"He said/she lied" over at NPR

The original broadcast was a few days ago, but I thought I'd share an exchange I've had with Morning Edition reporter John McChesney about a report he did on campaign advertising. He aired some of the Swift Boat Liars' ad without pointing out that their charges were unsubstantiated, that they didn't serve with Kerry, and that their main guy had recanted the night before (later that day, he unrecanted, but whatever). My response was based on material I've gotten here at Kos and elsewhere in the blogosphere.

Anyway, in the extended box is the entire exchange so far. Yes, it's really, really long, so only obsessives need apply. I don't expect McChesney to respond further, but I think it's good for all of us kossacks to keep up the pressure.

FIRST LETTER FROM ME:

I was simply astonished at John McChesney's report on presidential campaign advertising. He played a clip from the anti-Kerry ad from Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, which accuses Kerry of lying about his military service, and then McChesney had a media analyst discuss the likely outsized impact of this ad. Indeed, the backers of this group are counting on mainstream media outlets like NPR to play and replay their accusations.

The problem is that McChesney failed to test the veracity of the Swiftboat Veterans' claims, so listeners are likely to believe those claims. Yet this group has serious credibility problems. At first, the group claimed that its members served with Kerry, but none did. On Thursday, Kerry's commander retracted the claims he made at the behest of this group:

Also on Thursday, one of the Swiftboat Veterans, Larry Thurlow, claimed on CNN's Inside Politics that one of the battles for which Kerry won a Purple Heart wasn't a battle at all: no enemy fire occurred, said Thurlow. Yet every one of Kerry's comrades contradicts Thurlow, and Thurlow himself has claimed for years (see Douglas Brinkley's biography of Kerry) that enemy fire did occur, and indeed Thurlow himself won a bronze star for that incident.

So in the past 24 hours, a number of incidents have shown Swiftboat Veterans for Truth to be, well, less than truthful. Yet McChesney broadcast their claims without any comment on their legitimacy. One of the first jobs of any journalist is to determine the trustworthiness of their sources. Shame on McChesney for passing along lies and propaganda as if they were the truth.

WEASELLY LETTER FROM McCHESNEY:

Thanks for your response to the ad piece. As you probably gathered, this piece was not a fact checking report. There were parts of 3 other ads in the piece, two from Democrats and one from the Bush campaign. We do these ad roundup pieces to keep the rest of the nation informed about the air wars in the battleground states. The statement from Ken Goldstein at the end of the piece did not say anything about the "likely" outcome of the ad, but rather what the sponsoring group most likely was trying to do: get free media coverage and attract more money. While it is true that NPR gave the ad some free media coverage, we provided only a small percentage of the charges in the ad. The group sponsoring the ad made a very tiny buy... in three cities. If the ad begins to air more broadly, then it will undoubtedly be subjected to closer fact-checking scrutiny, as are other ads we report on.

FINAL RESPONSE FROM ME:

Mr. McChesney: Thanks for responding so thoughtfully to my commentary on your ad campaign report. I do have some further thoughts. I realize you will probably not respond further -- if you got into a never-ending dialogue with every disgruntled listener, you'd have no time for your actual job! I understand. But still . . .

You wrote, "As you probably gathered, this piece was not a fact checking report." So let me get this straight. If a piece is not explicitly labeled "fact check," then it's OK to broadcast unsubstantiated slander produced by a group of known liars? And you have no responsibility to your listeners to make sure they know that this group's claims are, shall we say, less than reliable?

Ah, the state of journalistic ethics these days! I hate to sound like an old codger, Mr. McChesney, but I used to be a journalist, and back in the day we believed that our primary duty was to publish the truth. You know, facts that could be checked. Yes, I really was told to fact-check every source, even if that source was our mother. We didn't believe in uncritically passing along lies and exaggerations. We didn't believe in providing a platform for partisan character assassins with a long track record of just making stuff up. When public figures lied or radically distorted the truth, it was our job to call them on it. It was our duty to readers and fellow citizens; it was what distinguished us from ad men and stenographers.

I gather that those days are gone. Today's mainstream reporters, yourself included, apparently practice what critics have called "he said/she said" journalism or, to be more accurate, "he said/she lied." In a misguided effort to provide balance, reporters such as yourself simply round up claims from Democrats and Republicans, then air those claims without bothering to find out whether they are true. Paul Krugman has satirized this tendency in a made-up headline about media coverage of the Bush administration's approach to science: "White House Claims Earth Is Flat; Some Scientists Disagree."

Indeed, you seem to follow this approach: in your response to me, you make much of the fact that you covered two Democratic ads and two ads from the other side (one from the Bush campaign, one from Swift Boat Veterans), as if that settled the matter. But if one side is lying and the other side is telling the truth, it is your job as a reporter to point that out.

One last thing. You wrote: "The group sponsoring the ad made a very tiny buy... in three cities. If the ad begins to air more broadly, then it will undoubtedly be subjected to closer fact-checking scrutiny, as are other ads we report on."

With all due respect, Mr. McChesney, this is absurd. Like the lack of a "fact check" label on your report, the size of the ad buy doesn't make it OK to uncritically broadcast untruths. Besides, this group received quite literally round-the-clock, uncritical coverage on CNN and Fox, as well as major air time on the other cable channels. Their ad was played almost in its entirety on Meet the Press this Sunday and was featured in all the other talking-head shows. It simply won't do to suspend your duty to tell the truth (or simply avoid passing along lies) because the ad buy was "very tiny."

Please do better.