Should reporters challenge “facts” that are asserted by newsmakers they write about?

It seems the NYT’s public editor isn’t quite sure.

http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/should-the-times-be-a-truth-vigilante/

So, um…should reporters be determining the veracity of factual statements made to them as part of their stories, or is their job mainly stenography?

If they go down that road, they’d be better off just not reporting anything any politician ever says. I don’t know that reporters have the resources to scrupulously analyze everything every politician says, so they’ll end up looking like they cherry pick.

I’d rather see sites like factcheck do this work, or if the papers want to run a column like that for special occasions (debates, SotU speech, etc.), I could see that making sense.

But everything that every politician says? Impossible.

I wouldn’t mind the reporter saying, “Mr. Politician said x today. In fact, that statement is untrue.”

Yes, whenever a public figure makes a statement that is clearly and unambiguously false, there should be an immediate response, right in the article, that it is a lie, or at the very least, inaccurate. For example, if Rick Perry were to say Mitt Romney is a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, the article should stay clearly and unequivocally that there is absolutely no evidence to that effect. Statements that involve “spin” or which use facts but put a misleading cast on them are harder to call. Frex, Mitt Romney DID say “I like to fire people” but he said it within the context, IIRC, of the advantage of corporations over government in providing services such as health care … in Romney’s mind, apparently, you can easily fire Blue Cross if they don’t do a good job of insuring you, but not the government. He was not talking about it in the context of Bain Capital, which routinely destroyed companies and fired people wholesale, which is what it’s generally linked to.

Still, it can be argued that Romney’s “I like to fire people” bespeaks a personal attitude that can reasonably be applied to his actions at Bain Capital as well as health insurance. So perhaps it is not ALL that misleading to link it to Bain Capital. So even though it is in one aspect misleading, it others it is perhaps not … it’s a thorny problem. Which is why it should be applied only in direct lies/falsehoods, IMHO, but by all means … nail them then, right when you report the lie. Might have saved John Kerry from being Swiftboated.

It only seems impossible because politicians know they can get away with it, so they do it a lot. If politicians expected to be called out for falsehoods, they’d be much more careful about what they said, and the amount of work required to police them would be much lower.

I doubt it. It’s simply impossible to do, and so they know it’s not going to be done. There is no way to bootstrap this.

Fact is, the higher profile a politician is, the more likely he’s going to be factcheck either by the news source or somewhere else. But they know it’s largely a war of words in the long run.

If the Times writer believes the two examples given are the sort of thing reporters need to challenge, then No - the reporters need to shut up and report what is told to them.

Unsurprisingly, both examples of things whose veracity needs to be challenged are anti-Republican. In the one case, a reader would like the Times to assert that Clarence Thomas deliberately flouted the law, instead of making a mistake. There is no evidence whatsoever that this is the case. In the other, apparently the NYT simply does not like the spin Romney puts on his criticism of Obama.

As the piece mentions, there is no problem when this kind of thing is done in an op-ed piece. The push seems to be to turn every news piece into an op-ed piece.

Not like the Times doesn’t do that already.

Regards,
Shodan

I agree with you on the Clarence Thomas example.

The Romney example is iffier. If Romney had pointed to specific things that Obama has said and told his audience “Sure seems like President Obama is apologizing for America,” refuting that interpretation is probably better suited to the op-ed pages. But if Romney baldly claims that Obama has been apologizing for America in his speeches without providing an example, I think it becomes a question of fact, and it would be of service to the reader if the reporter provided an answer.

Romney did that, and it apparently isn’t enough for the Times.

Regards,
Shodan

If their job is mainly stenography, then they should do it whole-hog, and print PDFs of politicians’ press releases, labeled as such.

Of course, I don’t think that. But if the newspaper doesn’t add value of some sort, there’s really no reason for it to do reporting.

Can anyone suggest a source of added value they’d provide that didn’t involve comparing quoted statements with known facts, and similar provision of context?

I can’t see that it would be that difficult. It isn’t like reporters don’t have access to Google.

Who do you think Politifact is?

See, that clip you show (a couple years old, right?) is where a reporter needs to be checking. Romney talks about Obama apologizing at the beginning of all his speeches. So is that accusation true? Is it just Romney’s interpretation? Is it outright false? As a viewer, I want to know — a reporter could easily check what Obama actually said and report back on it. Meanwhile, when Romney makes a more vague accusation like the ones referenced in the more recent article, the reporter can simply note that Romney did not specify what he meant by apologizing, allowing the reader to understand that the claim may or may not be correct.

A reporter should report the facts.

A lazy reporter will just report the easy facts: “Candidate Jones said that Candidate Smith was arrested as a minor for having sex with farm animals.” Assuming Jones actually said this, that’s a literally factual report.

A good reporter would give the relevant facts: “Candidate Jones said that Candidate Smith was arrested as a minor for having sex with farm animals. Court records have been checked and Smith has never been arrested for having sex with animals.” This is also a factual report and it conveys more information.

Editorializing is when the reporter goes beyond the facts: “Candidate Jones said that Candidate Smith was arrested as a minor for having sex with farm animals. Court records have been checked and Smith has never been arrested for having sex with animals. Jones is a liar.”

That’s well and good, but whether or not a politician is apologizing for America is not something that can be verified by checking court records - it’s just spin.

It appears that the Times wants, in the case of Thomas, to make an unsubstantiated accusation of wrongdoing, and, in the case of Romney, to decide if the spin is acceptable. Neither of these are fact-checking.

If a politician tells a whopper (“Ah never had sex with that woman”, or that rapes increased in Michigan, or remembering being in Cambodia on Christmas Eve, or claiming you were named after Edmund Hilary), and those can be clearly disproven, no problem - report the whopper and show that it is wrong. But simply rejecting spin isn’t nearly the same thing, unless you apply it to both sides. And neither of the cited examples are very reassuring that the NYT is going to reject spin from a jackass as from an elephant.

Regards,
Shodan

I’ll note that the examples you’re citing were put forth by NYT readers in their letters to the public editor, not from the NYT itself.

And incorrect assertions of fact are incorrect assertions of fact. Even if we assume for the sake of argument that the NYT would only fact-check Republican statements, how would that excuse the speakers for being untruthful? If 10 people say the Earth is flat, and 9 of them are Republicans, does their falsehood become less egregious if we fail to note that they were joined by one Democrat?

The reincarnation of David Broder as a nonprofit.

This isn’t really what the public editor is asking. What he’s talking about is where this kind of thing should be done and how it should be done. The Times already runs stories that evaluate the claims that candidates and politicians make. In one case a reader was saying the paper should insert something that was blatantly editorial: the suggestion that Clarence Thomas understood a financial disclosure form and simply chose to omit something he didn’t want to disclose. The problem is that that’s hard to substantiate even if it’s true. Maybe Thomas is telling the truth and maybe he isn’t, but it’s not the reporter’s place to determine that. If there are relevant facts that can be included to add perspective, that’s fair game. With respect to the Romney comment, my question is “why report it at all?” It’s empty political rhetoric. You can interpret anything you want as an apology for America if you are so inclined. Adding a paragraph that says President Obama has never used the word “apologize” in a statement overseas doesn’t prove anything. You can say you’re sorry for something without using one specific word and you can adopt an apologetic tone in any number of ways. It’s just rhetoric and that kind of thing should be printed sparingly. The candidates’ ideas and proposals are more important.

There are a lot of different issues that factor into this stuff, space considerations not least among them, but when candidates make factual assertions or proposals, they should be checked. When they’re not, think twice about printing what they’re saying. A lot of the rest of the commentary is just people hoping the news will start calling the other guys liars. :wink:

But isn’t that the very essence of journalism? If journalists are merely repeating, word for word, the factual claims that the subjects of their stories are making, isn’t that stenography or PR? Don’t you find it amazing that the NYT even had to ask? Isn’t it their job to already know this?

So regardless of what Obama said, and the context in which he said it, there’s no way to determine what his actual message and intent was? We can read whatever interpretations we want into it, and they’ll all be valid?

And perhaps they shouldn’t have bothered to report what Romney said. But they did report it. “Romney was here, and he said X.” Well, was “X” a true statement? Doesn’t the NYT give undue credence to an untrue statement and amplify its message when they report it without telling the readers whether there’s any evidence that X is true? As it stands now, political reporting involves dueling reports: “Romney says X;” “The White House denies X.” Okay…would it be possible to find out who is right, or is that up to the reader?

The story was an opinion piece in itself and has nothing to do with journalism or the theoretical question posed.

He talked about the view of Obama as an apologist for the United States. This is an opinion. Despite the fact that Obama tried to apologize for Hiroshima It’s not a function of him actually using the word “apology” in a sentence.

The writer was making an opinion about opinion.

Thank you for your heartfelt apology for the Republican Party and the conservative movement as a whole. It’s long overdue.

That’s just spin, right?

No, what a reporter can be asked to do is the same thing you’d ask me to do here: you’d ask me to produce a single statement of yours that could even be spun as an apology for the GOP and conservatism. And the reporter can ask the politician what basis there is in Obama’s own words that he’s apologizing for America.

If I couldn’t produce that statement, and I didn’t have the decency to retract my claim of your apology, then I’d fully deserve the Pitting I would have coming to me.

And obviously there isn’t a Pit out there, but if the politician or his staff can’t produce the basis for their claim that Obama has been apologizing for America, then the reporter can report that failure: “Senator Bedfellow’s staff failed to produce any substantiation of this claim.”

If they do produce a statement they claim is the basis for the Obama apology claim, the reporter can publish it in the story, and let the readers decide.

Now, was that too hard to think through?

Regards,
Your Favorite Troll