'False Balance'
Why Obama is so out of touch.The writer of this Associated Press headline is either witty or clueless: "Obama Defends Tenor of His Campaign, Slams Romney." The mixed metaphor almost seems appropriate for such a mixed message. At a press conference yesterday, the president "took questions from four reporters, the most he has taken from the national press corps in two months," the AP reports. One of the reporters, CBS's Nancy Cordes, actually asked him about the vicious tone of his campaign.
In response, Obama "defended the tone of his campaign . . . and insisted it's actually Mitt Romney's ads that are 'patently false.' " But his very denials of negative campaigning amounted to negative campaigning. As the AP puts it, he "did distance himself from a particularly provocative negative ad by a political group that supports him." Said the president: "I don't think that Governor Romney is somehow responsible for the death of the woman that was portrayed in that ad"--repeating the allegation in the course of weakly repudiating it.
Obama similarly employed apophasis when he asserted that "nobody accused Mr. Romney of being a felon." In fact, as the Washington Examiner notes, Obama aide Stephanie Cutter did just that, telling reporters last month "that Romney 'through his own words and his own signature' misrepresented 'his position at Bain to the [Securities and Exchange Commission], which is a felony.' "
RealClearPolitics.com notes that last week, in an interview with "Entertainment Tonight" (!), Obama made this risible assertion: "I don't think you or anybody who's been watching the campaign would say that in any way we have tried to divide the country. We've always tried to bring the country together."
The reader who sent us this clip observes that Obama probably believes what he's saying and describes him as the "most isolated president since Nixon. That's always the problem. Who tells his boss he is acting like [a jerk]?"
Nixon was famously paranoid, which didn't mean his adversaries, including in the media, weren't out to get him. By contrast, journalists are generally favorably disposed to Obama. "The media is very susceptible to doing what the Obama campaign wants," The Weekly Standard quotes Time's Mark Halperin as having observed the other day. (As we've noted in the past, that's very much true of Halperin himself.)
How could Obama be so out of touch? The Taranto Principle--the theory that approving coverage from liberal journalists encourages self-defeating behavior by liberal politicians--would not seem to apply here, at least not directly. Even admiring journalists have taken note (sometimes admiringly) of the nastiness and divisiveness of Obama's re-election campaign. The New York Times reported a couple of weeks ago that the president "is an avid consumer of political news and commentary" in the form of newspapers and magazines, so he can't actually be unaware that some people think his campaign is divisive.
But the Times report suggests that Obama has adopted a system to rationalize away even such critical coverage as he receives:
In his informal role as news media critic in chief, he developed a detailed critique of modern news coverage that he regularly expresses to those around him. . . .
While Mr. Obama frequently criticizes the heated speech of cable news, he sees what he views as deeper problems in news outlets that strive for objectivity. In private meetings with columnists, he has talked about the concept of "false balance"--that reporters should not give equal weight to both sides of an argument when one side is factually incorrect. He frequently cites the coverage of health care and the stimulus package as examples, according to aides familiar with the meetings.It gives Obama too much credit to say he "developed" this "critique," and in fact the Times piece acknowledges that his "assessments overlap with common critiques from academics and journalism pundits."
What exactly is meant by "false balance"? As the Times notes, the term, "which has been embraced by many Democrats, emerged in academic papers in the 1990s to describe global-warming coverage." In the ensuing years, a few news organizations expressly took this complaint to heart, announcing that thenceforth they would treat global warmism as a "fact" and banish dissent.
The Times notes that Obama "frequently cites the coverage of health care and the stimulus package as examples." The story doesn't elaborate on the complaint, but we think we know what he has in mind. At one point in Times reporter Kate Zernike's generally fair 2010 book, "Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America," she puzzles over how Tea Party activists "could be impervious to reports from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the closest thing the government has to a neutral arbiter, that the federal stimulus had cut taxes and created millions of jobs and that the health care legislation passed in 2010 would reduce the federal deficit."
The complaint of "false balance" turns out to be little more than an appeal to authority. Global warmism is not actually a fact but a theory consisting mostly of vague warnings of disaster. Likewise, the CBO's rosy view about ObamaCare is a prediction, not a fact, and its assertions that the stimulus created jobs is an interpretation that not everyone accepts. To complain of "false balance" is to deny the distinction between opinion, or at least authoritative opinion, and fact.
"What you need to realize is that the CBO is the servant of members of Congress, which means that if a Congressman asks it to analyze a plan under certain assumptions, it will do just that--no matter how unrealistic the assumptions may be," former Enron adviser Paul Krugman observed in 2010. But as we noted at the time, Krugman frequently cites CBO analyses as authoritative when they agree with him.
Krugman's faults are legion, but as he is an opinion writer, simple bias is not among them. The complaint of "false balance," however, amounts to a complaint about balance--to a demand that news reporters adhere to a particular point of view.
Obama's "critique" of the media takes the Taranto Principle to a new level. He is not only taken in when liberal journalists give him unrealistically favorable coverage but insulated when they give him realistically unfavorable coverage.
The latter sort of insularity is a danger for conservative politicians as well. Correctly expecting the media to be biased against them, they are apt to minimize indications of genuine popular discontent. But Obama, by means of his tendentious "critique" has managed to make himself impervious even to friendly criticism.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444443504577603461423900578.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinionLot of truth in that.
