Jamison Foser of Media Matters has a useful takedown of what Time's Jay Carney calls "the telling anecdote -- the seemingly small story that reveals a broader truth about a politician or other subject." As Foser points out, the anecdotes that journalists choose to highlight are frequently untrue, misleading, irrelevant, or trivial. He suggests this rubric for reporting anecdotes:
1) Is the anecdote verifiably true?
2) Is the anecdote illustrative rather than anomalous?
3) Does the anecdote illustrate something that is verifiably true, or is it merely a convenient vehicle for suggesting something the reporter believes but cannot prove?
4) Does the anecdote illustrate something that is not only verifiably true, but is also important to understanding how the candidate would govern or how the issue would affect people? Or is it just pointless snark?
Annoyingly, however, the column also includes this passage:
Reporting by anecdote is how we got a president who doesn't windsurf, doesn't order the "wrong" kind of cheesesteak, doesn't wear earth tones, doesn't sigh, and doesn't exaggerate* -- but who does lie to the nation on the way to war, spy on Americans, torture people, threaten to veto health care for children, allow arsenic in our drinking water, politicize the Justice Department, take an à la carte approach to the Constitution... and generally behave like a despot.
The statement that Bush "allow[s] arsenic in our drinking water" is extremely misleading. First, there will always be some acceptable level of arsenic in drinking water; the question is what the standard should be. And as we pointed out at Spinsanity, the Clinton administration did not even propose changing the original 50 parts per billion standard until the end of his term, and Bush's EPA ended up implementing the 10 parts per billion standard Clinton proposed:
President Bush never "tried to put more arsenic in the water." The controversy began in March 2001 when the White House withdrew a regulation issued late in the Clinton administration that had not yet gone into effect. The regulation would have reduced the federal standard for arsenic in drinking water from 50 parts per billion to 10 parts per billion by 2006. Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christie Todd Whitman stated at the time that EPA would ask expert panels to review the science and consider a standard of 3-20 parts per billion to go into effect by the original 2006 deadline. After a great deal of criticism, the EPA decided in October 2001 to issue a 10 parts per billion standard - the same as the original regulation.At no point in the controversy did the administration propose raising the allowable limit of arsenic in drinking water above the 50 parts per billion standard that had been in effect since 1942; the controversy centered on how much to reduce that limit. Nor did the White House repeal a standard that was already being enforced; Clinton's regulation had not yet gone into effect.
Also, contrary to Foser's loose rhetoric about Bush's "lies," the President rarely says things that are completely false. Instead, as we showed in All the President's Spin, he relies on half-truths and misleading suggestions that the media will report in a "he said," "she said" context.
Physician, heal thyself!
Merriam-Webster gives as its second definition for "lie":
2 : to create a false or misleading impression
Can we please drop the "dissembling" phraseology and just call these
"half-truths and misleading statements" what they are: lies.
Posted by: Michael Young | August 15, 2007 at 01:22 PM