Guest-blogging over at Unclaimed Territory, Anonymous Liberal has two posts about honesty in political advertising and the lack thereof. A.L. makes some interesting suggestions there, and I recommend reading one or the other or both. One of his observations is about the media's abrogation of its role in distinguishing truth from falsehood:
As I’ve observed before, when it comes to covering politics, journalists today are much more like play-by-play announcers than referees. They no longer see it as their job to step in and call fouls, i.e., to call a lie a lie. This is a pity because--for the reasons explained above--it is in the arena of politics where we are most in need of referees; it is in the arena of politics where the normal referees (government officials, judges, private litigants) cannot operate effectively.
We saw this quite clearly just after the November 2006 election, when the President announced that Donald Rumsfeld was leaving as Secretary of Defense. Bush was asked why, just days beforehand, he had unequivocally told reporters that he had no intention of replacing Rumsfeld. His response:
The reason why is I didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign. And so the only way to answer that question and to get you on to another question was to give you that answer.
In other words, he lied and he admitted lying. But how did the mainstream media report it? As Glenn Greenwald noted at the time, the Washington Post initially wrote:
At his news conference, Bush called the election results a "thumping" but vowed to maintain his policy of refusing to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq "before the job is done." Bush indicated that he had made the decision to replace Rumsfeld before the elections, but he said he had not held a "final conversation" with the defense chief or talked to Gates at the time he told reporters in response to a question last week that Rumsfeld would be staying on.
Asked about that comment, Bush said he made it because "I didn't want to inject a major decision about this war in the final days of a campaign," Bush said. He appeared to acknowledge having misled reporters, saying, "And so the only way to answer that question and to get you onto another question was to give you that answer."
He added later, "Win or lose, Bob Gates was going to become the nominee.
But at some point, the Post fundamentally changed this article (without leaving any indication that it did so). Now, in that same Post article, the passage I quoted about the President's having acknowledged that he "misled reporters" is gone entirely -- just disappeared, deleted with no trace -- and instead one finds only this:
He said that he had begun to contemplate Rumsfeld's exit before the election -- even while he was publicly vowing that he would keep the defense secretary through the end of his term and insisting that polls forecasting Republican defeat were wrong. "I thought we were going to do fine yesterday," Bush insisted. "Shows what I know." But "win or lose, Bob Gates was going to become the nominee."
At some point, the Post changed what was the accurate reporting -- that Bush expressly acknowledged that he "misled" reporters because he had "indicated that he had made the decision to replace Rumsfeld before the elections" -- by claiming in the new version that he merely "contemplated" Rumsfeld's exit before the election. Worse, the Post deleted entirely the accurate statement that the President "appeared to acknowledge having misled reporters."
The point here is not to specifically rehash the President's remarks about Rumsfeld's departure. It's to illustrate the point Anonymous Liberal made about how the press has gone all postmodern on us and now refrains from comparing the President's narratives against the known facts. It's as if the exercise of Aristotelean logic--both A and Not A cannot be simultaneously true--is beyond the pale in a family newspaper.
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