Cohen gets mendacious about mendacity

January 1, 2008

It’s tempting to skip past Richard Cohen columns just as a matter of habit, but today’s op-ed is so odd, one wonders how Washington Post editors even let it run.

The piece, ostensibly, is about taking Barack Obama to task over a misleading statistic he used in a speech. But the piece starts out badly and goes downhill from there:

John Edwards lied about the cost of his haircuts. Fred Thompson lied about lobbying for a pro-choice outfit. John McCain insists that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.” Mitt Romney concocted the story about how his father marched with Martin Luther King Jr. And Rudy Giuliani is a one-man fib machine — everything from why he had to provide police protection for his then-mistress to the survivability rates for prostate cancer in Britain. Yet it is something Barack Obama said that bothers me most of all….

The irony is rich. Cohen wrote a piece about the importance of accuracy, and the first nine words — “John Edwards lied about the cost of his haircuts” — are false. If Cohen wants to raise a fuss about the cost of Edwards’ haircuts, that would merely be annoying (though it would be consistent with the Post’s disconcerting obsession with the subject). Instead, the columnist emphasizes the importance of getting the details right, while making up a “lie” that never happened.

The McCain example is also bizarre. Yes, the Arizona senator claimed we were founded as a “Christian nation,” and we were not. But that’s not an example of mendacity; it’s an example of ignorance. McCain wasn’t lying; he was just foolishly pandering to the religious right with nonsense. That’s worthy of criticism, of course, but for different reasons.

If Cohen really wanted to throw McCain into the mix, he could have at least found some actual examples of the senator’s mendacity, such as McCain’s lies about his criticism of the Rumsfeld policy, or his spectacular lies about going for a safe stroll in a Baghdad market in March.

One gets the impression that Cohen, who’s been around long enough to know better, just casually threw in some accusations of dishonesty in the hopes of achieving some kind of “balance.” Regrettably he did so a) without getting his facts straight; and b) in a column about the importance of people getting their facts straight.

It’s really not a good way to start out the new year.

And what of Obama’s “lie”?

What concerns me is the lie or fib or misstatement — call it what you want — involved in Obama’s assertion that more young black men are in prison than in college. It is a shocking statistic — and it is wrong. But when The Post’s lonesome but formidable truth squad, Michael Dobbs, brought this to the attention of the Obama campaign, he not only got the brushoff but the assertion was later repeated.

Now, if this is right, and Obama repeated a bogus statistic, he’s in the wrong, no doubt about it. There have been far more dramatic lies from presidential candidates, and this one seems largely inconsequential, but would-be presidents should strive for 100% accuracy, regardless of party.

But Cohen applies a standard here that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

When John McCain sticks to his insistence that the Constitution established the United States as a “Christian nation,” I don’t like it, but I know McCain and I know his character. He has a record in public life going back, essentially, to 1967, when he was shot down over Vietnam and repeatedly tortured by his captors. Back in 2000, I might have gotten a bit “delusional” over him, but I had my reasons.

I see. So, McCain lied, even though he didn’t, and that’s fine, because Cohen has known him for a long while. Obama cited a bogus statistic, and that’s worth an entire column, because Cohen hasn’t known him very long.

It’s going to be a long year, isn’t it.

Without the figures — ie, number of Blacks in prison vs number of Blacks in college, my inclination is that there are more Blacks imprisoned than are being educated at a university.

The numbers of prisoners in the US — compared with other countries — are needless to say, off the charts, and since a huge proportion of these prisoners are Black — and I think that a good proportion of those Blacks are in on drug use charges — it is not difficult to make this assumption: that there are more Blacks in prison than in college.

Don’t forget this little gem: California spends more of its budget on its prisons that it does on higher education

Too time-consuming to look the figures up today, but I’m on Obama’s side, until someone shows me different data.

  • This has to be the most interesting primary for both parties. I believe we will be surprised by the outcome.

  • I would be so happy and grateful if some many of these pundits, print and other media, would be assigned nice long vacations during 2008.

    They are so counterproductive. It’s definitely time for some new perspectives.

  • I think part of his problem with the Edwards hair thing is that Cohen knows that Edwards did something wrong regarding his haircut, or else there wouldn’t be a big scandal about it. But because Edwards didn’t actually do anything wrong, Cohen’s “brain” imagined some wrongdoing, in order to make sense of the non-scandal.

  • According to an article in 2002 BNET [I don’t know why, but the comments window simply will not accept the html for the URL; the title is “Study compares number of Blacks in prisons, higher education”] in 2000 there were an estimated 791,600 African American men in prison and jail, and 603,000 in higher education. It added

    In 2000, there were at least 13 states where there were more African American men incarcerated than in college. And from 1980 to 2000, JPI estimates that 38 states and the federal system added more African American men to their prison systems than they added to their respective higher education systems.

    So, where is Obama’s “lie or fib or misstatement — call it what you want”?

    source is http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0DXK/is_16_19/ai_92724552

  • Cohen is the Joe Lieberman of pundits, and both deserve to suffer whatever the adult equivalent is to having one’s head forced into a toilet, which is then flushed.

  • Mkolb, this one is better (albeit a “consider the source” thing): http://econ4obama.blogspot.com/2007/12/factchecking-wps-factchecker.html

    And Okie, all you have to do is think FOX and your question is answered as to why any of these a$$hats have jobs. It’s what they are supposed to do. WE don’t matter. Selling us what they want us to believe, that is all that matters.

    There is no 4th estate. We are left to fend for ourselves with blogs and “alternate” news sources (you know, the very few real ones remaining like democracynow.org and innworldreport.net which are branded liberal because they dare speak truth). And to all the above, too few that even bother to do anything but allow themselves to be spoonfed whatever drivel they decide to consume (most seek what they believe so what’s the point in even trying sometimes?).

  • Ed Stephan at #7: You’re kidding, right?

    You don’t seriously think that the bit you quoted equates to “there are more young black men in prison than in college”?

  • That Cohen is a professor of journalism at Columbia is truly frightening. He’d do better sitting on the other side of the podium, relearning what it means to be a journalist. Somewhere along the road to “success” he lost his way.

  • Stop the Drug War cites the same facts, and frankly, anyone working with inner city youth would instinctively realize the truth of such a claim.

    IF there are numbers to back Cohen, it would be a narrow margin, but if you threw out technical and vocational schools, it wouldn’t even be close. Add in the higher mortality rates for young black men (or simply restrict this data to men only), and you would understand why the USA is the most racist nation on earth. Other countries may treat minorities more harshly, but at least they don’t lie to themselves about it.

    Any confusion over this simply shows how effectively racist our media is, that liberals and progressives would not instinctively understand that our society devours minoritie and spits out their corpses.

  • Sarabeth, @10

    I read the numbers the same way as Ed Stephan does; isn’t 791 600 (A-A males in prison/jail) a larger number than 603 000 (A-A males in higher education)?

  • To be fair, Cohen links to the article in the WaPo which does their fact check, and it has a citation from the Bureau of Justice Statistics that gives a much lower number for prisoners:

    106,000 African American men ages 18 to 24 were in federal or state prisons at the end of 2005. An additional 87,000 were temporarily held in local jails in mid-2006. According to 2005 census data, 530,000 African American men in this age group were in college.

    So, at least Cohen did bother actually pointing to some numbers. I’m curious about how the counts from various sources can have differences close to half-a-million. And I am aware of the old saying about lies, damn lies, and statistics.

    If anyone were going to be playing tricks with or “lying” about the numbers, I expect it would be Cohen, not Obama.

  • Since some will not click through to see what the WaPo fact-checker says about Obama’s claims, here is the relevant part of the article:

    It’s baaaack! I tried to nail this myth back in October, soon after this site was launched. Obama made a very similar statement at an NAACP forum in July. He got his facts wrong then–and he is still wrong four months later. The Obama campaign has failed to respond to several requests to support or explain the candidate’s statement. So let me take another bash at it.

    The claim that there are more African-Americans in prison than in college appears to have originated with a 2002 study by the Justice Policy Institute entitled “Cellblocks or Classrooms,” available here: http://www.soros.org/initiatives/justice/articles_publications/publications/cellblocks_20020918/coc.pdf. (See table 5.) The data in that study have been challenged. Some researchers have pointed out that comparing college-age African-American males with the entire African- American male population is like comparing “apples and oranges.”

    The Justice Policy Institute study is in any case irrelevant to the claim that Obama is making, as he is specifically comparing young black men in prison and in college. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 106,000 African-American males aged between 18 and 24 were in federal or state prisons at the end of 2005. (See table 10 of this report.) Another 87,000 were temporarily incarcerated in local jails in mid-2006. According to 2005 Census data, 530,000 African-American males of this age group were in college.

    Black male college students outnumber black male prisoners even if you expand the age band to thirty four. There were 276,600 African-American males in federal or state prisons in this age group and 710,000 in college.

    What does this mistake tell us about Obama’s campaigning style and personality? It is interesting that he made the claim to predominantly African-American audiences. I leave it to others to figure out whether he was trying to shock his listeners or whether he was pandering to them by emphasizing the theme of racial inequality in America. (Obama has been trailing Hillary Clinton among African-Americans, particularly African-American women.)

    Maybe this helps, but it is a little disturbing that Obama wasn’t even willing to engage in any kind of discussion about the numbers.

  • I wish you had addressed the causal dismissal for the reasons to have to war in Iraq. Basically Cohen states that it is acceptble for the government to lie about going to war insofar the governmnet determines the underlying reason is sufficient.

  • So basically, Obama’s statement is correct if you just leave out the word “young”? His campaign made a mistake and they should correct it. That said, he has a very valid point and calling him a liar for it trivializes a serious problem with the way this country treats it’s citizens.

  • All any of this proves – and the WaPo’s “fact-checker” has to be a joke jog, right, when you think of all the lies and misstatements made by his bosses there every daty) – is that if today’s Washington Post had been around 35 years ago, Nixon would still be in the White House.

    But then, Richard Cohen does do a lot of heavy lifting with his daily efforts to disprove the ancient anti-Semitic slur that all Jews are really smart, so give him credit where credit is due. (Even if he would dispute this – he reminds me of the essential truth a good NYC playwright I know said about his co-religionists he’d met while writing screenplays out here: “They’re just schmucks with Jewish names.”)

  • Ed Stephan’s source supports what I thought probably happened– Obama had a source for black men (regardless of age) being more numerous in jail/prison than in college, and off-the-cuff, he said “young” because he didn’t remember correctly that the stat was for men in general, not young men.

    Someone should write Cohen and ask him to print a retraction and an apology.

    This also explains why Obama would have balked at ceasing using the statistic. If someone told him “This is fake,” but they didn’t make it really clear why Obama’s statement was wrong, Obama would have not seen the problem, thought “What the fuck are you talking about?” and kept using the (non-bogus) statistic.

  • If Obama’s reciting inaccurate facts, he should stop. That said, does anyone else think calling this a “lie” is a bit of stretch? Generally, what makes a “lie” offensive is that it’s a falsehood in pursuit of selfish ends (to cite one famous example, “I did not have sex with that woman.”)

    It sounds like at worst, what Obama may have done was inaccurately cite a statistic, then refuse to acknowledge his mistake. But I don’t particularly see how it’s self serving. Whether or not there are more young blacks in jail or in college is not an argument for or against Obama. If he had said that it was raining outside and the Post’s fact checker alerted him that it was actually sunny, does that mean he lied? More importantly, does anyone care?

    If that’s Cohen’s rationale for withholding his support, it says a lot more about Cohen than it does about Obama.

  • Zorro,

    The reason it helps Obama if people know that there are more black men in prison/jail than in college is because it helps solidify support among black Americans- if they know the statistics that show that black people are still in a pretty bad situation, it makes them question the status quo. Conservative politics is about preserving the status quo, or even returning to old status quos. So if this stuff is covered up from black people, they will start to think– “The conservatives are right. The liberals are botching around with things that they shouldn’t be messing around with. Things are mostly OK for black people now.” Things are not OK for black people now, and conservatives don’t want black people to know it. It’s not that nothing can be done for black people, but it’s that the Republican party is not the party of doing things for black people. The less black people feel like their community is being hurt in America, the less likely they are to “fight” (politically) to protect it.

    Obama was right that there are more black men in prison or jail than in college, but by nit-picking about Obama using the word “young,” Richard Cohen was making it sound like Obama was totally making stuff up, instead of talking about a real problem. The RIchard Cohens of this world need to go, and the people who are concerned about the real problems- the Obamas and the Hillarys- need to be put into power.

  • Look, if you’re going to look at the blacks in college v. blacks in prison, you need to be looking at some kind of average age range. For a college population, you’re generally looking at an age range from 18-22; why would it not make sense to look at the prison population for the same age range?

    What would be your reaction if Obama said “there are more black men from 17-65 in prison than there are black men from 18-22 in college?” I’m guessing you’d say, “well, duh.” And the next thing you’d want to know is how many black men of college age are in prison, so that you could compare the numbers among the same age group.

    Is it a huge deal? No, probably not. But to admit that Obama’s numbers were not an apples-to-apples comparison takes away the talking point, doesn’t it? Isn’t there something different to be concluded by saying that among black men between 18 and 22, there are more in college than there are in prison? One might conclude that something is working, as opposed to something not working.

    Listen, John Edwards keeps saying that NAFTA and CAFTA have cost Americans “millions” of jobs – and that’s not true, either. He’s trying to make an argument about jobs and the American economy – and Obama is trying to make an argument about opportunity and access to the tools people need to lift themselves up.

    Richard Cohen is, generally speaking, somewhere out beyond the outfield on pretty much everything he writes. It would be helpful for him to make sure he has ALL of his facts straight before he accuses others of “mendacity,” but since he’s writing opinion pieces, I suppose he’s under the impression that facts don’t matter. He’s provided us, in one neat and tidy column, an example of what is wrong with the media – but most of us already knew what was wrong.

    Sadly, I wouldn’t look for it to get better over the next 10 months – in fact, I’m sure it will get worse.

  • Prisioners are criminals. College students are people trying to work their way into the middle class. Is Obama claiming that there are more black criminals than there are blacks aspiring to the middle class? To me that does not sound right. It does sound like something the KKK or the “rational fear” folks would come up with.

    Comparing the outcome for all patients diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2005 in the US with the outcome for patients with late stage prostate cancer discovered in 1999 in the UK is also misleading.

    “There’s lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

  • Swan, I see your point, and maybe I’m just biased as an Obama supporter, but as “lies” go, it’s a hell of a lot less self-serving than, “We’ve already found the weapons of mass destruction” or “We don’t torture.” (Yes, I know, that’s setting the bar pretty low.)

    Also, contra Anne, I don’t think the statistic is necessarily meant to be an apples-to-apples comparison. If Obama were trying to argue that young black men can’t get a fair shake in our society, then yes, comparing across different age groups would be skewed. But I think his point is more basic: The black community is in trouble when they’ve got more people in jail than in college. If — and I have no idea if this is the case — the same can’t be said of whites or other ethnic groups, then the point has even more saliency.

    Anyway, as a relevant issue I think this ranks up there with “Obama didn’t pay his parking tickets” and “He used composite characters in his book.” I’m not one of those Obama supporters who thinks the man walks on water, but every time I hear about one of these supposed “scandals”, my reaction is always the same: If that’s really the worst they can come up with, he should cruise to victory in November.

  • CH wrote: Prisioners are criminals. College students are people trying to work their way into the middle class. Is Obama claiming that there are more black criminals than there are blacks aspiring to the middle class? To me that does not sound right. It does sound like something the KKK or the “rational fear” folks would come up with.

    It’s not all blacks’ fault for bad things happening to them that they can’t control and that they don’t always react the best way to. The way to get less black people in prison is to take away societal racism and create better conditions so blacks who are low on the socio-economic rung can easier escape the influence of bad neighborhoods that is nothing more than the result of 400 years of racism.

    Calling the crime problem among blacks all blacks’ fault is racist, and society should not be expected to shoot itself in the foot by keeping the mistakes of the past unmitigated so that we will all face worse race relations, crime, and society in general for many years. Conservative racists are stupidly prolonging the consequences of slavery. Obama and civil rights activists are confronting and fighting it.

    Zorro, I don’t know why you feel the need to keep harping on this, but the basic point is, Obama didn’t lie (he probably at most had a “brain-fart,” or in other words, a screw-up) and and if Cohen is trying to hurt Demc or Obama, it would hurt us for him to mischaracterize Obama as exagerrating social problems faced by African Americans today.

  • Mark Gisleson said:
    “Add in the higher mortality rates for young black men (or simply restrict this data to men only), and you would understand why the USA is the most racist nation on earth.”

    I’d buy that if most of those prematurely dead young black men were killed by roving gangs of white supremists. But as the primary cause of death for young black men is young black men (like the primary cause of death of young male lions is young male lions) I have to go with there being a problem with inner city black culture. Argue if you will that there is a problem with inner city black culture ONLY because of residual racism in America, but like Bill Cosby I think that excuse is getting a little thin.

    Reading the stats reported here, I think Obama should stick to his guns, though with some clarification to show he isn’t just quoting statistics.

    Speaking of quoting, the line “Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics” is from Benjamin Disreali as quoted by our own Mark Twain.

  • It might be interesting to see:
    1) Numbers of college age men in college broken down by race/ethnicity.
    2) Numbers of college age men in prisons broken down by race/ethnicity.
    3) Items 1 & 2 expressed as percentages of the relevant total poulation (by race)
    4) A graph of Item 3 over time going back 50 years.
    5) Numbers of men (any age) in college broken down by race/ethnicity.
    6) Numbers of men (any age) in prisons broken down by race/ethnicity.
    Given all of those things, one might be able to draw some conclusions. or not. But the point is that the analysis is more complicated than Obama makes it sound in his sound bite (candidates do that), and it is also more complicated than Cohen made it sound in his critique. Two wrongs make a right?

  • One thing I left out: The older black men in prison today may have arrived in prison when they were of college age.

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  • Um, Cohen was not mendacious. Cohen even acknowledges a crisis of sociopathy among young black males. Cohen says “their condition amounts to a calamity and something has to be done.” But Obama’s statement was incorrect and it is the function of reporters and pundits to keep public discourse accurate and enlightening.

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