The Washington Post has a fascinating, groundbreaking article today, unfortunately buried on page A7: “McCain Mixes Up Iraqi Groups; Senator Misstates Which Extremists Are Aided by Iran.”
Perhaps I’m just jaded about the quality of journalism these days. Perhaps it’s the other articles in the paper commemorating the start of year six of the war in Iraq. But still: an article that leads with the statement, “A political leader in a position of authority made a factually incorrect statement today.” That’s revolutionary.
Compare that with the usual way that political statements are handled. Here’s the boilerplate:
[The president/chief of staff/Congressional leader] asserted something today about something important.
[S]he went on to say something else on the same topic, corroborating [his/her] first assertion.
If we do not do what [s]he wants about this issue, extremely bad things will occur.
The statements took place at [location and venue] on the occasion of [calendrical reference] to an audience of [people supporting the speaker].
[Opposition leader/representative of a nonprofit/random guy on the street] said afterwards, “no, [s]he’s wrong, that assertion has nothing to do with reality.”
[Ten paragraphs of analysis of the political implications about the statement]
So, what’s wrong with this picture? And how much better would it be if the template used was something similar to what they published on page A7 today?
[Senior official] said something today which contradicts all of the available information on the topic. [S]he repeated it several times, demonstrating that [s]he believes something in apparent opposition to what is known on the topic.
[Official’s campaign or legislative staff] did not provide any substantiating evidence to support these assertions, choosing instead to repeat the assertions using different words.
Of course, when new evidence is provided, that can certainly be the lead of the article. Likewise, when the argument is “our evidence is information that cannot be released for reasons of national security,” that could also be the lead to allow the reader to evaluate such comments themselves. And of course, statements about matters of opinion require a different structure.
But what a standard: requiring political statements to be factually accurate, or having the coverage be that the statement is wrong. I can’t help but wonder how Iraq might have gone in that case; certainly, if information opposing the invasion was available to me five years ago Friday, it was available to the newspapers.
Will we see more of this in the future? I’m not holding my breath.
I would posit that the difference between what McCain said and what Bush and others have said in the past is that McCain made a mis-statement (i.e., he disagrees with himself; i.e., he just said it wrong) as opposed to what happens most of the time, which is that a politician disagrees with you and the vast majority of the people you talk to all the time, and all of you collectively declare that state of affairs “lying.”
Your post from five years ago is a good example. You determined that Iraq wasn’t a nuclear threat because of what you read from Globalsecurity.org and Pugwash, so anyone who disagrees with these two organizations was, by definition, lying.
Here’s my hope: we get (back) to a point where statements from our leaders ARE information available on the topic, as opposed to rhetorical challenges to find contradictory evidence in order to slash & burn the leader’s credibility. I wonder if anyone, from either party, can be that kind of leader anymore.
Like you, I am not holding my breath.