We sometimes worry about all the trees felled in order to provide newspaper reporters with enough space to write around the blatant falsehoods spewed by politicians trying to spin the public, when with a few simple words, they could smack those falsehoods down to size.
In a piece headlined “Bush Team Casts Foes as Defeatist: Blunt Rhetoric Signals a New Thrust” in this morning’s Washington Post, Peter Baker and Jim VandeHei spend so much time propping up, then shooting down, bits of partisan spin that the whole exercise seems a waste of space. Don’t get us wrong — we commend the two for exposing some of the more outrageous claims being made in the opening salvos of the White House’s newest Iraq-related PR push, and seeing reporters fact-checking the spin-meisters is a welcome sight. But at what point is it better to ignore some of the more ridiculous rhetoric being put out there, rather than spend precious newshole airing it in the first place?
The duo write in their lead paragraph that the president and his supporters are “accusing the opposition of aiming to appease terrorists and cut off funding for troops on the battlefield, charges that many Democrats say distort their stated positions.”
It’s not surprising that Democrats say that this distorts their positions, since it’s pretty obvious the party neither calls for appeasing terrorists (in fact, who does?), nor have Democrats gone on record making it one of their policy goals to choke off funding for troops in the field.
Yet it takes the Post‘s duo until the fourth paragraph to get around to unmasking the president’s spinners as estranged from the reality-based community: “Pressed to support these allegations, the White House yesterday could cite no major Democrat who has proposed cutting off funds or suggested that withdrawing from Iraq would persuade terrorists to leave Americans alone.”
If only every reporter would perform the simple due diligence that Baker and VandeHei practiced here in shooting down a bit of obvious partisan spin, we’d all be a lot better off. But it also begs the question: if the arguments being made by one party are so obviously untrue, and cannot be supported by evidence, why run with it in the first place? Just as it’s usually a good idea to simply ignore the loud drunk at the far end of the bar, the press only encourages political operatives to toss out more factually challenged sound bites if they keep printing them in the next day’s paper.
But there’s more. Greg Sargent at the American Prospect‘s Horse Mouth blog points to another choice bit from the Post article. Baker and VandeHei — who apparently have very short memories — write, “Many Democrats accuse the president of advocating ‘stay the course’ in Iraq, but the White House rejects the phrase …”
Sargent points out (with examples) that not only has the president repeatedly used the phrase … but he did so just yesterday. You just can’t make stuff like that up. Although if you did, rest assured that the Washington Post would go to the trouble of printing it, making it sound reasonable, but then waiting a few paragraphs to shoot it down in a way that makes the other side sound reasonable.
In the end, these are just a few more examples in the expanding catalog of weak-kneed “he said, she said” stories, proving that the form is alive and well heading into Fall ’06. Sadly, we fully expect to have no shortage of opportunities to point out even more examples in the two months leading up to November’s midterms.
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.