"Striving for fairness and balance does not mean we can’t adjudicate the facts. When the truth is knowable, the press should not hesitate to point it out."
http://www.cjr.org/issues/2004/4/keefer-tsunami.asp<snip>
Political spin is as old as politics, and it is tempting to view the Campaign ’04 version as nothing more than an update of the same old, same old. Ask a dozen reporters about this campaign season and you’ll hear a dozen variations on recurrent themes: the campaigns are dishonest, the attacks and counterattacks fly nonstop, the wash of information dumped on the press is bewildering. Such assessments, though, miss a crucial new development: President Bush, Senator Kerry, and their operatives are deliberately using a cynical combination of calculated deception, speed, and volume to exploit the press’s reluctance to call a lie a lie. Rather than sorting through the facts and pointing out what is true and what is not — something good reporters are qualified to do — we too often treat the truth as something the reader or viewer should be able to discern from competing bits of spin. In doing so, we encourage the candidates to mislead the public. And when the “facts” are coming from every conceivable angle and around the clock, it makes it even more unlikely that the press will sort through it all and render a judgment. Bush has taken advantage of this like no other president before him (this is how he governs, not just how he campaigns) and Kerry is learning quickly how to play the game. The rules of engagement on the campaign trail have changed, and the press must change the way it covers the race or risk drowning — along with the voters — under a toxic tsunami.
<snip>
Many of the problems of political journalism are driven by the expectation that reporters must avoid making explicit judgments about the truth of what candidates say. Instead, reporters too often pass the misinformation on to readers, content to have “balanced” it with the “other side” of the story. If this were ever good enough, it isn’t anymore. Striving for fairness and balance does not mean we can’t adjudicate the facts. When the truth is knowable, the press should not hesitate to point it out. When it is not knowable, reporters need to include anything they can to help the reader understand a given issue or situation.
Journalists should treat candidate dishonesty like a shooting gallery: every time a candidate says something misleading, the press corps should report it and debunk it — within their stories, and in their own voices. No leaving it to “news analysis” pieces; no quoting “experts” telling viewers it’s false. To make informed decisions about the candidates these days, under these conditions, the public needs honest reporting, not only about the facts, but about how the candidates are misrepresenting them.
No one is better situated than journalists to serve as judges of factual accuracy. As The New Republic’s Ryan Lizza says, even if you don’t work at an opinion magazine, “judging what is truth and what isn’t should be part of your job. It’s really cynical for us to treat every piece of spin as a legitimate argument. Some stuff is just right and some stuff is just wrong.”
...much more
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