Weekend Reading

For those of you who have power and a net connection this morning (unlike millions near Houston), some good reading on the subject of the way the media are covering the presidential campaign.

A lot of us have been gratified to see major news outlets debunking false claims from the McCain campaign. After years of watching coverage of Bush, we'd thought the press had forgotten the word "lie."

But these two articles point out that merely taking note of the lie isn't enough. What we need is for the media to actually change the way it reacts to the lying, and to the liars.

John Mercurio's piece in National Journal starts this way:

John McCain's campaign recently declared that the sky is red, with green and yellow polka dots. Armed with binders full of research and a New York Times op-ed, Barack Obama angrily jabbed his finger at the sky and countered that it is blue. McCain's campaign accused Obama of anti-skyism. Cable TV talkers spent the next 48 hours debating the color of the sky and Obama's anti-skyist tendencies.

Welcome to the Sept. 11th week of White House 2008.

For a campaign that embraced "change" only belatedly, McCain-Palin is suddenly pushing a ton. And not the kind you can believe, much less believe in.

I particularly like that bit about 'debating the color of the sky and Obama's anti-skyist tendencies'. More where that came from: 'McCain Camp Builds a Bridge to Distraction'.

Jamison Foser at Media Matters gives us an insightful analysis of the way the choices made by the media can affect elections in important ways, and how the current media behavior is actually encouraging dishonesty on the part of the McCain campaign.

Here's an example: Yesterday, The Washington Post ran an article about McCain's attacks on Obama, including his false charge that Obama's use of the phrase "lipstick on a pig" was a sexist reference to Sarah Palin. Paragraphs 1, 5, 6, and 7 contained the allegation in various forms. Paragraphs 9 and 10 were about McCain allies saying the attacks were working. Paragraph 11 finally brought the first indication that the attack wasn't true.

Constructing the article that way privileges the false claim. Readers have it drummed into their heads, over and over again, before they finally see a fleeting suggestion that it isn't true.

So how else could the Post have constructed that article? Well, the article could have begun not with an unchallenged recitation of McCain's false claim, but with a very different frame: "John McCain launched another dishonest attack on Barack Obama, the latest in a long line of claims that have been debunked and denounced by neutral observers as false, misleading, and in some cases, lies." It could have gone on to detail the growing body of evidence that McCain is running a dishonest campaign and to note that McCain risks being seen as a serial liar who will say anything to get elected.

Sound judgmental? Maybe. But it's quite consistent with coverage of Al Gore in 2000 -- coverage about things he said that were not actually false.

Besides, news organizations make judgments all the time. The Washington Post made the judgment that the best way to report the story would be to repeat the false allegation in four separate paragraphs before finally, 11 paragraphs into the story, giving some indication that it was false. That's supposed to be better, or more appropriate, or more ethical than making the judgment that the most important thing about McCain's attack was that it was false? Please. That's absurd. That doesn't reflect any principle or standard of good journalism, it just reflects the media's steadfast belief that John McCain is a straight-talker, no matter how much he says things that aren't true -- and their fearful refusal to risk the wrath of Mark Salter and the army of Republican operatives who will attack them for "bias" if they don't frame the story in a way favorable to their candidate.

And that's just what happened this week. Journalists who knew McCain's "lipstick on a pig" charge was pure bunk framed their reports about it as though it might be true -- and as though the important thing was not one campaign lying about the other, but whether the lies would be effective.

There's a lot of insight and analysis that doesn't fit into a quick excerpt. Really, you owe it to yourself to read the whole thing.