Duke v. Butler 2010: "Narrow Lead" And "Toss-Up" Are Not The Same

As we head to election day tomorrow, one of the ongoing tropes in the political media is that it's not possible to know who is favored in the Presidential election - that it is a "toss-up".

As a matter of analysis, the idea that this race is a coin flip is wrong.  Though the national polls show a slight Obama lead - slight enough to argue that the race is tied nationally - Obama, according to the Real Clear Politics polling average, holds leads of at least 2 points in all the battleground states necessary for an electoral college victory except FL, NC, VA, and CO - trails only in VA and CO.

My point here is not to say that race isn't close - it is. Or to say that Romney can't win - he can.  But our political media's has not been able to deal with the concept of of a narrow but persistent lead. So I'm gonna provide a reference point.

If you are college basketball fan, you probably remember the 2010 National Championship game, where a scrappy mid-major program, Butler, lost by 2 points to Duke, the national power that everyone but Duke fans loves to hate.  As a Duke fan, I remember nervously watching a very close game, decided only when a last second three-quarter court shot by Butler's Gordon Heyward bounced off the rim.  So the game was close throughout.

But look at the play-by-play.  Butler led the game for just under 4 minutes of the entire contest total.  Butler never had a lead of more than 2 points, and Butler held its last lead at the 13:02 mark of the 2nd half.

The point?  Duke was narrowly leading virtually the entire game and was thus favored to win for most of the game. That did not preclude Butler from winning, as we know from the last minute of play, but it would have been an upset, even within the context of the game, had it happened.

This is directly related to Presidential race. It is not a "toss-up."  President Obama leads narrowly, but persistently, Mitt Romney has only led sporadically but he is can win. But it would be an upset. Just like if Heyward's shot hadn't bounced off the rim.

Paul Ryan's speech and The Political Press

The Republican convention concluded last night with a broad consensus that Mitt Romney either did or did not do some, most, or all of the thing he needed to do to be elected President.  However the most illustrative moment of the convention was the speech of Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan and the subsequent reactions. The reaction of the media shows a press corps so attuned to the idea of false balance and not being called liberal, that they are uncomfortable calling out conservative lies, even when they do it.

As has been noted in numerous places, Paul Ryan's speech and it's relationship to the truth was tenuous.  The question that many reporters are asking is whether or not it matters.  In fact, a number of articles have suggested that it doesn't.

The most interesting three pieces about the Ryan speech suggest  a political press corps so cognizant of not being branded as liberal and so guided by the idea that political balance is the most important value in reporting, that they don't even know that they sacrifice their own credibility.

In a post titled "Why Fact Checkers Fail, " Dan Conover, a journalist who managed political coverage for a number of news outlets in the south, wrote how he covered political lies.

A political editor walks the line between trying to find the truth and trying to publish the truth, and must constantly compromise the latter in the service of the former. That's because when the balance of truth favors one party over the other, presenting it that way destroys the journalistic fiction that Jay Rosen dubbed "The View From Nowhere." Media companies like that view because, in theory at least, it allows them to sell their newspapers (or TV programs) to the entire electorate.  

In other words, if the Republican Party produces 10 fact-mangling whoppers to every arcane Democratic stat-fudger, you've got a serious problem as a journalist. You simply can't present that ratio as-is without looking like a liberal hack. 

So here's what we did -- what I did -- and what others have certainly done as well: I downplayed Republican dishonesty while judging Democratic failings with an unfairly harsh bias. I applied this to assignments, to the tone and presentation of stories, and to the various gimmicks we invented to try to evaluate claims. The results didn't reflect the true scale of the dishonesty gap, but they at least demonstrated that a gap existed. At least, they had the potential to demonstrate the gap, but only to very careful readers with a knack for drawing subtle inference. Because we could never come out and tell you what we all knew in the newsroom: Yes, "all politicians lie" (a cynical dodge if ever there was one), but the modern Republican Party is based on a set of counter-factual and faith-based beliefs, and has been for years. Not only has that foundation consistently put the party on the wrong side of fact-checkers, it has led us to where we stand today, with Mitt Romney running a campaign that has abandoned even the pretense of fact. 

I'd recommend the whole piece, as it illustrates how the constraints of a political press corps afraid of being labelled liberal has led to privileging the most audacious of lies, and brought us to the most brazen, falsehood-laden campaign that Romney and the Republicans are running.

A second piece, by Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, a liberal policy wonk, suggests the lengths that reporters go to in order to give the Republicans the benefit of the doubt.  Klein describes the lengths we went to to write an article giving Ryan every benefit of the doubt.

The original pitch was for “the five biggest lies in Paul Ryan’s speech.” I said no. It’s not that the speech didn’t include some lies. It’s that I wanted us to bend over backward to be fair, to see it from Ryan’s perspective, to highlight its best arguments as well as its worst. So I suggested an alternative: The true, the false, and the misleading in Ryan’s speech. (Note here that we’re talking about political claims, not personal ones. Ryan’s biography isn’t what we’re examining here though, for the record, I found his story deeply moving.)

An hour later, the draft came in — Dylan Matthews is a very fast writer. There was one item in the “true” section.  

So at about 1 a.m. Thursday, having read Ryan’s speech in an advance text and having watched it on television, I sat down to read it again, this time with the explicit purpose of finding claims we could add to the “true” category. And I did find one. He was right to say that the Obama administration has been unable to correct the housing crisis, though the force of that criticism is somewhat blunted by the fact that neither Ryan nor Mitt Romneyhave proposed an alternative housing policy. But I also came up with two more “false” claims. So I read the speech again. And I simply couldn’t find any other major claims or criticisms that were true.

 Klein goes on to explain is definition of "true".

I want to stop here and say that even the definition of “true” that we’re using is loose. “Legitimate” might be a better word. The search wasn’t for arguments that were ironclad. It was just for arguments — for claims about Obama’s record — that were based on a reasonable reading of the facts, and that weren’t missing obviously key context.

Forget his conclusion.  Look at the effort Klein goes through to give Ryan every benefit of the doubt.   And he does it to preserve the illusion that both sides are equally mendacious, even though the actual data his is looking at clearly indicates that is not true.


Finally, an article whose headline speaks for itself.  "The media coverage of Paul Ryan's speech: 15 euphemisms for 'lying."  So, even though the press recognizes what it it looking at, it refuses to call a lie a lie, because that would upset the very idea of balance.

What these three articles illustrate is that, ultimately, the conservative goal of demonizing the press as liberal has been internalized by reporters, so much so that they have an internal debate over whether to call obvious lies what they are, if they are uttered by Republicans.   That this is the current state of affairs is bad for the country and is bad for a free press, but unless the media's fear of being branded liberal has been what has allowed this to happen.

Fact Checkers and False Balance

Fact checkers complaining that Mitt Romney makes false claims during his campaign have a point. But because most of them have hewn to the ridiculous idea that "both sides do it" provides necessary balance, these fact checkers have neutralized themselves.  It explains why the Romney campaign can say, "We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers."

Case in point, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post.   Kessler has correctly pointed out that the theme of first night of the Republican National Convention, "We Built It," was based on the distortion and truncation of a speech by Barack Obama, lifting it from all context and changing its meaning.  Writing on July  23rd, Kessler opined.

 [B]y focusing on one ill-phrased sentence, Romney and his campaign have decided to pretend that Obama is talking about something different — and then further extrapolated it so that it becomes ridiculous. That’s not very original at all.

After the first night of the convention, Kessler "upgraded" his rating to 4 Pinocchio's because: 

[I]n light of the GOP’s repeated misuse of this Obama quote in speech after speech, we feel compelled to increase the Pinocchio rating to Four.

Fine.  The GOP repeats a debunked lie and he upgrades it.  But in his piece, Kessler describes the complaints generated by the original 3 Pinocchio rating and that the original rating was a "compromise"

We originally gave Romney’s use of the phrase Three Pinocchios, a ruling that did not seem to please anyone, with Democrats complaining that Obama’s words were clearly taken out of context and Republicans arguing that even in context, his words exposed a philosophy that was deeply suspicious of — even hostile to — the private sector...So we believed Three Pinocchios was a reasonable compromise, given the ungrammatical nature of Obama’s phrasing. [Emphasis added]

Kessler goes on to write, "As we have often said, a gaffe can become an effective attack when it reinforces an existing stereotype about a politician. Democrats would have a stronger case for a complaint if they did not also yesterday release two videos that made ample use of gaffes by Romney that reinforced the stereotype of the GOP nominee being an uncaring corporate executive." [Emphasis added]

And there's the point.  Kessler does not independently think about whether the claim is true or not. Embedded in his analysis is the thought about how political actors use the claims.  For purposes of a "fact check" it does not actually matter whether the Democrats would have a "stronger" case if they did something different. If they are complaining, yet doing the same thing, it makes them hypocrites, but it doesn't make the statement any less false.   Yet that is not how Kessler treats the claim.

And thus the problem. The idea that you have to ding both sides is so embedded in the ideology of reporters who cover politics that even "fact checkers" do it when it is totally irrelevant to the "fact" they are trying to "check."