Last night, Campaign Desk was excited to see NBC announce a segment fact-checking the latest political ads. But the network’s short piece left us wondering, is this the best they can do?
“NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw” looked at ads supporting John Kerry (tonight they’ll cover President Bush’s ads). Brokaw set up the piece by posing the question, “What’s the truth in these ads? What’s fiction?”
But NBC never considered the factual accuracy of the first case they examined — an ad by a pro-Kerry group that asserts, “During the past three years, it’s true George W. Bush has created more jobs. Unfortunately, they were created in places like China.”
Instead, NBC had Brooks Jackson of Factcheck.org — “a Web site set up to help separate fact from fiction”, as NBC put it — tell viewers: “Well, what a voter needs to ask is exactly how did George Bush’s policies encourage this transformation of jobs overseas. They don’t say.”
Jackson is right, but expecting political ads to tell the full story is like asking for coq au vin at McDonald’s — it simply misses the point. And NBC later has “another expert,” Ken Goldstein of the University of Wisconsin, make essentially the same point: “The political advertising can be a vitamin. And like a vitamin with food, people shouldn’t only eat vitamins. People need a well-balanced diet. And people should be getting their political information in other places.”
The only actual fact that NBC looked at comes from an ad that says of Bush, “And he raided Social Security to pay for a tax cut for millionaires.” Of this claim, Jackson says, “The fact is the Social Security Trust Fund has just as many IOUs in it … as it would have had those tax cuts never been passed.”
That’s true as far as it goes, but it misses the context of the debate, which is that Democrats have argued that using surplus Social Security revenues to pay for government programs instead of paying down the national debt imperils the long-term health of the program. (To be fair, the ad hardly articulates this, either.) That’s a longer debate for another forum, but Jackson’s comment, on its own, confuses as much as it clarifies. The ad may be misleading, but it’s far from clear that NBC has fulfilled its stated goal of finding anything factually inaccurate about it.
Finally, notice how NBC relied on two outside “experts,” Jackson and Goldstein, to critique the ads, rather than simply doing it themselves. Call us crazy, but we thought it was the job of the news media itself to help viewers make sense of campaign rhetoric. By getting outsiders to do it for them, NBC distances itself from the criticism, suggesting the network isn’t entirely comfortable with questioning the campaigns’ veracity so flatly.
It’s great to see the media finally figuring out that it really is their job to point out when the campaigns aren’t telling the truth. But NBC’s analysis, like so many other critiques of campaign ads we’ve seen so far, comes up short.
–Zachary Roth
Zachary Roth is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly. He also has written for The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, Slate, Salon, The Daily Beast, and Talking Points Memo, among other outlets.