If they get equal time and presentation, I call that treating them equally. If I’m a reporter:
I hear candidate A make charge A against candidate B
I hear candidate B make charge B against candidate A
You investigate charges A & B for variance with the truth as best you can find it.
If A and B are roughly equidistant from the truth, you show them both equally.
If A is much farther removed from the truth than B and A has a pattern of distorting B much more so than A distorts B, then it is unfair to B to give them equal presentation.
much more so than B distorts A.
See, this was in large part the point of those hypothetical scenarios you seem to hold in such disdain. There may be a fuzzy line between harmless misstatements and damned lies, but that doesn’t mean some things don’t fall clearly on one side of that line or the other.
Here’s another thought. If ABC notes a misstatement from each candidate and decided that one is more egregious than the other, and if they only have limited time and resources to follow up on those misstatements, should they divide those resources equally, just to give the appearance of balance?
If they only have limited broadcast time on a nightly news program, should they divide that time equally, just to give the appearance of balance?
Would it be imbalanced to give one statement the headline on their web page, and put the less egregious statement behind a hyperlink on the sidebar?
I just wonder why our stalward defenders of media impartiality, Tigers2B1 and Shodan, haven’t been jumping all over the place condemning Sinclair Broadcasting for their blatant attempt to slant the election. Why fool around with imagined media bias when here’s a classic example, standing in the middle of the road underneath a big blinking neon sign?
Oh, well. I’m sure they’ll get to denouncing Sinclair’s slant soon enough, after they get done with more important tasks, like clipping their toenails…
Well, not exactly. I would have thought the meaning of the memo - that Bush and Kerry both lie, but Bush’s lies are worse, and therefore we need to go after Bush and leave Kerry alone - is fairly clear from a reading of the text.
On the other hand, your inference is stuff like “there is a distinction between a candidate and his campaign”, or saying “both sides lie but Bush’s lies are central to his campaign” does not mean “Bush is worse”, and so on.
I would have said the meaning of the text is relatively straightforward. You obviously disagree, but it seems to me that the two examples of “distinctions without a difference” above don’t exactly inspire a lot of confidence in our likelihood to come to a meeting of minds.
AFAICT, the memo rather clearly states what it states. Halperin obviously thinks that Bush’s campaign is worse than Kerry’s, even though both sides are lying. And that it would be unfair (or falsely equivalent, or some such weaselling) to treat both campaigns the same. So he is telling his reporters not to do that. Give more air time and effort into debunking what Bush says, and give Kerry a pass as far as debunking what he says.
It also seems pretty clear that the distinction is between those who think “Bush is the worse candidate and deserves to be attacked” is a political judgement, and those who think it is objective truth. The notion that “the Bush campaign uses lies as central to its efforts” is Wisdom Received From On High is simply and merely the commonly arrogant assumption that whatever the media elite think is self-evidently true. As John Mace points out, it is a unfalsifiable opinion. IOW, ABC is basing its coverage on its opinions, not on verifiable facts.
Frankly, the plain sense of the words.
If I have learned anything from my years on the SDMB, it is that no one can force anyone else to understand something if they don’t want to understand.
Regards,
Shodan
I’m certain that ABC has staff dedicated to both campaigns. If they purposely put more resources towards debunking one candidate’s lies, they are distorting the news. Their claim that one candidate lies more than the other will become a self fullfilling prophecy. It’s just too easy to make either candidate look worse if that is your intention.
Yes, they should divide the time equally. Isn’t that legally required? Even if it’s not legally required, they should devout equal time and let the viewers decide which candidate is guilty of the worst exagerations.
I don’t know. It would, to a large extent, depend on how one determined which statement was worse.
The alternative scheme makes it advantageous to distort as much as possible… specifically, to spread more distortions than can reasonably be covered in the news sufficiently. My opinion of this administration is low enough that I think this “strategy” has always been their style. Spin, distort, spin the distortions. Who can keep up? And I say this having been in the position four years ago to be a complete fence-sitter, possibly leaning to the republican side. The board history is here for everyone to see. I was a total Randian objectivist libertarian type, origially called myself aynrandlover (“erl” as a nickname is an adaptation of the more appropriate “arl”). I no longer trust this administration to do anything with a bit of good faith in mind. Crony capitalist warmongers hoping to appeal to base fear in enough people that the worst terrorist attack on US soil (which happened on their watch, but nevermind that now) will be repeated unless we replace existing body armor for our troops, give more tax breaks to the wealthy, and kill people all over the globe. If they’re lucky they’ll use the constitution to restrict rights of a minority population and overturn Roe v Wade on top of that.
I’m simply not that scared of terrorists, even if I thought waging war arbitrarily were a sufficient way to combat it. Sorry. I wish the media was biased against Bush. I’d love that, I really would. It ain’t. This memo doesn’t make it so. Don’t be scared, your man can still lie quicker than ABC can keep the population informed. Besides which, the right has already done its damnedest to discredit the media, Hollywood, and universities, so even if the information about distortions gets out through any popular funnel of information, it will miss the people it needs to get to the most or be tainted by the poison well fallacy I could mention if I wouldn’t then get charged with “talking down” to people like the ivory-tower, elitist lefty I am.
Do we all remember when a large portion of America thought that Iraq was linked to 9/11 and Al Qaeda? Where did that come from,[ol][]the great American population “making up their mind” as is their god-given right,[]the administration not making significant distortions,or the media just reporting the facts?[/ol] As far as I’m concerned a memo like this is overdue by a few years.
I think it’s quite obvious why the memo didn’t put it this way and if you were being honest, you’d own up to it.
The fact is that the Republicans have in place an organized campaign of harassment of the mainstream media that looks for opportunities on a daily basis to label the media as biased and liberal regardless of the facts or the truth of the matter.
If you read the text of the memo itself, you understand that Halperin is reacting to a specific fact – the Bush team is stepping up its harassment of ABC. Halperin is telling his staff to ignore the Bush thugs and to do its news stories as the facts warrant, not out of some false notion of “equality” that is being hammered by the Republican harassment team.
If you want to get that, sure. What I get is–Bush and Kerry both lie, to some extent, but Bush’s lies are bigger distortions and play a more significant role in his campaign rhetoric, and we should not feel obligated to pretend that this isn’t true.
What it comes down to are these questions:
–Are the distortions and lies in Bush’s campaign rhetoric objectively more significant and more prominent than those in Kerry’s?
–Even if you believe that this isn’t true, is it reasonable to make this conclusion? Or is any determination of the relative dishonesty of the two campaigns a subjective determination?
–If yes, and if a news director draws this conclusion, is he obligated to ignore the conclusion and proceed as if the campaigns’ distortions are in proportion to one another?
The first question is probably deserving of a GD of its own, if anyone wants to start it.
So, remind me, did the news organizations in 2000 spend an equal amount of time discussing Bush’s exaggerations as they did discussing Gore’s exaggerations? (Many of which later turned out to be deceptive anyway…i.e., Gore never claimed to have invented the internet.)
And, I personally don’t recall Gore making any statements equivalent to “My opponent says the world would be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power.”
God, I sound like a broken record, but here we go again… He should report that conclusion, along with the supporting evidence, and let the audience decide if they agree. He should NOT make that conclusion himself, not tell the audience, and then proceed to act on it (ie, report more distortions of one candidate than the other).
Lockbox… 
Seriously, though, do we have to keep score one election cycle to the next and ensure that everything is perfectly even? Sounds like a liberal pipe dream to me…
I agree. I have seen no evidence, however, that anyone at ABC has been directed to report more distortions of one candidate than the other.
The language of the memo seems very plain. It’s about what my favorite talk show host would call “the bounds of reason”, what Jon Stewart calls objectivity, and related to Wikipedia’s “neutral point of view” - objectively reviewing the facts and making decisions based on them. The amount of space in a news article devoted to competing misconduct should relate to the severity of such misconduct, just as the amount of space in an encyclopedia article devoted to competing theories should relate to the popular acceptance of each theory.
If an author decides to simply devote equal space to each side, because he thinks that’s what objectivity means, then he’s a stenographer, not a journalist. Journalism is about separating the wheat from the chaff - just as readers expect page A1 to have the most important stories, they expect each story to focus on the important events and facts.
Now, that means someone has to decide which events and facts are important, just as they have to decide which stories are important. How they make those decisions will say a lot about the quality of their newspaper, TV show, etc. But if they simply avoid making the decisions at all, they’re not doing their job.
This breakdown of the debate and the relative seriousness/egregiousness of the lies/distortions told by each candidate should be of some interest.[uqote]In other words, Bush rather clearly lied more than Kerry and lied more seriously than Kerry. I did my best to apply the same rigor to both candidates, but even with a different formula and different scoring, it’s hard to see how Bush wouldn’t come out as seriously more deceptive than Kerry. As Halperin said, deception seems to be central to George Bush’s campaign while it’s basically peripheral to John Kerry’s.
[/quote]
The problem ABC faces, per the memo, is that to report a “balanced” perspective on the debate would be to somehow paint these inaccuracies as equal when they aren’t. Being equal is not the same as being fair. If one candidate demands closer scrutiny than the other, they should be unafraid of coming across as “biased” simply to get to the facts of the matter, as they see them.
A general question about this memo:
Why do people put such stuff in writing? Why couldn’t he just give verbal instructions to his people?
If you’re going to say something that you know may be construed as inappropriate (even if your intentions are proper), why put it in a memo?
Similar question applies when, during a trial, they find memos and emails between company employees that talk of their “evil” plans.
Do these people think: “Let me put this in writing. There is no way this is going to come back and bite me”?
Anyway, this is independent of whether the Halperin memo was proper or not. I just don’t understand, in general, why such things are put in writing.
That is exactly why you should put it in a memo. If you said it orally, then there is no documentary evidence that shows that what you were saying was not inappropriate. If you write it down, you have documentary evidence to show. Of course, that doesn’t mean that some people won’t interpret in ways to still make the claim that it is inappropriate, as some have here, but at least they don’t have the additional ammunition that would be provided to them if people could also lie about what was actually said.