconsin boy, I guess.)

Saturday afternoon, I was somewhat surprised by the Facebook posts concerning Paul Ryan.  One in particular stood out.  It was a post about how this woman, who lived for many years in Janesville, knew Paul Ryan, knew his family, and proclaimed that he always seemed like an honest and sincere person, and she had now decided that she’d vote for Romney/Ryan.

The irony is so abundant in her post I don’t know where to begin.  Like many of my social media friends, this woman is a broadcaster.  She lost her job at a Clear Channel station when the huge purges began in earnest in 2009.  For those who don’t follow the game too closely, shortly after Bain Capital took the helm at Clear Channel, the world’s largest broadcast group began shedding personnel like crazy, to make the impossible cash flow requirements of their new loan package.  She was one of the thousands of victims of the second round of Clear Channel personnel cuts.

This woman was fortunate to land another broadcasting job, but it’s part-time, and she augments her income by bartending.  She has no benefits at either job, and is on Badger Care for her “health insurance”.

That this woman has now decided to vote for Romney/Ryan because Paul Ryan seems like such a nice guy perfectly illustrates the theme of this blog-post.  Bain Capital put her out of work, and Ryan’s budget plan would make it even more difficult for her to get health care at an age when she’ll begin to need it the most.

She will be voting against her own personal best interests, and not even with the “higher motive” of philosophically agreeing with the Romney/Ryan platform - at least, that part of the platform which is self-evident at this point.

But she likes Paul Ryan.  He’s always seemed like such a nice guy.