Truth, truthiness and balance

JQ, you didn’t actually bother to read Brisbane’s article. The facts in question weren’t objective ones like is it cold today. They were about interpretations of flimsy excuses and tenuous readings of things. If a candidate said “Obama invaded Iraq” the Times would most definitely correct this. This is well covered in the responses to the update of the article, including a comment by Jill Abramson with some examples of the Times being really snarky.

Truth vigilantes? What does that even mean? What is a newspaper supposed to do for its money?

If the Sulzbergers and their co-investors aren’t interested in printing the truth, they should sell their shares and buy Exxon or something. If telling the truth isn’t their idea of something to do with their lives, nobody is insisting that they continue to publish the NYTimes.

The shellacking is not well-deserved at all. The critics all sem to think that news media should say public figures are lying. The current convention is that they don’t, they just set up a “he said, she said” debate by funding someone to express a different view regardless of the facts. Brisbane his opened a serious debate by raising this and it
‘s a pity he has been subjected to such silly criticism.

This is a very tough one. At the limit, JQ’s suggestions would be highly anti-pluralist. I say that even accepting that much of what is in the newspapers is the laundered/euphemized claims of welfare-reducing narrow interest groups.

There’s also the problem that some outlandish claims or policy proposals do turn out to “work”. JQ’s suggestion could have been used to justify requiring that every newspaper discussion of the proposed EEC in the 1950s should have included the sentence “An international organization of the sort that Monnet is proposing has never functioned before and, in the view of most scholarship on international relations, should be considered a utopian dream”.

Okay, but the pre-Euro part of the EEC/EU history was clearly much more effective than 1950s IR scholarship based on the history of the reliability of treaty obligations would have lead one to believe.

Not only are the suggestions anti-pluralist, but they are:

1. Abdicating the newspaper’s own role as determiner of truth. We have seen a big move towards this over the last 20 years, and now the newspapers have duelling statements by “experts.” This is not an improvement, and has likely made things worse, as it has politicised academia.

2. Moving into a different marketplace. The partisan press exists. Not everyone likes it.

3. Not really about truth statements at all. Global warming is mostly a prediction about the future, not a description of the world right now. The Ryan budget is a policy proposal – it’s not at all clear what it would mean for it to be “false” or a “lie.”

I agree that Brisbane, in part due to poor choices on his part, was asking a somewhat more subtle and specific question than the one he was initially taken to be asking. However, were I him, the fact that so many people thought I was asking that other, more obvious question, might inspire me to consider why so many people had that impression, and perhaps arrive at the conclusion that my organization wasn’t actually even doing very well in that regard.

re:12 ” not a description of the world right now.”

[Sound of laughter like a balloon bursting]

Physics isn’t a description of the world right now?

More importantly (and possibly, but only possibly, more dangerously) it would probably shift the framework of the debate. If the NYT and other MSM were to report on Repubs statements on global warming as JQ suggests, it could lead to Repubs to make fewer bat-guano crazy statements. On the other hand, there is the question of who would decide what their facts were and how. “A conclusion endorsed by every scientific body in the world” seems relatively easy, but what about orthodox economics? It is entirely possible that a policy of this sort could actually perpetuate zombie ideas if they appeared to be the orthodoxy in a field.

Of c ourse, the other possibility is that the Repubs would just label the NYT as biased liberal media. They might even gravitate towards some sort of hack news network that actually pandered to their bat-guano crazy ideas. I know – it seems unlikely that there would be a media outlet that would dedicate themselves to being a mouthpiece for right-wing hacks, but it could happen. . .

“If you just repeat what people say you’re just the Weekly World News.”

You can criticize the factual accuracy of the Weekly World News on a number of different fronts, but I don’t think you can accuse them of being mere stenographers. Or if they are, that puts a rather different complexion on all the times they quoted Bat Boy.

Very few say that in so many words.

Actually, it’s not at all unusual for public officials to accuse climate scientists of deliberate fraud.

But anyway, surely you can agree that when this happens – or when politicians suggest there is a scientific controversy over evolution – that a proper journalists must point out that these statements are unsupported by any sensible reading of the facts.

I am confused as to the direction the debate’s taking. The crucial failure of news media to me seems to me not to be their failure to call out partisan politicians on lies about their opponents (although of course they should). At least on those issues an alternate point of view is usually presented, if not in the same article. The crucial failure occurs on those issues where both parties agree (read, most issues); in that case no challenge is usually presented, not even in a he-said-she-said manner. This is not a problem of US media only, either, to be clear, although it seems more acute here than some other places. Another problem that to me seems worse than failure to call campaigners to account is the way the news media themselves concoct a story line and then fit the facts to it (cf. Bush vs. Gore, 1999/2000).

@21: I read a wonderful article about the Weekly World News, and their particular genius was that they would simply write down what their subjects said. If a guy said he saw Bat Boy, or Elvis, or was a vampire…they just wrote an article taking them at their word. After awhile they didn’t even have to make things up.

Great for them, but this is not such a good model for news.

Great for them, but this is not such a good model for news.

No, it really isn’t. I ran into Bat Boy at an Applebees in Minnesota once. He said most of those stories were wildly inaccurate. Even when they quoted him directly, they usually took it out of context.

“@18: Rick Perry said exactly that, and he was running for president.”

No, Rick Perry never said climate change was a conspiracy cooked up by scientists to get funding data. That is what he implied. What he actually said is (numbering mine):

“[1]I do believe that the issue of global warming has been politicized,” Perry answered. “[2]I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. [3]I think we’re seeing it almost weekly or even daily, scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change. [4]Yes, our climates change. They’ve been changing ever since the earth was formed.”

There aren’t any provably false statements! Let’s parse:

1. True statement. False implication – politicised by scientists, when in fact it is he (and others like him) politicising it.
2. Weasel-worded statement, and accusation without target. What does it mean to “manipulate” data? For some value of “substantial number” and “manipulate,” this statement is likely true: there is both a conflict of interest and a publication bias just like everywhere in academia. However the false implication coming out of this statement is just huge. In particular, the conflict of interest works in both directions, and the work of some noted denialists has not been short on “manipulation.”
3. True statement: Perry would likely even name names if challenged. False implication, because few if any of these scientists are experts in the relevant field.
4. True statement. False implication: that the relevant timeframes are comparable.

It’s very hard to know what a is newspaper supposed to do with this. There’s no lie here, but it’s not exactly the truth. Moreover, it’s hard for a news article to get into the weeds of all this. If there were an easy response I’m sure the newspapers would have come up with it by now.

christian_h-

That’s an excellent point.

I think proposals like JQ’s are really the bare minimum that we should be expecting: not to print false or misleading completely without effective challenge (i.e., generally with, at most, dueling quotes, or an intermittent ‘fact check’ column in some other part of the paper).

The deeper issues are somewhat less tractable. It’s harder to see what to do about straight up bias – whether narrative or partisan – or how to change the method of selection of issues and stories reported on in a way that is less driven by what the powerful happen to want the press to talk about.

I do think that a genuine commitment to report more actual facts might at least mitigate these issues somewhat, so it’s not a bad start. For example, one could hope that reporting the facts about the Al Gore’s “invented the internet” meme in every story that mentioned it might have served as a form of self correction to the broader developing media narrative. Or constantly relating facts about the depth and nature of the budget deficit problem might tend to lead writers and editors to step back and ask questions about whether it was really the most pressing issue at the moment.

Watson Ladd @1 – Sorry, that’s not actually what happened. Brisbane first wrote “I’m looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about.” He then got roundly mocked for this, then retreated to saying that “What I was trying to ask was whether reporters should always rebut dubious facts in the body of the stories they are writing. I was hoping for diverse and even nuanced responses to what I think is a difficult question.” Then even the current executive editor of the New York Times came down on him saying, ” Of course we should and we do. The kind of rigorous fact-checking and truth-testing you describe is a fundamental part of our job as journalists.”

Then he retreated to saying, “My inquiry related to whether The Times, in the text of news columns, should more aggressively rebut “facts” that are offered by newsmakers when those “facts” are in question” and gave the examples of Mitt Romney claiming the president apologized for America or Justice Thomas claiming to have misunderstood financial disclosure rules as if those were cases in which journalists should shy away from definite statements about who’s telling the truth.

The problem is that those cases don’t help him. In the case of Romney, it’s a straightforward lie – the president hasn’t apologized, so the paper should state that. In the case of Thomas, yes, a “reporter can[‘t] crawl inside the mind of a Supreme Court justice,” but there’s nothing that stops a reporter from say, asking some tax experts how difficult it is to fill out a financial disclosure form, whether Thomas has done so in the past, or at a pinch just saying “Thomas said he misunderstood the forms. The New York Times cannot confirm or deny whether this is the case.”

@ OP: I’m a little hesitant about your idea of having a facts style guide without greater transparency to the public – in part because I think there’s some kind of this already in existence operating in unsavory ways. Your examples about climate change or the Ryan plan are all to the good, but what about the habit the New York Times has of automatically describing all welfare states as bloated, or that Europe can’t compete because of worker protection laws? These ticks are common across multiple New York Times writers, which makes me think there is an unofficial facts style guide full of zombie economics ideas.

”@21: I read a wonderful article about the Weekly World News, and their particular genius was that they would simply write down what their subjects said. If a guy said he saw Bat Boy, or Elvis, or was a vampire…they just wrote an article taking them at their word. After awhile they didn’t even have to make things up.’

The main difference between the NYT and the Guardian (in the UK) and the WWN/Sunday Sport is that this ‘stenographer’ approach is used by both ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ papers but in the NYT/Guardian it is only the rich and powerful who are so treated. There are two differences between the loonies interviewed by the Sunday Sport and the loonies who run our world: the loonies who run our world earn more, and have more power than the ‘ordinary punters’ who are interviewed by the WWN/Sunday Sport, and the loonies who run our world tend to invent deranged incoherent lies that flatter or serve elite interests. It’s only if both these criteria are met that the ‘journalists’ at the Guardian or the NYT switch off the ‘skeptical’ parts of their brain. So if a poor person turned up at the offices of the NYT saying that a World War 2 bomber had been found on the moon, or whatever, proper journalistic caution would be used. But if a rich powerful person invents some demented story about ‘weapons of mass destruction’ held by Iraq or that ‘Iran is developing a nuclear weapon’ then, and only then, is the stenographer approach used.

NYT should formulate a standard set of words

They should have a Not So page on their site, and any time someone bullshits and they manage to catch it, they asterisk it, the asterisk leads to “Not so.” at the bottom of the item (which can be linked on the site). You don’t actually need to clutter up the story. Readers of the paper edition know there’s a reference they can have if they want it.

Lying is often confused with perjury, but a lie is a moral act, not a legal one. It’s an attempt to deceive. True statements are irrelevant to it.

But if a rich powerful person invents some demented story about ‘weapons of mass destruction’ held by Iraq or that ‘Iran is developing a nuclear weapon’ then, and only then, is the stenographer approach used.

To be [over-]scrupulously fair, there is the issue of authority. If the above rich powerful person telling the story is, say, the director of a national intelligence service, then it’s not entirely unfair to start with a somewhat greater presumption that there is actually news to relate there.

Which is not to say that what they are saying should be taken at anything like face value either – journalistic caution should still be very much in play. Just at perhaps closer to the level you might apply to a professional astronomer reporting sightings of a lunar B-17, rather than a man off the street.

CJColucci

” How did Bat Boy like the Applebees salad bar?”

He’s half fruit bat, so he loves it. He did say that he never runs into Brooks there,
so Brooks is making it up.

I think that process concerns would actually go further than fact-checking politician’s statements, per se.

1. No anonymous sources. If you want to be a stenographer, you can, but people need to know who you’re quoting. The only exceptions come when you actually are doing investigative journalism and have a source that would actually be harmed if identified.

2. No he said/she said about matters of fact. If you’re writing about global warming, then there is only one side insofar as atmospheric science is concerned. Costs / benefits, maybe not.

3. Stop pretending to be unbiassed. All remaining newspapers should be openly partisan newspapers. Either that, or stop insulting our intelligence by pretending that e.g. heterodox economics does not exist.

The NYT isn’t the only source of information in the world, although people like to hold it to a higher standard than say, Fox or tabloids. I wouldn’t mind if they adopted some of the ideas from CJR like Story Repair:

http://remappingdebate.org/story-repair

“In this feature, we select a story that appeared in one or more major news outlets and try to show how a different set of inquiries or observations could have produced a more illuminating article. For repair this week, four Apr. 7 articles: “House Votes to Stop EPA From Regulating Greenhouse Gases” (Wall Street Journal); “Senate rejects measure to stop EPA on climate” (Reuters); “House Passes Anti-EPA Legislation” (US News); and “U.S. House Passes Repeal of EPA Carbon Rules Over White House Objections” (Bloomberg).

A reader looking at any of those stories would have little or no way to know that those supporting the legislation were: (a) denying scientific consensus on climate change; (b) presenting an argument about an “overreaching” Environmental Protection Agency that is apparently belied by the Agency’s existing responsibilities as determined by the Supreme Court; and (c) were largely unwilling or unable to support their talking points with evidence beyond a desire to assist local industries regardless of environmental impact.”

grismcthorn

I’m really, really, really contemptuous of the “Oh lord, the NYT may be portrayed as partisan, dearie me” arguments here when it comes to Romney telling porkies. Acronyns like “WTF” and “DIAF” and “NWGFFO” cross my mind.

On the one hand, reporting is meant to tell truth and reveal lies, as almost everyone seems to understand apart from Arthur Brisbane. On the other hand, since the Democrats are a center-right party as I understand, is “partisanship” the right word when you are seen to favor them over the far-right Republicans? On the gripping hand, if the NYT is worried about being too much in the tank for the Democrats, there should be things they could go hard on the Obama administration. Why has Eric Holder been so easy on Goldman Sachs these last three years?

Pr Q said:

This is a sad state of affairs, just as its sad that Americans won’t have a chance to vote for a serious Presidential candidate who opposes indefinite detention of innocent people.

I guess this implies that Ron Paul is not a “serious Presidential candidate”, although he has taken a principled civil libertarian stand against the suspension of habeas corpus for terrorist suspects. Paul’s candidacy deserves more attention from both pundits and populus because he is reality-based on quite a few key issues (civil liberty, border protection, national security, economic stability – he correctly predicted the causes and consequences of the housing bubble years before mainstream economists) and because his appeal cuts across party lines.

FWIW, I am in agreement with the Pr Q on the illegitimacy of the US kidnapping, torturing and indefinitely detaining presumably innocent people in an endless GWOT. Especially given the spread of democratic norms across the Middle East and the winding down of the US’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. On utilitarian, libertarian and conservative grounds we should stick to the rule of law, as martial law causes more harm to the accused than good to the public, violates our headline liberal values and represents a sharp break in our civil tradition which might be difficult to fix.

The surest way of protecting freedom in general is to “do no harm” to our own freedom in particular. Respect other people’s borders and protect our own. Right-wing “corporals” should take a chill pill about Muslim gangs that can’t shoot straight. And Left-wing liberals need to become “truth vigilantes” towards the naive and delusional aspects of their “open borders” ideology.

I don’t think it actually would be a pointless delay. In the case of the woman, ask a neighbor in the building or the super. In the case of the mayor, call Port Authority, N.J transit and check. It’s a few minutes work.

As a (former) Democrat who actually knows the party’s history I found this quite hysterical.

Doesn’t somebody here have some kind of tag-line to go with this sort of thing?