I realize it’s counterintuitive, but ‘apologist’ doesn’t mean ‘someone who apologizes,’ but rather ‘a person who makes a defense in speech or writing of a belief or idea.’ E.g. “C.S. Lewis was a vigorous apologist for traditional Christianity.”
Perhaps I’m thinking back to Judith Miller’s reporting before the Iraq War and feeling glad they’re suggesting that the answer might not be “stenography.”
Romney is full of shit. That being said, yes, you can interpret a lot of things as apologizing or being apologetic. At that point I think the value of reporting the statement is going to be limited.
And it’s more than fair to evaluate that. But I’m pointing out that some statements don’t hold up to simple evaluation in a news story.
Knock it off.
But a good reporter can report the context as well as the sound bite.
Look at the current snafu over Romney saying “I like being able to fire people.” It’s being used out of context by both Democrats and rival Republicans.
But a good reporter would show the context of what Romney was saying: that he was talking about people being able to have a choice in their medical insurance providers.
In the context of what the writer was referring too he specifically talked about Obama using the word “apology” as part of his premise. He is talking about the general feeling of many Americans that Obama is an apologist in that respect.
“Obama the apologist” is already a lexicon of public opinion and will assuredly be used in the upcoming election. The writer knows this as do other writers. Here is the same argument by another writer who also stated that the word “apology” was never used by Obama: "In none of these cases does Obama actually use a word at all similar to “apologize.”
I would expect a plethora of similar opinion pieces by editors as the election cycle heats up.
Failure to do so has cost the news media credibility
This is not a fact. There is no information regarding where the idea to apologize for Hiroshima came from, and no indication it came from the administration. All the wikileaks document said was that the Japanese government told our ambassador it would not be a good idea to do so, perhaps in response to speculation from anti-nuclear groups.
So, if I were the NYT and reporting on Magiver’s post, I think it might be a good idea to include the fact that his claim was false, no? Or should I just repeat it without pointing out the lie?
Yes and no. Most news sources will challenge things said that are obviously not true, at least at times. But is it your contention that a reporter should not quote a politician unless he has fact checked everything in the quote? Like I said earlier, it’s simply not possible even if we’re talking about things that are black and white, much less the large grey area where there may not be a simple true/false dichotomy.
Fear of fact-checking and editorializing has ruined mainstream media for me. I miss blatant opinions and “bias” in the media. I have long considered it their job to have opinions. I valued their opinions, since it was basically their job to be more informed than me (the wonders of specialization). The bland, parroting, “fair and balanced” media that exists now is absolutely horrible.
That seems a little excessive. Of course they’ll look like they cherry pick. They already cherry pick. There is only a finite amount of time and space available for reporting what happens; now their bias is hidden behind what isn’t said, rather than out in the open for inspection. The notion that it is possible to just report events/facts/words and nothing else is fundamentally flawed.
Perhaps. But a couple of things:
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There are a lot of things that come up in stories, over and over again, that have had their veracity challenged by people who know what they’re talking about, but rarely if ever get challenged by actual reporters. The ‘apologizing for America’ meme is a classic for-instance. At an absolute minimum, a reporter should ask for substantiation in cases like these.
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Having a good bullshit detector is a minimum requirement for a reporter, and putting it to use is part of her job description. A reporter may not be able to check everything, but should have a good sense of what needs checking. And given the ease of Googling things these days, a reporter really can check most of what goes into his penultimate draft.
And mentioned in the article as examples of the sort of thing they might want to do.
Because of the distorted and inaccurate view that it conveys, in implying that Republicans are the only ones who are untruthful.
Senator A and Senator B both give speeches. Both spin the facts in favor of their party and their position. The NYT thoroughly fact-checks Senator A and points out what they believe is being spun, but leave everything Senator B says unexamined, and simply report it verbatim.
Is this good reporting? I would say No, if the goal is to push for honesty.
If the goal is to benefit Senator A, then it is not reporting but advocacy.
Regards,
Shodan
No, it isn’t. It’s a suggestion from a reader, and the bit about “The president has never used the word ‘apologize’ in a speech about U.S. policy or history” is the public editor’s interpretation of what the reader wants to see - not a comment about what the paper should do. It’s a setup for the open-ended questions at the end of the piece.
Yes it is - these are examples of what the paper might want to do if they try this sort of “fact-checking”. And unsurprisingly, both examples are anti-Republican, as I mentioned.
That’s why one of the questions asked in the article -
can be answered “Yes it’s possible, but let’s not kid ourselves that the NYT is going to be fair. Readers want us to spin everything against the GOP even harder than we do - should we?”
When Clinton “apologized” to the country for his adultery and lies, he never used the words “I’m sorry”. But the NYT did not feel it necessary to point that out.
This is the same thing as the Halperin memo back in 2004. ‘Both sides lie, but let’s only call one side on it, otherwise the wrong guy will win the election’.
Maybe this is SOP for ABC and the NYT, but it shouldn’t be for honest reporters.
Regards,
Shodan
Two Times readers sent letters asking the paper to take a harder line against perceived Republican falsehoods while reporting them. The public editor used those letters as a jumping off point to ask how readers want the paper to handle claims made by politicians. Conclusion: the Times hates Republicans. Got it.
This seems too-easily accepted without proof. I don’t think it is possible in the slightest. In fact I think the assumption that it is possible is the ultimate reason why anti-bias-in-the-media folks never cease, even after mainstream news has been totally crippled by such pressure. In order to represent balanced views, one must already have an opinion on what the overall opinion-climate is. But this begs the question, because how does one determine this without bias? It isn’t like politicians are taking principled stands on the existence or non-existence of photons, whether unmeasurable sets are a good thing in mathematics, or somesuch. They’re discussing things like heath care and taxation.
If they don’t then papers might as well publish PR releases and get rid of reporters altogether.
Let’s debate this with a clearer example. During the Meet the Press debate, Romney was asked about how social programs/entitlements would need to change in the age of austerity. In his answer he said the following:
[QUOTE=Mitt Romney]
“What unfortunately happens is, with all the multiplicity of federal programs, you have massive overhead with government bureaucrats in Washington administering all these programs. Very little of the money that’s actually needed by those that really need help, those that can’t care for themselves, actually reaches them."
[/quote]
This isn’t just spin, it’s patently untrue–I say patently because anyone who pays attention to (i.e. reports on) these programs knows that 91 to 99 percent of total federal spending on these programs reaches beneficiaries in the form of benefits or services. It’s a basic fact that I would expect a reporter covering the federal budget and its major outlays to know pretty much instantly, and given it’s prevalence in the Republican primary I’d expect any political reporter to either know it as well or at least be smart enough to check it with a colleague who covers the budget.
In short, this is a fact, not an opinion, but a fact that flies in the face of the narrative Romney wants to spin. If a reporter writing about Romney’s response inserts this fact into the body of the story, it’s more than just a correction–it calls into question the candidate’s entire narrative. Should this be allowed, or is it fairer to isolate such corrections to the opinion page?
Honestly, that people want less information from their newspapers is kind of baffiling. If I want to find out what Mitt Romney or Obama has to say, I’m sure their campaigns have website full of speeches and unchallenged assertions.
If a candidate says a program suffers from massive overhead, I want a paper that can tell me the actual overhead. They don’t even need to call it a “lie” if they’re uncomfortable with that, just say the overhead is however many percent and the reader can decide if that counts as “massive”.
But a paper thats just a verbatim reporting of who said what and where is pointless. Its basically just a bunch of press-releases reprinted on crappier paper.
Well, you can point to that Clinton speech as evidence that he apologized for his affair with Lewinsky, right? I think that’s fair enough.
Now, what can you point to as evidence of remotely similar quality that Obama has gone around apologizing for America? Best we’ve got in this thread is something Obama didn’t ever actually say or do, but allegedly might’ve done if things had happened differently.
Got any instances where he said anything that could have reasonably been interpreted as an apology? Please share - as Ross Perot once said, “I’m all ears!”
France April 3, 2009
France April 3. 2009
Al Arabiya Jan 27, 2009
summit of the americas, april 17, 2009
Editorial April 6, 2009
Five examples of his saying that American has been wrong and will start doing better, which is an apology. All of them just from the first six months of this term. We await Rufus T’s apology.