Clark Hoyt, the former Knight Ridder reporter and editor (now McClatchy), is living up to his promise as public editor of the New York Times. Today he takes the paper to task for failing to fact-check candidate claims in a timely fashion -- one of the reasons that McClatchy's coverage is often so much better than that of the Times:
Last Monday’s Times reported that Rudolph Giuliani had accused Mitt Romney of having a bad record on crime while governor of Massachusetts.
“Violent crime and murder went up when he was governor,” Giuliani said of his Republican rival.
In time-honored journalistic fashion, the newspaper noted the Romney campaign’s response: No, violent crime, which includes murder, actually went down during Romney’s tenure.
If you were like me, you wondered, impatiently, why the newspaper didn’t answer a simple question: who is telling the truth? I wanted the facts, and, not for the first time, The Times let me down.
My colleague Michael McElroy came up with the facts that morning after a 10-minute check of F.B.I. statistics readily available on the Internet. Murder in Massachusetts did go up in the four years Romney was governor, from 173 in 2002, the year before he took office, to 186 in 2006, the last full year of his term. An increase of 13 murders may not seem like a crime wave in a state with a population of 6.4 million, but an increase is an increase, so Giuliani was right on that point.
But violent crime, a broader category made up of murder, rape, robbery and assault, went down in the Romney era, from 31,137 to 28,775, so Giuliani was wrong on that score and the Romney campaign was right, though it failed to mention that robberies had also increased.
After noting some effective fact-checking by Times reporters, Hoyt takes inventory of the failures:
The Times has also missed opportunities to set the record straight. When Karl Rove, on his way out of the White House as President Bush’s chief political adviser, took a shot at Hillary Clinton as “weak” on national security and said she opposed the USA Patriot Act, The Times failed to note that Senator Clinton had in fact voted twice for the act. When John Edwards said he would use his power as president to take health coverage away from Congress if it failed to pass universal coverage for all Americans, the newspaper did not note that presidents do not have that authority.
To be most useful, fact-checking needs to be timely. In October, Giuliani incorrectly claimed that the prostate cancer survival rate in England, under the “socialized medicine” he falsely implied Democrats favor, was only 44 percent, compared with 82 percent in the United States. The Times initially said the number for England was “in dispute,” though it provided all the necessary information for a reader to conclude it was wrong. It wasn’t until Friday that the newspaper declared the statistic a “false statement.”
He also calls on the Times to devote more resources to fact-checking, which would be fantastic:
But in this Internet age, with its instant news cycle, The Times is falling behind major competitors. The Washington Post started The Fact Checker on its Web site in mid-September. The fact checker is Michael Dobbs, a distinguished foreign and diplomatic correspondent who came out of retirement to start the feature...
The St. Petersburg Times and its sister publication, Congressional Quarterly, have started PolitiFact.com, a site that uses a “Truth-O-Meter”...
The pioneer online fact-checking operation, FactCheck.org, was started in 2003 by Brooks Jackson, a veteran investigative reporter, for the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. At its peak during the 2004 presidential election, FactCheck.org drew up to 400,000 unique visitors a day, a strong indication of the public’s appetite for help in sorting through the claims of candidates.
The Times, with its own rich Web offerings on the presidential campaign, would do well to showcase a similar fact-checking feature.
However, I do have to take issue with the claim that FactCheck.org was "[t]he pioneer online fact-checking operation" -- a scrappy little independent website called Spinsanity was started back in 2001.
You can't expect Clark Hoyt to get all his facts right. He is, after all, a journalist.
Your noticing the error in his omission of Spinsanity points to a larger truth. The more one knows personally about the facts covered in a news story, the more one sees how imperfect news reporting is. The scary thing is, even though personal experience demonstrates that reporters consistently get facts wrong, oversimplify and misunderstand, we are obliged to rely on them for reporting of facts about things for which we have no personal knowledge. God he'p us.
Posted by: Rob | December 02, 2007 at 02:45 PM