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.