After a dismal performance by the major news organizations in fact-checking the Wednesday night assertions and accusations of Vice President Cheney and Sen. Zell Miller, Campaign Desk woke up this morning to a new world: the Associated Press, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, as if the scales had fallen from their eyes, rose up as one and subjected the speakers at the last night of the Republican National Convention — including the president — to a rigorous fact-check. Moving at last beyond he-said/she-said reporting, all three news organizations struck back in their own voice at the mis-statements and subtle distortions of the record that the evening’s speakers produced.
The Associated Press struck first, by using an advance transcript of Bush’s speech to not only get out a “blow-by-blow” account of the speech, but also using the lead time to assess the veracity of the President’s statements. Nearly twenty minutes before Bush could say “God Bless You”, the news wire’s customers had already been blessed with “Bush Glosses Over Complex Facts in Speech” by Calvin Woodward. Woodward chides the President for “masking the fact that U.S. troops are pulling by far most of the weight” in Iraq, for distorting Kerry’s stance on tax cuts, for his contradictory rhetoric on education, for citing misleading statistics on the strength of al Qaeda, and for once again distorting Kerry’s vote against one $87 billion appropriations bill.
The Washington Post responded by running a “For the Record” takedown of President Bush’s, Vice President Cheney’s, and Sen. Zell Miller’s distortions of Sen. Kerry’s record. Most notably, the paper slapped the article above the fold on page one, with a strongly worded headline “GOP Prism Distorts Some Kerry Votes.” That kind of prominent placement is a startling improvement over the Post’s usual practice of placing stories reporting speeches on page one and stories actually vetting the claims in said speech on page 25. This in-depth piece looked at all three speeches, taking the orators to task for, among others, distorting the Senator Kerry’s record on defense votes, for selectively quoting a Kerry statement from 35 years ago on the role of the United Nations, and for attacking Kerry votes that mirrored Dick Cheney’s positions at the time. Then, the Post took it one step farther than the other papers and asked White House Communication director Dan Bartlett “why the campaign was attacking Kerry for having similar positions as Cheney.” Bartlett dodged the inquiry saying, “I don’t have the specifics of [when] then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney was in charge of the Pentagon, but I think we’d be more than willing to have a debate on whether Dick Cheney or John Kerry was stronger on defense.” But at least the Post now has him on record as doing so.
The New York Times has it’s own “The Record” piece, whose headline is self-explanatory: “Comparing President’s Address and History.” The Times history review found that “President Bush’s acceptance speech last night included assertions about his accomplishments and Senator John Kerry’s past statements and voting patterns that were at best selective, and in some cases challenged by the historical record.” The paper took a conspicuously different approach, calling into question claims often left unchallenged by the press because they can not easily be validated by a statistic or vote. The David E. Sanger and Elisabeth Bumiller piece matches the President’s statements about Sen. Kerry’s and his own position on the recent Medicare reform, on the No Child Left Behind Act, and on the economy with the actual record, and it finds the veracity of the president’s speech lacking. (Also, not surprisingly, the Times fires back at Bush for selectively quoting and then belittling an article printed in the Gray Lady itself in 1946. It supplies a fuller passage from the article, one that describes an American attempt to turn over post-war authority to German citizens — the very technique the president has used in Iraq to try to hasten that nation’s trip to self-sustained sovereignty.)
Despite its underplayed presence on page P3, the Times analysis stands out for its emphasis on three issues that matter to voters — health care, education, and the economy — that have recently been overshadowed by debates about Kerry’s service record in Vietnam.
As the Post put it in its summary, the Republican National Convention speakers time and again put forth claims that were “at best selective and in many cases stripped of their context.”
As we’ve shouted into the wind all year long, it’s the job of the campaign press to not only report the claims of a candidate, but also to report the accuracy of those claims, and then, as the Post did, to ask the political figure in question to justify his or her deliberate attempt to mislead the voter.
The attempt by power to mislead the powerless, wherever it raises its eternal head, is the real news, as Albert Camus pointed out long ago. And it’s about time we got some of that news, framed that way. So, in the spirit of acknowledging that late is better than never, we say, thank you, ladies and gentlemen of the campaign press.
Now that we’re down to the final eight weeks of the election campaign, it’s more important than ever that the press relentlessly, and daily, measure claim against fact.
–Thomas Lang
Thomas Lang was a writer at CJR Daily.