My letter to the Boston Globe

To the Editors:

I am pleased to be a Globe subscriber. Usually I feel that the paper’s coverage of politics is reasonably thorough, fair, professional, robust, and detailed.

I was very disappointed in Thursday’s coverage of Paul Ryan’s Vice-Presidential nominating speech the previous night. While deftly delivered and ecstatically received in the hall, Ryan included a large number of demonstrably false statements. In his report, your reporters Matt Viser and Brian MacQuarrie focused on the atmospherics, neglecting to point out the following:

1. Ryan blames the Obama adminstration for allowing a GM plant to shut down in Janesville, WI. He has made this claim before, and it is certifiably false; the shutdown was ordered in June 2008.
2. He called the Affordable Care Act a “government takeover” of health care, also a common but demonstrably false claim. This made Politifact’s “Lie of the Year” in 2010.
3. Ryan decried the reduction of $716 billion in future spending that the Affordable Care Act contemplates — while Ryan’s own budget is dependent upon those very savings.

And so on. There were many more, perfectly well-documented, perfectly clear. Ryan’s speech was riddled with barefaced lies, very well documented by Dylan Matthews of the Washington Post, Dan Amira and Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine, among many others.

Viser and MacQuarrie should not feel constrained to merely relate the speech’s style and internal reception; they must report on the substance of what is said and compare it to the real world. To do otherwise opens the door to demagoguery and cynical manipulation — the very dangers to democracy that our professional media exists to fight. NPR’s Mara Liasson gave a good example of how this might better be done, reporting on Ryan’s speech Thursday morning. She interspersed the problematic sections of the speech with her own corrections of the factual record. She did not ignore style and atmosphere. But she was not going to be played for a chump, either.

Indeed, the Globe as a whole did not let Ryan off the hook. In a separate “analysis” articles, the Globe’s Peter Canellos politely suggested — in the Opinion section, of all places — that Ryan’s “bill of particulars against Obama strained credibility”; and Callum Borchers stated blandly that Ryan’s remarks lacked “context”.

.Also in Thursdays’s paper was a report by Michael Kranish titled “Medicare Arguments Key for both Parties”. In focusing on the relative political effectiveness of the two parties’ Medicare claims, Kranish gives no indication of the truthfulness of any of these claims. His quotes are from partisan sources — DNCC Chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, and Mitt Romneys’ book No Apology — or from pollsters. None are from respected, independent, empirical analysts — eg. the Congressional Budget Office, Kaiser Family Foundation — that actually might illuminate the substance of the issue.

While it is certainly necessary to discuss the politics of Medicare, it must be done in a context of fact. To leave out factual context — particularly with a complex and emotionally charged issue like Medicare/health care — again enables demagoguery and fear-mongering from unscrupulous partisans. If all we know is which soundbite moves votes, and which doesn’t, we’ll never know about what policy works and what doesn’t. We will be easily manipulated, voting for a pig-in-a-poke, based on our own dimly-understood sympathies, prejudices and heuristics rather than facts. This would be a lousy way to shop for a car, much less choose a President.

And today (Friday), we read “Fact checkers dispute Romney’s claims”. This is better than nothing, of course. But even this headline makes it into a he-said-she-said situation, where “fact-checkers” are just another claimant, another voice in the political fray. Fact-checking organizations arose as the professional media abdicated that role, searching for a larger margin share by resolving not to offend anyone.

Fact-checking should should permeate every article that appears in the Globe; it should exemplify the culture of the newsroom. Comparing claims to reality should not be confined to some ghetto in the newspaper — and certainly not the “Opinion” section, as the Canellos column was.

Fact-checking is the news; it is the critical role of a news organization in our civic life. Your readers and subscribers expect nothing less.

Sincerely,

Charles Blandy