Media

Another line: “Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another?” Haha what? Probably?

Basically everyone on the Internet is slack-jawed and stunned by this entire thing, because, man, “should we print the truth or not” is a hilarious question to just throw out to readers.

(The “public editor” has no power or authority at the Times, for the record. It is just the Times’ phrase for “crusty old newspaper veteran who answers reader complaints about stock photo usage and anonymous sourcing by hassling editors to give him defensive quotes for his column,” or “ombudsman.” The position was created after Jayson Blair published a bunch of untrue “facts” in the newspaper. The Times eventually corrected those “facts.”)

John Heilemann made the case in August of 2010, but Bob Woodward really kicked it off by pretending a Biden-Clinton switch was “on the table” in October of 2010. That notion — supposedly — can be traced back to pollster grifter Mark Penn, which should have stopped anyone else from bringing it up ever again. But Jonathan Alter took another crack at it last October, and publishing speculation on the switch has become reliable Drudge-bait ever since.

Keller’s column frames the switch as something wished for, instead of predicting it based on the “chatter” of “insiders,” which helps make it merely stupid instead of inherently dishonest. But here are his arguments as to why it would be a good idea instead of a bizarre and desperate stunt:

One: it does more to guarantee Obama’s re-election than anything else the Democrats can do. Two: it improves the chances that, come next January, he will not be a lame duck with a gridlocked Congress but a rejuvenated president with a mandate and a Congress that may be a little less forbidding. Three: it makes Hillary the party’s heir apparent in 2016. If she sits out politics for the next four years, other Democrats (yes, Governor Cuomo, we see your hand up) will fill the void.

One: What? Prove it, maybe? Two: Haha what, again? Congress will get ungridlocked if the president switches vice presidents? To a Clinton? Three: OK, but what if Obama/Clinton loses? And if Obama wins again wouldn’t any Democrat be at a disadvantage in 2016 due to historical trends anyway, making it a “safer” bet to not be his running mate, assuming she actually wants to be president still, which is not at all a given?

But we’re not dealing with observable reality here, as the bit about Clinton’s magical power to un-gridlock Congress demonstrates. We’re in the world of vague assertions about “warmth” and “voltage.” How many electoral votes would running mate Hillary Clinton be worth? Keller never bothers to attempt to make a quantitative guess. This is the closest we get:

Moreover, even if Obama can win without Hillary, there’s a lot to be said for running up the score. If she can do in 2012 what Obama did in 2008 — animate that feeling of historic possibility — the pair can lift some House and Senate candidates along with them. One reason Republicans did so well in the 2010 Congressional elections is that they overcame the gender gap and carried women voters 51 to 49. Those voters will flock back to Hillary, the more so if the Republican ticket is locked into a culture-war agenda. So, by the way, will Hispanic voters, securing such endangered states as Florida, New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado.

Ooh, actual data! The Republicans won women in a midterm election. Hillary Clinton is a woman. So in a presidential general election, women will “flock back to Hillary.” Those women may be Republicans, voting in a Republican wave election, but they are women and so they will vote for Barack Obama if he is next to a woman on the ballot. (Though what about those Hispanics? Shouldn’t Obama replace Biden with a Hispanic woman, in this case? Or isn’t he in fact best off retaining Joe Biden, who is, after all, a white man? From Scranton? White men will “flock back” to Obama once they see that he is friends with a white person.)

The column isn’t just bad analysis — it’s also oddly condescending to Secretary Clinton! It complains that she owes “us” a vice-presidential run after she “raised our expectations” by running for president last time. It calls Clinton “the dutiful Methodist schoolgirl.”

Here’s the line that is secretly the worst:

But the idea that she should replace Joe Biden as Obama’s running mate in 2012 is something else. It has been kicking around on the blogs for more than a year without getting any traction, mainly because it has been authoritatively, emphatically dismissed by Hillary, Biden and Team Obama.

Did you see that? “Kicking around on the blogs.” That’s Keller-speak for “not worth anyone’s time until a real journalist like New York Times opinion columnist Bill Keller brought it up.” The “bloggers” kicking this idea around, as I mentioned earlier, are New York magazine political writer John Heilemann, Washington Post living legend Bob Woodward, and former Newsweek senior editor and best-selling author Jonathan Alter. Those bloggers and their crazy notions!

As a blogger, I know that my silly opinion is not as carefully considered and well-informed as that of former New York Times editor Bill Keller, who is not at all simply talking out of his ass. But even if there were any hint at all that the switch was a possibility, which there isn’t, it would be a stupid idea. Hillary Clinton is already part of the president’s Cabinet, and she and her husband will already campaign for the president’s reelection. Running mates barely nudge the numbers in presidential elections, unless they’re historically awful, which Joe Biden isn’t. The Clintons are among the most divisive figures in American politics — Hillary Clinton’s recent high approval rating has come because she’s not running for anything — and relitigating every Clinton scandal would consume the national political press for weeks if she ended up on the ticket.

The running mate switch hasn’t been successful since the Franklin Roosevelt administration, and the last time a president made a strategic switch to help win a tough reelection, it failed.

And I bet if Obama did make this stupid switch, Bill Keller would write some awful column about how desperate it made the president look. Unless he will have by then moved on to finally writing his “kids today sure are sexting each other a lot” piece.

Some are wise enough to bemoan the entire remaining slate, though they of course blame outsiders, and not the actual rank-and-file of their own movement. Jim Geraghty hates Iowa, and says the kooky results (Ron Paul!!!) can be blamed on the lack of a Democratic primary sending unreliable “independents” — presumably baked out of their minds — to GOP caucuses to spoil the entire campaign.

Erick Erickson — a longtime Santorum hater and one of the few pundits brave enough to label the culture warrior a false conservative, because Erickson declares everyone he dislikes for any reason to be Not a True Conservative — was so dispirited that he literally blamed Bush. (Well, Bush and those damned Paul-voting independents: “If you take out the non-Republicans who came into the caucuses last night for Ron Paul, the Republican turnout was less than 2008 — even considering the ratio of independents to Republicans who turned out in 2008.” And if you take out the votes for Santorum, Romney, Paul and Gingrich, Rick Perry won!)

The problem, per Erickson, is that Bush picked Cheney instead of a likable young president-in-waiting. The GOP, he has heard, likes “orderly processes” of succession. If only Bush had shown the foresight to select Marco Rubio as his running mate! In Erickson’s eyes, Bush’s failure to appoint an heir is what led to the John McCain campaign and Mitt Romney’s painful stumble toward the nomination. There is still hope, we’re told, for someone else (unnamed!) to enter the race and build momentum for the really important contests, which are now apparently scheduled for April.

If I were Perry, I’d wake up tomorrow, say I refuse to surrender the Republican Party into the hands of big government conservatives after all the gains the tea party has made, and then announce I’m firing all my political staffers and communications staffers and ask South Carolina to help me reboot to victory. Make it an Alamo stand and, if like at the Alamo Perry goes down, perhaps there’ll at least be a rallying cry for small government conservatism left over.

I can’t for the life of me figure out what makes Rick Perry “more conservative” than Rick Santorum but something something Alamo guns a-blazin’ cowboy Custer etc., etc. (Erickson then promoted a blog from a diarist making the case that perhaps Mitt Romney isn’t such an unmitigated socialistic big government evil.)

Kathryn Jean Lopez, of course, truly has always liked Rick, because they share a religion and a twisted puritanical revulsion for the whole of modernity.

As Roy Edroso noted, Jennifer Rubin’s been a Santorum fan since about August, so with the race now down to her two favorites, I imagine she’s thrilled. She certainly seems pleased — in her usual dyspeptic loathsome way — to stick it to those liberals who hoped vaguely for a Ron Paul victory. (She knows liberals like Paul because of his “bizarre views on Iran” and they hate Santorum for “his robust foreign policy.” She used the word “robust” again later, because it is code for “wants to bomb Muslims.”)

That post was just a warmup to her true defense of Santorum, whom she defends from Ericksonian charges of secret man-on-big government love. The case boils down to the facts that Santorum — like everyone else in the Republican Party — promises to repeal Obamacare and slash taxes yet further on our put-upon 1 percenters. (And let’s be honest — Santorum got into politics solely to be a soldier in God’s war on gays and abortionists. On every other issue he always has and always will just do whatever the think tanks and well-connected interest groups say, making his “record” on something like Medicare Part D entirely beside the point. If the party doesn’t like Medicare anymore, he doesn’t either!)

Ira Stoll makes the entirely unconvincing case that Santorum’s slight victory over Ron Paul was because voters were hungering for “a candidate who was willing to take on Ron Paul on foreign policy,” which, last I checked, was all of them. Those who vote Republican solely on “foreign policy” issues (bomb Iran) will likely continue pretending that the race from here on out will come down to which man can sound the hawkiest, even as the candidates themselves run on which one promises to ban the most abortions and deport the most immigrants.

There is, in other words, plenty for “establishment conservatives” to talk themselves into liking about Mr. Santorum as he takes his Iowa victory lap. Those who consider him an unlikable and decidedly unelectable boob will probably just keep quiet until he begins fading.

And then, a few short weeks later, all that “buzz” added up to precisely nothing. So, no, you should not be forgiven for having assumed that Perry had won the Iowa contest. Because if you assumed that, based on “social media buzz,” you’re horrible at forecasting elections and analyzing campaigns. Twitter was the “real-time warning system” for a media-fueled Rick Perry coverage bubble that burst months before anyone actually voted for a 2012 nominee.

Now, thanks to the Post, we will have a real-time map of ill-informed “buzz” from now until the general election. (And until it adjusts its algorithm, Ron Paul will “win” every day, because he’s got a psycho nternet cult.)

This is the distorting effect of minutiae-driven campaign coverage made animate. Here’s the Post again:

There are a few ways Twitter variables, or mentions, can be measured or extrapolated to examine trends in campaigns. Growth in number of legitimate followers or a high recurrence of retweets are both indicative of growing grass-roots support. A spike in the number of times a candidate is mentioned on Twitter might signal an event that could alter a campaign.

Even as information-free buzz-tracking this tool is flawed, because it fails to distinguish between positive and negative Twitter attention (I’m guessing Perry’s rank on the “leaderboard” would’ve surged when he forgot that third federal agency). Beginning tonight and continuing on through this year we will have an actual leaderboard for the GOP nomination, ranked by votes and delegates instead of retweets, rendering this entire thing even more useless.

The @MentionMachine (what a name) is too silly to get worked up about (sorry!), but it’s decidedly symptomatic of the awfulness of most campaign coverage, which mistakes volume for “grass-roots energy,” suffers from staggering historical amnesia, and regularly insults its audience by putting forth ridiculous speculative bullshit (Donald Trump could win!). This isn’t a call for the press to simply report on “the important stuff” — I find Santorum’s endorsement from the guy with a zillion kids just as gross and interesting as everyone else — it’s just a call to be smart about the dumb stuff. I’d like to know what it means that an old paleo-libertarian crank with a history of embracing conspiracy theories and white populism has a fanatical base of mostly young followers, not that those young followers give him enough “buzz” to win the nomination (they don’t).

Horse race coverage has an audience and a purpose — I’d just like to see it done well.

Politifact’s decision, needless to say, frustrated a lot of people. They have been accused of naming this arguably true claim the year’s biggest lie because Rep. Paul Ryan, the man who came up with the Medicare-replacing plan, launched a big letter-writing campaign lobbying for it, complete with a badly lit YouTube video. Paul Krugman and others say that Politifact made this decision in the interest of achieving the illusion of “balance,” because the past couple “lies of the year” have all belonged to Republicans.

The central argument for labeling this statement a “lie” is that campaign ads were produced that were supposed to scare senior citizens into voting for Democrats, even though the Republican plan exempted people who are currently senior citizens. The idea is that scare-mongering is basically the same thing as deceiving, which seems to make it extremely difficult to make a forceful political argument, in cases where you believe your opponent’s policies would make things radically worse.

Though it’s received less attention so far, Factcheck.org named the Medicare claim one of its three “Whoppers of 2011.” According to Factcheck, saying the Ryan plan would “essentially end Medicare” doesn’t count as a true statement because Democrat Ron Wyden joined with Paul Ryan to endorse a similar plan. Also saying it involves “cutting benefits for seniors” is false because the plan would only go into effect for people who will be seniors in the future.

This means the problem is not an isolated one. It’s not simply the journalists at Politifact clinging to a dubious claim because it grants them non-partisan cover. There is something broken about the institution of “fact-checking” as it currently operates.

Glenn Greenwald says professional fact-checkers rely too much on institutional Washington “experts” to determine the truth. Mark Hemingway, less convincingly, says fact-checkers are just biased liberals. Dan Kennedy, more convcingingly, says fact-checkers are simply programmed to ferret out lies, and are manufacturing lies in order to have material to write about.

As CJR said, in an editorial quoted by the New Republic’s Alec MacGillis: “One can mislead without betraying a carefully constructed set of facts.” And one can tell the truth while exaggerating or engaging in hyperbole. I think the simple truth, in this instance, is that these fact-checkers all saw the frankly ridiculous ads in which old people were wheeled to the brink of a cliff and thought it was all a bit much, and certainly not a sober explanation of the Ryan plan. And I think the political reporter’s natural cynicism, the conviction that both sides lie equally and often, led them to believe that there was no substantial difference between Sarah Palin labeling a review board a “death panel” and Democrats labeling the effective transformation of Medicare into a different thing the “end of Medicare” (while using scare-the-seniors visuals).

In other words, fact-checking practiced under the operating rules of “unbiased” “objective” political journalism will sometimes just highlight the failings of “unbiased” “objective” political journalism. Sometimes, the fact-check will look like a bad “centrist’s” opinion column. (The Ryan plan may radically alter Medicare, but it’s irresponsible to say it ends it, says David Brooks….)

The press has a real and serious need for a mechanism by which it can report the unvarnished truth, which by necessity involves judgment calls and the application of critical thinking that can often look like “bias.” Right now, the most prominent version of that mechanism has revealed itself to be as flawed as the rest of the political press.

The Guardian helpfully liveblogged Morgan’s entire appearance. Asked why the Mirror employed private detectives, Morgan played dumb:

I don’t know. Because I was never directly involved, this was dealt with through the news desk or features desk … Certainly all journalists knew they had to act within the confines of the law.

Questioned about the legality of using “rubbish” thrown out by private citizens as material for stories, Morgan said he thought it legal but “on the cusp of the unethical.”

Asked about a diary entry in which he explained how “phone-hacking” works, Morgan again played dumb, claiming not to remember who explained it to him. Morgan was questioned about a man “who went to the Daily Mirror more than 10 years ago with a story about mobile phone voicemail security being compromised.” Morgan said he doesn’t remember ever hearing about the man, and said the story would’ve been too boring to print, but the man was paid 100 pounds for the tip.

From the Guardian liveblog:

Morgan says he has “studied this man’s testimony”. “He seems to me one sandwich short of a picnic,” he adds.

He continues: “This was a complete non-event, it never got supressed for the reason he’s trying to …”

Sherborne asks why Nott was paid £100 for the story.

Morgan says “loads” of people get paid £100 for stories that are not used.

Nice work if you can get it.

And that was about it. The inquiry was never going to “nail” Morgan on anything other than generally being simultaneously amoral and sanctimonious. While he engaged in loads of completely unethical behavior, and almost certainly skirted the law, it’s clear that the Mirror wasn’t acting in blatant violation of the law as often or as brazenly as the Sun and News of the World.

Morgan finished off with a defensive and petulant closing statement, complaining that the inquiry lawyers only asked him about the bad stuff he did in his years in British tabloids. “It’s like a rock star having an album coming out with all his worst-ever hits,” Morgan said.