In the days leading up to the Republican convention in Tampa, Jay Rosen published another insightful piece asking if journalists should call-out lies when they occur. He’s referencing Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the four-term Democratic Senator from New York: “You’re entitled to your own opinions. You’re not entitled to your own facts.”
For years, journalists have let outright lies — especially those told by politicians — slide. Rosen maintains we’re now in a time of “post-truth” politics and that fact-checking in journalism is an afterthought, if it’s thought about at all. Politicians have begun to act like they are not bound by truth in the statements they make. Rosen files this down to the nub:
“‘Hey, you’re not entitled to your own facts…’ vs: That’s your opinion. Kiss my ad. Read my poll.”
In the 1990s, Rosen notes, misleading political advertisements were scored with the focus on judging the truth — not the effectiveness — of an ad. But this campaign season, “the campaigns seem able to override it, which does not mean they override it equally or with the same vengeance,” writes Rosen.
There’s little hope the lies will stop until the media — corporate and independent — call out false information immediately, and in context. Rosen points to Ron Fournier’s recent National Journal piece as a high point and explanation of why this is happening.
The US corporate media has, ever so slowly and ever so timidly, begun calling the lying politicians on their lies, what Rosen calls a “revolt of the saavy.” At first it was relatively gentle rebukes of Mitt Romney attacking President Obama’s cooperation with Republican governors in their desire to experiment with existing law requiring work for welfare.
Then, all of a sudden, the Los Angeles Times broke from Rosen’s church of the saavy and ran a withering headline: “Rick Santorum repeats inaccurate welfare attack on Obama.” Well, withering for corporate media.
Almost simultaneously, Ben Rosen, editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, cited Romney pollster Neil Newhouse at a breakfast briefing at the Republican convention in Tampa: “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.” Ben Rosen published a full account of the GOP breakfast briefing including the full context of Newhouse’s comment:
“‘Fact checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs, and we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers,’ he said. The fact-checkers — whose institutional rise has been a feature of the cycle — have ‘jumped the shark,’ he added after the panel.”
That seemed to be the shot heard ’round the mediasphere. “You’re not entitled to your own facts,” the media chanted, seemingly in unison. “That’s your opinion,” comes the response from the Romney campaign. “Professional journalists, whose self-image starts with: ‘We’re a check on…’ have to decide what to do about the truck that just ran their checkpoint, carrying the brain trust of the Romney campaign, who are inside laughing at how easy it all was,” writes Jay Rosen.
James Bennet, writing for the Atlantic, acknowledges that the best journalists have abandoned the he-said-she-said mode of reporting this campaign season, “and directly declaring that certain claims are false.” Calling this behavior by the journalists the “new assertiveness,” Bennet frets about what happens if nobody cares when the lies are called out. The Romney campaign responds to being called out on each of its lies by doubling-down with a simple rejection and denial. “The result is a stalemate — or, actually, a kind of mind-blowing media-political meta-vortex that might be better fodder for students of epistemology or semiotics, and certainly of American Studies, than for journalists, though they should probably watch it, too,” writes Bennet.
Bennet concludes:
“The bottom line, of course, is that the ad is continuing to run. It is continuing to run because the Romney campaign’s polling shows it to be effective. And therefore, kind of by definition, the press pushback is not having much effect — at least not so far, and at least not in the battlegrounds where the ad is playing.
“Instead of being able to stand above the fray as some sort of neutral arbiter of the truth, the press may be finding that it is winding up on one side of a new kind of he-said-she-said argument.”
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Media and post-truth politics was originally published by ARTS & FARCES internet on Tuesday, 4 September 2012 at 6:04 AM CDT. Copyright © ARTS & FARCES LLC. All rights reserved. | ISSN: 1535-8119 | OCLC: 48219498 | Digital fingerprint: 974a89ee1284e6e92dd256bbfbef3751 (64.237.45.114)