NYT inconsistency on "he said," "she said"

One of the most frustrating aspects of the fight against "he said," "she said" journalism is the inconsistency within news outlets about how they treat misleading or unsupported factual claims.

For instance, The New York Times just published another article directly identifying Betsy McCaughey as a proponent of health care misinformation (see also my post on the first Times piece). Note the laudable lack of hedging or artificial balance in this passage:

[McCaughey] incorrectly stated in July that a Democratic bill in the House would “absolutely require” counseling sessions for Medicare recipients “that will tell them how to end their life sooner,” drawing a “Pants on Fire” rating from the PolitiFact fact-checking Web site; her false assertion that the presidential health adviser Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel believed “medical care should be reserved for the nondisabled” helped inspire the former Alaska governor Sarah Palin’s discredited warning about “death panels’ ” deciding who is “worthy of health care.”

Two days later, however, the Times ran a story on national service programs that included this passage in which the absurd charges of Americorps critics are treated with kid gloves:

Critics say that these bipartisan programs [Americorps and other national service programs] provide little more than busywork for volunteers; some even see dark forces at play. Michelle Bachmann, a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, cautioned that they might morph into mandatory “re-education camps,” while the conservative commentator Glenn Beck recited the AmeriCorps pledge (“I will get things done for America,” it begins) on television while wearing lederhosen — to make either a strained analogy to National Socialism or a daring fashion statement.

Bachmann's claim is reported without comment, and the only substantive statement on Beck's comparison to the Nazis is a description of it as "a strained analogy." (Strained! The Nazis!) It's not clear why the reporter felt like the story had to be balanced by this nonsense (surely there are more serious critics of Americorps), but if they are to be included, the Times has some duty to assess the likelihood of the scenarios that Bachmann and Beck are envisioning.

At a more fundamental level, the media needs to draw the line and stop reporting on the paranoid fringe. Is the Times going to balance every news story on the Obama administration with a paragraph saying Bachmann and Beck say that the White House is leading us toward socialism, fascism, etc.? These are not serious people and their claims do not deserve coverage.

Comments

[Rob]

I think the Times has already taken Brendan's advice. When there's uncomfortable news brewing, the Times elects not to cover it at all.

That's why the first time the Times's readers learned about the controversy over Van Jones was when it blogged on Friday night that Press Secretary Gibbs had given a statement of non-support. After Jones resigned at midnight on Saturday night, the Times reported, "Controversy over Mr. Jones’s past comments and affiliations has slowly escalated over several weeks . . . ." But you'd never have known about that controversy from reading the New York Times.

Brendan's previously illustrated his mind-reading criticisms with a graphic of a mind reader. He ought to illustrate his news coverage criticism with a different graphic.

[David]

Brendan undermines his credibility when he says its "paranoid" to assert that the White House is leading us to socialism. The government now runs AIG, the largest insurance company in America. They run General Motors and Chrysler. They want to run the entire health care system. They run a substantial piece of the mortgage industry in Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac. And, President Obama has indicated that he wants the government to continue to expand its role in diverse areas.

No doubt one can make a case that this doesn't quite amount to "socialism", but its far from paranoid to use that label.

[Eskimohorn]

"The government now runs AIG, the largest insurance company in America. They run General Motors and Chrysler."

Or, these companies BEGGED the government (beginning with conservative Bush) for assistance to stay afloat. And the word, "run," is another way of saying the government is holding these businesses accountable.

[David]

Eskimohorn, I don't disagree with you, at least not too much. However, that background doesn't change the fact that we're moving toward an economic system that has at least some characteristics of socialism. It may be good policy that government holds businesses accountable. However, that's different from free market capitalism, in which businesses succeed or fail based on their actual profit-and-loss.

Here's another note partially justifying the label "socialist". In the Peoples Republic of China, the government doesn't supply health care. People buy their own health insurance. So, the single-payer health care system that Obama has advocated is more socialistic than the PRC.

[twitter.com/rone]

Keep picking those cherries, David, the season's almost over.

We aren't moving towards an economic system that has at least some characteristics of socialism. We've been in one longer than you've been alive.