By Dan Kennedy • Tracking the future of local news and other passions since 2005
Over the weekend I converted Boston Media Tweeters from a wiki to a Twitter list. I made the move because the wiki had been hit repeatedly by spammers.
The advantage to the list is that you can subscribe to it and instantly start following the people who are on it. The disadvantage is that you can’t add yourself.
Click here to check out the list and to subscribe. Click here to learn a bit more about the list, and to see how you can request to be added.
When you claim that President Obama was responsible for the closing of an auto plant that actually shut down before President Bush left office, people are going to notice. The question is whether anyone will care.
Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan delivered a speech Wednesday night that was unusual for its deliberate mendacity, even by the rough-and-tumble standards of political combat. Right after he finished, the usually timid souls of CNN praised his address for its tone and approach, but volunteered that the fact-checkers would surely have something to say.
Indeed. FactCheck.org, nonpartisan and often cautious to a fault, reports that Ryan’s speech “contained several false claims and misleading statements” — the auto-plant closing as well as the Surety Bond cost, of course, but also:
FactCheck competitor PolitiFact rated Ryan’s auto-plant whopper as “false” and his Medicare claim as “mostly false.”
New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen recently wrote a provocative blog post on the media’s encouragingly aggressive response to a much bigger lie being perpetrated by the Romney-Ryan team — that Obama had loosened the work requirements for welfare recipients.
The problem is that though the media have deviated from their usual he-said/he-said/you-decide formula in frankly labeling the welfare claim a falsehood, the Republicans keep using it on the theory that it’s working. And there’s little evidence that the media’s diligence will make any difference with the public, which is likely to chalk it up to politics as usual.
As for the notion that “both sides do it,” well, they do and they don’t. I think Rosen gets it exactly right:
If you’re wondering: do I recognize that the Obama forces have also used deceptive, depraved and untrue claims? Yes. I do. These stand out: Romney didn’t say he likes firing people in the way some Democrats and TV personalities have suggested, so that counts as a kind of lie. The Priorities USA ad that suggested (without quite saying it) that Bain Capital was somehow responsible for the death of a steelworker’s wife: that goes in the depraved category. When the White House claimed it knew nothing about the case that was clearly untrue — pathetic, really. The refusal to condemn the ad was a black mark, as well. Obama ads calling Romney “outsourcer in chief” were over the top and relied on false or overblown claims.
In my view these are serious transgressions. And in my view they do not compare to the use of falsehood and deceptive claims in the Romney 2012 campaign. Nor is there anything coming from the Obama machine that is like the open defiance of fact-checking we have seen from Romney and his team.
Romney delivers his acceptance speech tonight. It will be interesting to see whether he takes the high road, content to let his running mate do the dirty work — or if he will dive into the muck himself.
Photo (cc) by Gage Skidmore and republished under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
This commentary also appears at the Huffington Post.
The media — all 15,000-plus reporters, photographers, editors, producers and assorted hangers-on who’ve descended on this unlovely, brutally humid old city — are having a nervous breakdown. And you’re invited to watch.
With the Republican National Convention making no news, and with the Democratic convention destined to be similarly vacuous, it seems the only story media people are talking about is the fact that there’s no story.
I wrote those words 12 years ago in Philadelphia, where I was covering the nomination of George W. Bush for the Boston Phoenix. If anything, the ennui that has come to permeate our national political conventions has grown even more pronounced since then. Nothing newsworthy will take place inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum this week or at Bank of America Forum in Charlotte, N.C., the following week.
But, once again, some 15,000 members of the media have showed up anyway, and most of them will be covering the same non-story. As the noted media observer Jeff Jarvis wrote on his blog, Buzz Machine, the financially strapped news business is spending some $60 million to attend two conventions even while cutting far more important coverage elsewhere. Jarvis continued:
Note that even while newspapers and news organizations have shrunken drastically, we are sending the same number of journalists to the conventions that we sent in 2008 and 2004. Why? Editorial ego: It’s fun to be there, in the pack. It’s fun for a paper or station to say, “We have our man/woman in Tampa/Charlotte.” Well goody for you. It’s a waste.
Yet it doesn’t have to be that way. Yes, way too many journalists are attending the conventions, and many if not most of the folks carrying press credentials this week should have stayed home. But I never found any shortage of news at the four national conventions I covered from 1996 to 2004. The secret — and it’s really no secret at all — is to get out of the hall and look for stories. I was a reporter for the Phoenix, an alternative weekly, during those years, so leaving the media pack behind wasn’t just tolerated; it was required.
In 1996, when I covered the Republican convention in San Diego, I was one of a surprisingly small group of reporters who took a bus to a rally at which Pat Buchanan made his last stand. No doubt other journalists were afraid of missing out on even a moment of Dole-Kemp mania.
In 2000, covering the Republicans in Philadelphia and the Democrats in Los Angeles, I followed protesters around the city streets and reported on two “Shadow Conventions” — left-leaning events organized by Arianna Huffington, who had only recently moved from the conservative to the progressive side of the political spectrum.
At the Democratic convention in 2004, on my home turf in Boston, I skipped Barack Obama’s keynote address because I was writing on deadline. So what? Yes, I missed a bit of history, but it’s not as though his speech wasn’t covered. What mattered was that my fellow Phoenix reporters and I went looking for news outside the building — and found plenty of it, from a meeting of gay and lesbian Democrats to a church service/rally in honor of the late senator Paul Wellstone, from demonstrations in the streets to panel discussions on the sad state of political journalism.
I have little doubt that Jeff Jarvis will be proven right, although there will be a few honorable exceptions. But it doesn’t have to be that way. All the media have to do is get off their collective rear ends and go looking for news. (And let me give a plug to David Bernstein and Chris Faraone, who are heading up the Phoenix’s Tampa coverage.)
I’ll close here as I did in Philadelphia in 2000:
Sure, the media will cover the horse race — who’s up, who’s down, who’s gaining, who’s losing — as well as the accusations and responses, the biographical retrospectives, and the gotchas. That’s all valuable stuff.
But they’ll almost certainly miss the biggest political story of all: the profound disconnect between average citizens and their elected officials…. A sign at the Shadow Convention put it best: “We Can Only Vote Every Four Years; Money Votes Every Day.”
It’s a story the media could have tried to cover during convention week, but — with rare exceptions — they didn’t even try. Instead, the story coming out of Philadelphia was that there was no story. There was. If journalists would start focusing more on the public’s alienation and less on their own, maybe they could start to tell it.
Photo (cc) by Gage Skidmore and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.
John Sununu makes a false claim today in his Boston Globe column, which he devotes to a tiresome defense of Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan.
The former Republican senator writes that Brad DeLong, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley, had called on Harvard University to fire the historian Niall Ferguson over his recent Newsweek cover story on the alleged failures of President Obama. “A Berkeley professor more or less demanded that Harvard ‘fire his ass'” is how Sununu puts it.
That would be a pretty amazing statement by DeLong if it were true. Sununu is claiming, in effect, that DeLong, a member of the academy, is calling on Harvard to violate a colleague’s academic freedom solely because he doesn’t like what he’s written. As I said: If it were true. It’s not.
In the online version of his column, Sununu helpfully provides a link to DeLong’s blog post. And here is what DeLong actually wrote:
Fire his ass.
Fire his ass from Newsweek, and the Daily Beast.
Convene a committee at Harvard to impose proper sanctions on this degree of intellectual dishonesty.
In an “update,” DeLong clarifies his Harvard reference: “Not that I claim to know what the proper sanctions are, you understand. But we should be inquiring into what they are.”
Now, let me hasten to say that I’m troubled by DeLong’s actual position — that Harvard should look into disciplining Ferguson. But that is a long, long way from calling on Harvard to fire him.
And I should note that DeLong and a number of other critics contend that Ferguson went far beyond expressing anti-Obama opinions, veering into deliberate falsehoods in order to bolster his argument that Obama’s presidency is a failure. (Here is the full bill of particulars compiled by the Atlantic, which I found via the estimable Charlie Pierce.) That could be considered academic misconduct, so DeLong is not completely off the mark — though it strikes me as extreme and unwarranted under the circumstances. Banging out a screed for Tina Brown isn’t exactly the same thing as falsifying academic research.
My issue isn’t with DeLong or Ferguson, though. It’s with Sununu, who has blithely and wrongly slimed DeLong. Perhaps because he didn’t name DeLong, he thought it was all right. Perhaps he thought including the phrase “more or less” would get him off the hook.
Finally, what is up with the Globe’s editors? If I can click on Sununu’s link, so could they.
The Boston Globe today admitted to “the use of material without attribution” in a recent editorial criticizing Vice President Joe Biden. The Aug. 17 editorial, which took Biden to task for his “put y’all back in chains” comment, tracks closely — very closely — with a commentary by Republican political consultant Todd Domke that was published two days earlier on the website of WBUR Radio (90.9 FM).
An editor’s note published by the Globe reads as follows:
An Aug. 17 editorial on Vice President Joe Biden’s comments on bank regulations contained some similarities in phrasing and structure to an opinion piece by Todd Domke on WBUR.org. The use of the material without attribution was inconsistent with Globe policies, and the Globe regrets the error.
WBUR reports on the editor’s note here.
Domke’s commentary is longer and better written than the Globe editorial. The problem is that the editorial tracks with Domke virtually paragraph by paragraph, with similar and at times identical language, while offering nothing that Domke didn’t come up with first. Even if it’s not actual plagiarism, Globe editors obviously believed it was close enough to warrant a mea culpa.
Which raises a few questions:
If this were a signed column rather than an unsigned editorial, wouldn’t this be a bigger deal? Wouldn’t we be wondering whether the writer had been or should be disciplined? Does the anonymity of editorial-writing mean less scrutiny than this would otherwise warrant?
And, more important, what are we to make of a partisan political argument written by a Republican contributor to WBUR becoming the official position of the region’s paper of record? The Globe editorial accepted the view that Biden’s comment was somehow racial in nature, even though Biden’s reference to “chains” was arguably a response to House Speaker John Boehner’s promise to “unshackle Wall Street.”*
As former conservative Charles Johnson wrote: “The right wing media are still shrieking about Joe Biden’s ‘chains’ comment, even though not a single one of these demagogues honestly believes there was a racial intent to it.”
Not to beat a dead horse. The Globe acknowledged its misstep. But really.
*Note: What Biden actually said was, “Romney wants to let the — he said in the first hundred days, he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules, unchain Wall Street. They’re going to put ya’ll back in chains.” It was Obama campaign spokesman Robert Gibbs who later cited Boehner’s remarks.
OpenCourt, an innovative project set up to cover proceedings in Quincy District Court, has won another round, as Supreme Judicial Court Associate Justice Margot Botsford has ruled that it may expand its live-streaming to a second courtroom.
In so doing, Botsford rejected a move by Norfolk County District Attorney Michael Morrissey and public defenders to keep OpenCourt out.
Earlier item here; Boston Globe story here; the text of Botsford’s ruling here.
Some unexpectedly good news in Bob Ryan’s “farewell” column in today’s Boston Globe: He’s going to continue writing between 30 and 40 Sundays a year. That’s more than we had been led to believe. Not quite a farewell. Ryan writes:
[W]hat matters most to me as I wind down my association with this great newspaper is that I firmly believe I have been a member of a true All-Star team in sports journalism for the entire 44 years. We tend to judge sports figures by the number of championship rings they have been fortunate enough to accumulate. I want to be judged by the people I’ve worked with. Lists are dangerous, because someone obvious invariably is left off. So I won’t risk that. Just appreciate that I have been in a killer lineup for 44 years.
Well, Bob, you were as good as any of them, and better than most. I’m glad we won’t be missing you as much as we thought.
[blip.tv http://blip.tv/play/hIUWg4CfJQI?p=1 width=”480″ height=”321″]
The Paul Ryan announcement has made Joe Soptic seem like yesterday’s news. But before we let go, I want to take a look at a truly miserable job of fact-checking done by FactCheck.org on the pro-Obama ad in which Soptic appears to blame his wife’s death from cancer on Mitt Romney.
My purpose is not to defend the ad, produced by Priorities USA, a Super PAC aligned with President Obama. I agree with just about everyone that it’s over the top, though I take it as kind of a warning shot for Romney to ease up on his own false claims (see this and this for recent examples).
Last December, I wrote a piece for the Huffington Post on the downside of the explosion in fact-checking. FactCheck’s attempt to knock down the Soptic ad is a good example of what I found troubling about the phenomenon. I would have no problem with calling it a toxic bit of sleaze, because it is. But false? Not by any standards I’m aware of. Essentially, the ad omits the sort of factual statements that could be subjected to a binary true/false test.
The FactCheck fact-check, by Robert Farley (click here and scroll down for bio), is rife with distortions. Let me take a few.
First, and most important, FactCheck is sticking with its insistence that Romney had nothing to do with Bain Capital in February 2002, when Bain pulled the plug on the steel mill where Soptic worked. (The back story on the plant closing, reported by Reuters last January, is well worth reading.) “As we’ve reported before, when the plant closed Romney was running the 2002 Winter Olympics,” Farley instructs us.
But as the Boston Globe and others have reported, Romney — who says he left Bain in 1999 — was chief executive of the company until well into 2002. Whether he was hands-on or not, he was in charge and he benefited financially from the decision that left Soptic unemployed.
The idea that Romney shouldn’t be held accountable because he was running the Olympics is mystifying. As someone else said (I wish I had the link), imagine that Obama owned an apartment building in Chicago, and that rats and cockroaches were discovered there. Do you think anyone would be inclined to let him off the hook because he was an absentee landlord and had hired a manager to look after the property?
FactCheck’s Farley also finds the ad “misleading” because Ranae Soptic “didn’t lose coverage when the plant closed. Mr. Soptic told CNN that she lost her own employer-sponsored coverage a year or two later. She had no coverage after that.”
Seriously? This isn’t hard, folks. If Joe Soptic hadn’t lost his health insurance after Bain shut down the plant where he worked, his wife could have slid over onto his coverage after she lost hers — assuming she wouldn’t have been rejected for having a pre-existing condition. I have absolutely no idea what point Farley even thinks he’s making.
Finally, Farley wants us to know that the ad is “misleading” because Mrs. Soptic “died in 2006 — five years after the plant closed.” Good Lord. I’m not even going to attempt to comment on that except to point out that uninsured people tend to let things go.
Interestingly enough, the ad has never even appeared on television as an ad, but it’s been shown numerous times for free so critics could denounce it. That’s cost-effective advertising.
Voters should feel free to judge the candidates on the tenor of their campaigns. Fact-checking has its purposes. But it has real limits as well.
Kudos to Steve Annear of BostInno for calling out these mouth-breathing racists by name.
Watch 1 Guest: Stephen Mindich on PBS. See more from Greater Boston.
Boston Phoenix publisher Stephen Mindich sat down with Emily Rooney last night on “Greater Boston” on WGBH-TV (Channel 2) to talk about the future of the Phoenix and his own legendary career in Boston media. Well worth your time.