“In Lebanon,” John McCain declared in his second debate with
Barack Obama, “I stood up to President Reagan, my hero, and said,
if we send Marines in there, how can we possibly beneficially
affect this situation? And said we shouldn’t. Unfortunately, almost
300 brave young Marines were killed.”
The finest minds in American journalism set out to check
McCain’s claim and discovered it to be true.
The finest minds in American journalism set out to check
McCain’s claim and discovered it to be false.
Seriously. Here is CNN explaining why McCain’s statement was
true:
The U.S. Multinational Force operated in Beirut, Lebanon, from
August 24, 1982, to March 30, 1984, as part of an international
peacekeeping operation in the war-torn country.
McCain was a freshman member of the House of Representatives in
September 1983 when it approved legislation “that would invoke the
War Powers Act in Lebanon and authorize the deployment of American
Marines in the Beirut area for an additional 18 months,” the New
York Times reported.
The resolution had the backing of House leaders of both parties
and President Reagan, and it passed by a vote of 270 to 161, the
Times report said. But McCain “argued that his military training
led him to oppose the continued deployment of troops in Lebanon,”
the Times reported.
But here is how ABC concluded it was false:
This is an issue that came up in the first presidential debate,
as well. And in both cases, McCain exaggerates his position.
Marines were already in Lebanon when McCain arrived on Capitol Hill
in 1983, and his vote was to prevent invoking the War Powers Act to
extend the Marines already deployed. McCain did vote against that,
but as he did in the first debate, McCain is wrong to imply that he
opposed sending the Marines to Lebanon.
This was the year in which “fact checking” of political ads and
statements became a full-blown journalistic fad, practiced by TV
networks like CNN and ABC, newspapers like the Washington
Post and USA Today, and even dedicated websites like
FactCheck.org and PolitiFact.com (the latter a joint venture of the
St. Petersburg Times and Congressional
Quarterly).
The “fact check” format is opinion journalism or criticism
masquerading as straight news. The object is not merely to report
facts but to render a judgment—or a “verdict,” as CNN calls it.
The Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog ends each
assessment with between one and four “Pinocchios,” just like movie
reviewers giving out stars.
Like movie reviewing, the “fact check” is a highly subjective
process. If a politician makes a statement that is flatly false, it
does not need to be “fact checked.” The facts themselves are
sufficient. “Fact checks” end up dealing in murkier areas of
context and emphasis, making it very easy for the journalist to
make up standards as he goes along, applying them more rigorously
to the candidate he disfavors (which usually means the
Republican).
McCain’s Lebanon statement, about which ABC and CNN reached
opposite conclusions, is a prime illustration. Both networks agreed
on the underlying fact, namely that McCain voted against what CNN
called the “continued deployment” in Lebanon. ABC had a
niggle—that the vote was not on the initial deployment,
which occurred before McCain took his seat in the House. ABC did
not mention that when Reagan deployed the Marines in August 1982,
he did so on his own authority. Congress’s 1983 vote on “continued
deployment” was the first time lawmakers weighed in on the subject.
(Neither network seems to have made an effort to determine if
candidate McCain took a position on the deployment in 1982.)
To this writer, it appears that ABC was going out of its way to
make McCain look bad. The timing of McCain’s vote vis-à-vis the
deployment was not essential to the points he was trying to make at
the debate, namely that he does not always favor military action
and has not always sided with presidents of his own party.
HERE IS ANOTHER EXAMPLE, one in which the criticism of the
McCain campaign had a stronger basis. On October 6, USA
Today published a “reality check” of a McCain ad whose script
ran as follows:
Narrator: Who is Barack Obama? He says our
troops in Afghanistan are…
Obama: …just air-raiding villages and killing
civilians.
Narrator: How dishonorable. Congressional
liberals voted repeatedly to cut off funding to our active troops,
increasing the risk on their lives. How dangerous. Obama and
congressional liberals: too risky for America.
The USA Today headline read “Quote From Obama Taken Out
of Context.” The paper gave a longer version of the Obama quote:
“We’ve got to get the job done there, and that requires us to have
enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and
killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over
there.”
Was McCain’s quote fair? It’s a close call. On the one hand,
Obama was making a broader argument, which the McCain ad ignored:
that America should send more troops to Afghanistan. On the other
hand, Obama clearly did assert that America is “air-raiding
villages and killing civilians,” though one could argue about
whether he was asserting or merely worrying that we are “just”
doing so.
But again, why is it necessary for USA Today to have an
opinion on the matter at all? Why not just report what the McCain
ad said, report what Obama said, and let the reader make up his own
mind as to whether McCain was lying, telling the truth, or engaging
in ordinary political hyperbole?
“Ordinary political hyperbole” is a concept with which reporters
ought to refamiliarize themselves. In their zeal to uncover
political “lies,” journalists have increasingly adopted a prissy
and ridiculous literalism, exemplified in this October 6 report
from the New York Times:
There is no way, of course, that Senator Barack Obama would ever
nominate three controversial figures from his past to serve on the
United States Supreme Court: the convicted felon Antoin Rezko; the
former Weather Underground radical Bill Ayers; or Mr. Obama’s
former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.
Yet the names and faces of the three men appear in a new
television advertisement—running in Michigan and Ohio this week
and nationally on Fox News on Monday, at a total cost of
$500,000—arguing that Mr. Obama’s judgment about his associates
shows that he cannot be trusted to pick justices for the Supreme
Court.
In September 1984, Walter Mondale asked, “Do you really want
Jerry Falwell to pick the next two judges to the Supreme Court?”
The Times quoted him and did not think it necessary to
point out that only the president has the power to make nominations
to the federal bench, that Falwell was not running for president,
and that therefore the premise of Mondale’s question was false.
Back then, the Times took for granted that its readers
were smart enough to make sense of Mondale’s statement on their
own. Today, journalists seem to assume that their readers and
viewers need to be told what to think of everything the politicians
say. It just may be, however, that people are as smart today as the
Times gave them credit for being 24 years ago.
