No room for facts; there’s a horserace to cover

November 19, 2007

It’s surprisingly easy to turn on the TV and find countless examples of why most coverage of the presidential campaign is utterly useless, but Greg Sargent found a particularly egregious example yesterday on Meet the Press.

Yesterday’s show consisted of six media personalities discussing the presidential race. It was hardly gripping television — we, the humble audience, basically got to peek in on a discussion among six media insiders discussing the horserace. The discussion turned to Rudy Giuliani’s Bernie Kerik problem, and Tim Russert read the spin the former mayor told the AP: “There were mistakes made with Bernie Kerik. But what’s the ultimate result for the people of New York City? The ultimate result for the people of New York City was a 74 percent reduction in shootings, a 60 percent reduction in crime, a correction program that went from being one of the worst in the country to one that was on ’60 Minutes’ as one of the best in the country, 90 percent reduction of violence in the jails.”

Here’s the video and the transcript, but we heard several minutes of chatter about whether Giuliani’s spin “works.” Whether the issue would “go away” as the primaries unfolded. Ron Brownstein concluded that the Kerik story is a reminder that if Giuliani gets the GOP nomination, “We will begin to explore the New York record and debate it and discuss it in a way that we haven’t so far.”

The underlying point of the discussion went unsaid, but it was obvious: Giuliani appointed a criminal to head the NYPD, but he got results. The real question, therefore, is whether the ends justify the means.

But this is complete nonsense. Giuliani’s excuses for Kerik are factually wrong. Not a single person on the Meet the Press panel even paused to let the audience know that the claim they were discussing is demonstrably false. As Greg explained:

Neither Russert nor his guests spent a second asking whether Rudy’s claims were true. Russert selected this quote beforehand, so he had plenty of time to entertain this question. But he didn’t — and neither did his guests. Instead, they only discussed whether it will work politically.

The point of the program wasn’t to inform the audience; the point of the show is to highlight horserace analysis from a variety of media personalities. It’s as if we, the unwashed masses, are lucky to have the chance to see six media insiders chat about who’s up or down this week, so NBC puts it on the air for an hour.

Greg added:

The point is, no matter how you interpret it, Rudy’s push-back demands aggressive factual scrutiny. Yet here you have a group at the top of the punditry game — Russert, Chuck Todd, Ronald Brownstein, Gwenn Ifil, etc. — and none of them even took a tentative step down that path. These folks are so preoccupied with whether Rudy’s pushback will work that there’s no mental space left to question whether it’s true. The irony, of course, is that this wrongheaded focus makes it more likely that Rudy’s pushback will work.

Which leaves it to the blogs to do the work media personalities don’t want to do anymore.

* Giuliani claimed that Kerik reduced “shootings” by 74% — Greg found that there are no statistics that measure the amorphous category of “shootings,” but there is data that showed shooting victims in New York City fell by just 7% between 1999 and 2002. So, Giuliani was only off by a factor of ten.

* Giuliani claimed that Kerik reduced crime by 60% — Wrong again. Greg explained, “According to FBI crime stats, in 2000 there were 288,368 police-recorded crimes. In 2001, there were 263,764. Comparing these is actually overly fair to Kerik, since he started half way into 2000. So here we see a drop of roughly 8.5% percent — hardly the 60 percent Rudy claimed.”

* Giuliani said Kerik’s success in turning around NYC’s correction program was touted on 60 Minutes — Actually, 60 Minutes featured Kerik’s role overseeing one specific jail, not the city’s entire corrections program.

Matthew Yglesias added the one thing Russert might have been tempted to air.

Greg Sargent is obviously confused. “Tough” questioning isn’t when you examine a public figure’s claims for factual accuracy, it’s when you examine them for consistency. So if Rudy Giuliani says Bernard Kerik was a good choice to lead the NYPD, it’d be “tough” to toss up on the screen some years-old statement in which Rudy said something that was different. Asking whether or not the things he’s saying are true isn’t what toughness is about.

I actually think the media’s coverage of presidential campaigns is getting worse. After 2000 and 2004, I foolishly thought this was impossible.

And the MSM wonders why people are turning away in droves? These clowns don’t deserve the title journalist. They should be named what they are, political class fart catchers.

  • Maybe they should follow Fox “News”‘ lead and show more tits and ass among the commentary.

  • “I actually think the media’s coverage of presidential campaigns is getting worse”

    No question about it. My theory – as blogs begin to do more journalism, TV is losing interest more and more – case in point: CNN has a feature on their TV shows where they check out “What the blogs are saying”, and very frequently show a woman standing near a huge LCD monitor that has, say, thinkprogress.org on the screen.

    The fun part? The irony of it all completely escapes them.

  • I actually think the media’s coverage of presidential campaigns is getting worse. After 2000 and 2004, I foolishly thought this was impossible.

    No one has paid a price for giving bad coverage, so there’s no reason for it to improve.

    Restore the Fairness Doctrine, impose a la carte pricing on cable (i.e. don’t force every subscriber to pay a fee to Rupert Murdoch), and tighten ownership rules so the massive conglomerates are forced to sell most of their media properties. That might get their attention.

  • “Mussolini may have done many brutal and tyrannical things; he may have destroyed human freedom in Italy; he may have murdered and tortured citizens whose only crime was to oppose Mussolini; but one had to admit one thing about the Dictator: he made the trains run on time.”

    Well, not exactly. The post-WWI repair of the Italian railway system was complete before Il Duce rose to power.

    Like Mussolini, Rudy’s signature achievements as New York City’s mayor are exaggerations at best. You have to be very charitable to call them exaggerations.

    Sometimes we lefties can be over the top with our rhetoric, throwing around words like “fascism.” But aren’t we getting very, very close?

  • Rudy’s been dealing with “faith based” people for so long that facts no longer matter. Besides, adding a zero to anything (turning 7 into 70 and 8 into 80) doesn’t add anything but drama, does it?

    “Which leaves it to the blogs to do the work media personalities don’t want to do anymore.” Ever since newspapers and their seedy, besotted reporters gave way to the much more expensive BriteSmile bubble-heads of TeeVeeWorld, news and news analysts aren’t worth the time it takes to watch. Blogs serve much the same function served by the big-city multiple newspapers of yore. Boston, e.g., had eight dailies, with every range of bias and shock value. It was up the reader to choose then, as it is now with reading blogs. But the important point is this: they had a choice. Nothing in the mass media offers options. And that is why the blogs are leaving the old media in the dust.

  • THE QUESTION that the Corporate News Media will not ask:

    – Bernie Kerik was a low-medium grade detective when he became Rudy’s ‘driver’
    – Kerik had that job for a ‘couple months’
    – Rudy then appointed Kerik to 2 major jobs
    – Each of those jobs had greater opportunity for graft

    Question: What did Kerik have on Rudy?

  • It’s surprisingly easy to turn on the TV and find countless examples of why most coverage of the presidential campaign is utterly useless,

    Or as Darth Vader would say, “All too easy.”

  • After 2000 and 2004, I foolishly thought this was impossible.

    It’s sad.

    I used to intern over the past few years in a law office in Manhattan that gave legal aid to prisoners in the NY state corrections system, and consequently I heard a lot about the conditions of the state prisons and the city jails. They didn’t sound that great to me, so I’m not surprised to hear your debunking. From what I understand, they’re better in some aspects than some other prison/jail systems (but this may have to so with the prison population, for one thing, not just the administration and how the prisons/jails are run) and better than what came before (before being 20 years ago- not right before GIuliani came around). But, to take one example, the improvement in the city jails is from “a hellish place to be” to “a really dangerous place to be” so it’s not something to really be proud of. People actually get so scared in the NYC jails that they commit suicide.


  • OkieFromMuskogee: Sometimes we lefties can be over the top with our rhetoric, throwing around words like “fascism.” But aren’t we getting very, very close?

    We’re already there, which is why righties are so “over the top” with their rhetorical use of the term “Islamofascism”. Projection, in this case, is both pathological and practical.

    One thing lefties are over the top about is humbly accepting whatever criticism the right wing hurl at us.

  • The problem could lie with the American people. The media does a lot of research to find out what sells, what draws the largest audiences. What do you think would happen if they emphasized the issues instead of the horse race, and the personalities? How many people would watch thoughtful discussions about where this country is going in the next five, ten and twenty years? One has to wonder if anyone actually even thinks about these things in America anymore.

  • A few nights back, our local NBC affiliate touted a special program scheduled to follow the 11 o’clock news. What was it about? Apparently, the Clintons’ marriage and what that could tell us about a Clinton presidency. I groaned and turned off the TV. You’d think we might have figured out by now how disastrous it is to concentrate on these superficial, irrelevant factors when selecting a president, but I guess not. We depress me.

  • This is one of the most absurd distortions of a quote ever. When Giuliani says shootings went down by 74%, he’s not saying *Kerik*, in his one year in office, reduced shootings by that much. He’s sayng that his decision making (Giuliani’s) led to a reduction in shootings by that much over the course of his term in office. Please. You think some moonbats on a blog are going to trip up a person who was one of the most successful prosecutors *ever* so easily?

  • No. This is NOT fascism.

    Fascism is the elevation of the state of power so extreme, it dominates everything and everyone. That’s what Hitler and Mussolini did.

    The Repugs like Ghouliani and Bush and Reagan have been aiming for the exact opposite: to destroy the state, and replace it with the corporation and and oligarchy of the wealthy elite. Probably because, here at least, and now at least, the state serves the people and is somewhat controlled by us, and thanks to the New Deal and earlier and later progressive movements, makes it (sometimes) a counterweight against the power of the wealthy elite and the corporations. Repugs can’t stand that. The corporation, on the other hand, is the most authoritarian entity that exists in the modern western world.

    Very different. This is a new American thing we’re seeing finally implode (I hope!), this corporate-feudalism. It’s not fascism. Not even close. It’s more “Brave New World” than “1984”, as dystopias go.

    This media is foolish, idiotic, childishly banal. It’s not Big Brother, it’s Little Moron Cousin.

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