"Specific information" and the failure of the press
by David Atkins
A respondent to the latest NYTimes swing state poll says of Romney's debate performance:
“The debate made me feel better about” Mr. Romney, one poll respondent, Paula Gregory, 37, a clerical manager for a construction firm who lives in Highlands Ranch, Colo., said in a follow-up interview. “I had more specific information from him and he had real rebuttals to accusations that had been made, most specifically about his tax plan.”
Real rebuttals, as in: "It doesn't matter what I said before, if I say it's not true, then it isn't."
Look, there's no question that the President didn't do remotely enough to call Mitt Romney out on his sudden reinvention in Denver.
But on the issue of his tax plan, Obama did point out that Mitt's plan was to cut taxes by $5 trillion, which would have to increase the deficit or be made up for in costs to the middle class. When Romney insisted that the President was lying about that, all the President could do was say that Romney's plan did, in fact, do that. What else was the President supposed to do? Flash anger? Call him a liar? Most Americans in the squishy don't take too well to that sort of thing, particularly from melanin-endowed politicians.
This is what the press is supposed to do. It's what a debate moderator is supposed to do. If a candidate trots out a mind-boggling lie on stage, it's supposed to be the job of a fair arbiter to say,
"Wait a moment, Mr. Romney. You have in fact been calling for a $4.8 trillion tax reduction across the board, offset by elimination of deductions. What specific deductions would you eliminate to avoid raising the deficit or burdening the middle class?"
Now, the President could in theory have taken it upon himself to ask this question. But that's not supposed to his job, and it would have seemed very small on that stage, effacing him and his policies while allowing Romney to take center stage. Instead, both men engaged in a "did not/did too" battle of boring in which the more asinine and confident-sounding bully came out the winner.
The fact that no such question was asked after Romney's nakedly false assertion is not just a dramatic failure by Mr. Lehrer, but representative of the decades long failure of the press in seeking a perception of balance over the pursuit of the truth.
Fortunately, it would appear from the same poll that most people aren't actually buying Romney's snake oil in major quantities, as the latest numbers in Virginia, Wisconsin and Colorado have barely moved--or moved in Obama's direction--since late September:
Time will tell if enough voters are smart enough to see through Romney's lies. But one thing's for certain: the press has failed spectacularly to do its job.
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