On CNN last night, as a tired-looking David Gergen was decrying, in a dull monotone, his assessment of the second presidential debate as “flat at times,” a black-and-white chyron—itself dull against the flashy red-and-blue graphics splashed across the rest of the screen—popped up beneath him. “FACT:” it said, in all caps. “Half of the debate was about the economy; other domestic issues took up 15 minutes; international issues took up 30 minutes.”
As Campbell Brown discussed the implications, for both candidates, of the town hall-style format of the debate, another chyron popped up: “FACT: Neither candidate was willing to agree with moderator Tom Brokaw that the economy would necessarily get worse before it gets better.”
As Jeff Toobin talked about the odd “that one” moment, another chyron—this one a deep red, with white font—appeared: “FACT: Mr. McCain didn’t want to specify a 1-2-3 order for his priorities, insisting he would work on energy, health care, and entitlement reform simultaneously.”
As John King gave his analysis of the candidates’ styles in discussing the economy, a blue chryon (white font) popped up: “FACT: Obama listed his top priorities as energy independence, health care and education.”
Well. Riveting. The old facts-as-Whack-A-Moles trope, in which discrete bits of information spring up for us to see—pop!—and then, just as quickly as they appeared—ha, too slow!—duck down again. Such a graphical approach to information may be cute and visually appealing and bell-and-whistly and what have you. But helpful to voters? Not so much.
Particularly when the “facts” being delivered aren’t checks on what the candidates have just spent the last hour-and-a-half claiming, but rather Trivial Pursuit-style bits of information that suggest that Facts Are Fun! (rather than, you know, Facts Are Vital).
And last night, the facts were particularly vital. The sheer physicality of the town hall format—on the chairs! off the chairs! pacing the stage! invading audience members’ personal space!—encouraged rhetorical give-and-take between the candidates. Which often led to bickering. Take the sub-debate that took place last night, the candidates’ back-and-forth over tax policy. Each candidate initially delivered the Stump Speech Summary of his plan, making sure to punch it up with everyday details that would make his plan relatable to the Joe and Josephine Sixpacks in the audience. Each candidate made his tax claims—I’ll cut taxes!—and the other, inevitably, rebutted—No, you won’t, because I’ll cut taxes!—and then the first one rebutted that—No, you won’t, because I will!—and on and on we go, and where we stop, nobody knows.
Except, um, somebody should know. We’re talking, after all, about the factual details of each candidate’s tax policy. Kind of important. Kind of, you could say, the whole point. And kind of something that’s been checked many, many times before. Last night’s debate, given the up-in-the-grill nature of it, was, among other things, an opportunity for those vaunted and oft-discussed impartial fact-checking organizations—FactCheck.org, Politifact.com, etc.—to show themselves yet again to be invaluable resources to voters trying to navigate their way through the hall of mirrors that is The Rhetoric of Presidential Debates.
Those organs did a great job last night, as usual, all the way around. And journalistic outlets—The New York Times, The Washington Post—did well, for their part, in figuring fact-checking into their debate-coverage packages, featuring links to Check Point and The Fact Checker, respectively, prominently on their home pages. Other news outlets did well doing the same.
Great, on the one hand. But one the other: not so much. Because the majority of Americans were watching last night’s debate not online, but on TV—probably at home, probably among friends or family, possibly also taking part in recreational activities involving beer and McCain’s use of the term “my friends.” (To those in that last group: Here are some good hangover remedies.) Most Americans weren’t, in other words, watching the debate online, or even in the company of a computer. It’d be presumptuous to assume they own a computer in the first place.
For those voters, then—who are also, not uncoincidentally, the voters who will be in many ways the most directly and urgently affected by the tax policies the candidates are proposing—truth-squadding the candidates becomes an even more vital endeavor. And one that must be conducted, therefore, not just on the Net, but on the networks.
CNN’s answer to truth-squadding, those glib pop-up chryons (“FACT: ____”), are not only not enough in this regard; they also miss the point. They suggest that the facts are subsidiary to the debate, rather than the other way around. They turn information—often boring, but always vital in elections, as in anything else—into Fun Facts!™ that serve visual verve more than they do democracy. Were we talking about VH1 here, fine…but we’re not. (And at least CNN makes an effort in regard to truth-squadding: on Fox and MSNBC, the only fact-checking I saw last night came courtesy of commentators who would occasionally toss around “McCain was lying” and “Obama was lying” allusions to make arguments in their commentary. And since TV pundits are famously impartial…oh, wait.)
But facts—on any night, to be sure, but on debate nights, in particular—shouldn’t be at the discretion of pundits. On CNN last night, the first sentence Wolf Blitzer uttered by way of transitioning from the Debate Proper to the Pundit Portion of the Evening was this:
Alright, and we’re going to see whether Senators Obama and McCain actually shake hands—I see Senator McCain is already joined by his wife, Cindy. Anderson, it’s clear that there were very stark differences—very stark differences—on a whole host of issues that these two presidential candidates spelled out on the economy, on taxes, health care, the war in Iraq, Afghanistan. I could go on, but the American public got pretty candid assessments from both of these candidates…where they agree—very little, apparently—and where they disagree.
Which, you know, fair enough. But wouldn’t it have been about a thousand times better had his first words been uttered in the service of correcting the record? Wouldn’t it have been better had Blitzer, serving as a kind of moderator-of-information, prefaced all the punditry with a concise-but-comprehensive fact-check of what was discussed during the debate?
Such a watchdog role is ostensibly the reason we want journalists to be part of these debates in the first place. Not to be stuffed shirts delighted at the spectacle of political theater they’ve just witnessed—and even more delighted at the sound of their own voices in discussing the performances—but rather to be guides for audiences, to help them navigate and make sense of what everyone just saw play out onstage. Journalists in these situations are supposed to be experts, in other words. And occasionally, they are. But wouldn’t it be fantastic if their expertise were put to use, on debate nights, in the service of information as well as blather?
Okay Megan: I'm with you on most of this. But you write as if it would be no problem at all for, say, CNN to broadcast the results when the fact check is done and one candidate lied and mislead way more than the other. I mean, an imbalance like that could happen, right? And they're just going to come out and report that, on their own authority, the night of the debate?
No way.
"Now let's go to Anderson Cooper, who has the fact-checking results from tonight's debate. Anderson, who was more misleading tonight?"
"That's right, Wolf, the results are in and they clearly show it: John McCain was way more misleading than Barack Obama tonight, as he has been through the campaign, and he had more of his facts wrong. Let's look at the details....."
This fact check from CNN's Political Ticker suggests just such a verdict. But you didn't hear it on last night's coverage did you?
"The results are in and they clearly show that John McCain was way more misleading tonight." You know that's never going to happen, Megan, and you ought to know why. Truth-squadding is a fine job description and journalists will warm to it as long as they can assume that a symmetrical apporoach to truth-shading prevails among the candidates. But who can guarantee that? No one. And if one campaign blows off the fact checkers more than the other, you have a big problem on your hands if you make a big deal of it. So they don't.
You should have factored that squeamishness in.
Posted by Jay Rosen on Wed 8 Oct 2008 at 11:18 AM
I see that point, and it's a good one, but I'd respond that just because truth-squadding is politically fraught, that doesn't make it any less worth doing. If CNN--or any other network--isn't passing along to its audience rigorous, important reporting from reputable, nonpartisan sources simply for fear of being labeled as biased...well, then, that's incredibly sad.
If it's the case, though, here's a solution: Frame the fact-checking not as "McCain or Obama was more misleading," as you say, but simply as "here's the substance of what they said, un-spun." Blitzer could simply have said last night, before ceding the floor to the pundits, "Here's what you need to know about each candidate's tax proposals, in a nutshell"....and then gone on to explain each proposal. There's no way to read bias in that approach. And the three-minutes-max such a clarification would require would be immensely more valuable to viewers than three minutes of, say, punditry from Alex Castellanos.
I appreciate the sensitivity of the issue--particularly with CNN, which is struggling to maintain its "straight down the middle" reputation. And I'm not saying we need TV commentators to be human versions of Politifact. But the networks have, on debate nights, essentially a captive audience of voters, some of whom form their opinions and decisions about candidates based on debate performances--and those performances' coverage--and not much else. Because of that, the nets have a responsibility, I think, to ensure that what they broadcast is as valuable to voters as possible. To me, that means balancing all the punditry with some actual, useful information.
Posted by Megan Garber on Wed 8 Oct 2008 at 01:32 PM