In the age of "truthiness" from our politicians and lapdog media, there's something going on here in the Tampa/St. Petersburg area that is truly revolutionary. On of oure local newspapers, The St. Petersburg Times, has launched a new project to expose the honest-to-goodness truth, or lack thereof, in the 2008 presidential campaign. It's unlike anything I've seen in a major newspaper, and a look at their dismantling of a recent Rudy Guiliani claim shows why.
We've all seen attempts by newspapers to examine political ads, but in all of the examples I've seen the newspaper shies away from actually saying whether or not an ad is actually true. Instead, they'll analyze and summarize the contents of an ad and use watered down, lame phrases like "the ad stretches the facts" or "the ad is somewhat misleading," rather than saying "this ad is not true." And as we all know too well, most candidates' statements get regurgitated by the MSM steno pool with no attempt to examine the truth of those statements, no matter how outrageous they may be.
The new St. Pete Times project is different. The newspaper is partnering with Congressional Quarterly on the project, called PolitiFact, to "analyze the candidates' speeches, TV ads and interviews and determine whether the claims are accurate." As the paper's executive editor, Neil Brown, explained the service in a recent editorial:
Sorting out the "truth" may seem a treacherous endeavor in such a politically polarized time. But we believe our journalists can play a greater role as an honest broker for voters bewildered by the barrage of campaign talk.
So in a move rare for a news organization, we're dedicating a team of reporters and researchers to meticulously examine the rhetoric of candidates and their partisans, and then make a call: Is the claim true or not?
You might think such work would be standard journalistic fare. But many news organizations can spend less money and get less grief if their political reporting sticks to stenography and puffery.
It's easier to record the words and claims of competing candidates than to vet their accuracy. It's easier to write about the strategy of using negative advertising than to do the painstaking research to sort out whether the claim is actually true or false.
Amen to that.
This past weekend, for example, PolitiFact analyzed the following claim by Rudy Guiliani, which was published a few weeks ago in The New Yorker magazine: "I mean, we took a city that nobody believed could be turned around with regard to crime, and really did turn it around. That’s not like a political slogan. We really did it."
PolitiFact gives a Truth-O-Meter rating to each analysis, and in this case it gave Guiliani's claim a "Barely True" rating, and went on to say the following:
In the Aug. 20, 2007 edition of The New Yorker magazine, Giuliani makes the claim that he turned around New York's crime trend.
But violent crime in New York actually began falling three years before Giuliani became mayor in 1994, and property crime started falling four years before.
Under Giuliani, the decline in crime rates sure picked up speed: After falling about 12 percent from 1990 to 1993, violent crime dropped 56 percent over the next eight years. But most big cities, and the nation as a whole, followed a similar pattern: A slow fall beginning around 1990 or 1991, followed by a sharp drop over the next decade.
Giuliani may have helped push New York’s crime rate down, but "turn it around"? Not quite. The trend had started without him.
Wow, the newspaper actually presented the facts and exposed the lies behind Guiliani's statement. When's the last time you saw a newspaper do that? Another nice feature of the project is that it not only examines candidates' own ads and statements but also analyzes the truth behind attacks on candidates by other candidates. And it provides the sources for all of its analysis.
The St. Petersburg Times is, sadly, in a unique position to engage in a project like PolitiFact, since it is independently owned by a nonprofit institute. You can see more PolitiFact analysis at politifact.com. The project is nonpartisan, of course, and analyzes the statements of both Dems and Repugs. It's definitely worth a look, and should prove to be a valuable resource for all of us during the presidental campaign. Maybe journalism isn't dead after all.