Oh yeah, I been waiting for this one
Report Card
November 10, 2004
Still Ambivalent After All These Years
Part one of a series evaluating the media's performance during the 2004 campaign.
By Thomas Lang
In a perfect world, the press would facilitate the spread of fact and block the proliferation of falsehoods. Alas, the American political system is plagued by a political media obsessed with strategy, attracted to the trivial, essentially too distracted to bother with the mundane details of fact and fiction. This year was no exception.
From day one, the campaign press showed a maddening unwillingness to brush up on the basic facts most important to Americans. Instead of bookmarking the slightly intimidating Bureau of Labor Statistics webpage, reporters hung on to and transcribed verbatim many of the loaded partisan talking points delivered by the candidates via email.
…This automatic pilot approach to reporting -- due to either laziness or ineptness, or both -- continued throughout the campaign season on an endless number of topics from the war in Iraq to the politics of the flu. The framework remained the same no matter what: a quote from a candidate or campaign surrogate reprinted without question by the reporter or editor, followed by (if available) a quote from the candidate's opponent, also printed without question.
This at a time when the data-rich Internet is available to any reporter at the touch of a keyboard. (To be fair, that same Internet permits campaigns and party committees to pelt reporters all day -- and night -- with an endless stream of new talking points, just as distorted as the old ones.)
Campaign coverage is a living animal fed on a daily diet of campaign events, spiced up by the occasional scandal with the potential to consume the candidacy of one or both of the men running for office. Fact-checking failures were not just confined to undistinguished accounts of the daily campaign grind. Consider the press' attempt, or lack thereof, to provide voters an accurate account of President Bush's and (later in the campaign) Sen. Kerry's military records.
