It’s not my intention to return, for a third day, to Mitt Romney’s bizarre assertion that IAEA weapons inspectors were not allowed entry into Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but rather to use the incident as an example of media malpractice.
If politics made sense, Romney’s mistake would have been an immediate disqualifier. No one who’s that confused about Iraq should be the Commander in Chief. Romney was either breathtakingly ignorant in offering the comments or cynically dishonest. Either way, it should have been a debate gaffe for the ages.
And it might have been, if the media had bothered to notice. I searched Google News for the words “Romney,” “Saddam,” “IAEA,” and “debate,” and couldn’t find a single major news outlet that had bothered to point out the obvious error. (The Union Leader, in New Hampshire, reported, “Bloggers yesterday said Romney had incorrectly implied that Saddam Hussein had closed his country to weapons inspectors before the invasion of Iraq.” The Union Leader neglected to mention that the bloggers were right.)
Indeed, as Paul [tag]Krugman[/tag] noted, it offers a discouraging look at what’s likely to come.
In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.
Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the “gaffe of the night”?
Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit.
Obviously, Romney’s inexplicable screw-up is just one example, but the media coverage of the presidential candidates has been embarrassing for a while now (particularly on Hardball in recent weeks).
But this need not be depressing. The presidential campaign is just kicking into high gear. Sure, the media coverage has been generally awful, but just as the candidates are getting warmed up, maybe news outlets are, too.
There is, in other words, time for the media to step back and consider why the coverage has been misguided, and make changes accordingly.
Krugman offers, shall we say, constructive criticism.
[A]s far as I can tell, no major news organization did any fact-checking of either debate. And post-debate analyses tended to be horse-race stuff mingled with theater criticism: assessments not of what the candidates said, but of how they “came across.”
Thus most analysts declared Mrs. Clinton the winner in her debate, because she did the best job of delivering sound bites — including her Bush-talking-point declaration that we’re safer now than we were on 9/11, a claim her advisers later tried to explain away as not meaning what it seemed to mean.
Similarly, many analysts gave the G.O.P. debate to Rudy Giuliani not because he made sense — he didn’t — but because he sounded tough saying things like, “It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror.” (Why?)
Look, debates involving 10 people are, inevitably, short on extended discussion. But news organizations should fight the shallowness of the format by providing the facts — not embrace it by reporting on a presidential race as if it were a high-school popularity contest.
Do I think that reporters, editors, anchors, producers, and bureau chiefs are going to read Krugman’s column and think, “You know, he’s right; maybe we should start acting like journalists”? No, I’m really not that naive. But a guy can dream.