I whine bitterly when reporters do this incorrectly, so I figure it’s only fair that I praise a reporter for getting it right.
As I’ve said on probably too many occasions, it’s terribly frustrating when journalists, in the name of some ambiguous “balance,” refuse to draw conclusions. They’re so afraid of being accused of bias, reporters won’t point to demonstrable falsehoods, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions.
This is absurd. Dems said this, Republicans said that. It’s “balanced,” but the point of journalism is to inform. Readers who don’t know which side is objectively correct, when one side is objectively correct, still won’t know the truth because the reporter was afraid to tell them. If one side makes a claim that just isn’t true, there’s nothing wrong with a newspaper or other media outlet saying so.
Which brings me to a terrific item in yesterday’s Washington Post by Jim VandeHei.
The Bush campaign has repeatedly accused the senator of “politicizing” Iraq. Bush-Cheney chairman Marc Racicot told reporters Wednesday that Kerry is relentlessly “playing politics” and exploiting tragedy for political gain.
Racicot, for instance, told reporters that Kerry suggested that 150,000 or so U.S. troops are “somehow universally responsible” for the misdeeds of a small number of American soldiers and contractors. Racicot made several variations of this charge. But Kerry never said this, or anything like it.
As evidence, Racicot pointed to the following quote Kerry made at a fundraiser on Tuesday: “What has happened is not just something that a few a privates or corporals or sergeants engaged in. This is something that comes out of an attitude about the rights of prisoners of war, it’s an attitude that comes out of America’s overall arrogance in its policy that is alienating countries all around the world.”
What Racicot did not mention was that Kerry preceded this remark by saying, “I know that what happened over there is not the behavior of 99.9 percent of our troops.”
Be still my heart; someone gets it.
Racicot was up to his usual tricks, trying to deceive reporters (and by extension, the public) by wrenching a Kerry comment from context. VandeHei told readers about the attack, but he had the acuity to also report on Kerry’s entire remarks.
Was VandeHei’s article biased against Racicot and the GOP? Of course not. This is a straight telling of the facts. Racicot made a charge against Kerry, but left out pertinent information in order to change the meaning of Kerry’s remarks. VandeHei gave readers the whole story.
VandeHei didn’t literally call Racicot a liar, but he told readers what they needed to know, instead of just reporting that Kerry said x, Racicot said y.
It’s a shame this is so rare. The New Republic’s Noam Scheiber noticed the same thing.
[S]omewhere during the evolution of their craft journalists began subscribing to the idiotic idea that being objective means renouncing objective truth, and simply treating each side’s claims as equally valid. This, of course, is preposterous — and is a tendency the Bush administration (and, before that, the Bush campaign) has cynically exploited. Yet, outside The Washington Post — and even here we’re only talking about the last few years — you almost never see daily journalists at brand-name outlets mustering the courage to sort out facts from lies.
I can only hope this realization spreads.