How should journalists cover Obama’s last two years? Ignore Fox News.

by Brian Mann on January 6th, 2015

A Fox News report on President Barack Obama’s religious faith. Image via Media Matters. http://mediamatters.org/research/2012/03/20/bret-baier-ignores-fox-news-role-in-fueling-oba/185740

Just before the New Year, the Washington Post ran an article reminding us that two months into President Barack Obama’s first term, conservatives were already blaming him for tanking — perhaps deliberately — the U.S. stock market. In an essay published in 2009, Michael Boskin, a guy people take seriously who worked in the Bush White House, blamed Obama’s “radicalism” for terrifying investors. “[O]ur new president’s policies are designed to radically re-engineer the market-based U.S. economy.”

This kind of context and memory is rare these days in journalism. But I’ve been thinking about this for a while, long before Obama’s economy shifted into high gear and the Dow topped 18,000. Here’s the thing: conservatives keep getting it terribly, terribly wrong. And those of us in the media biz — journalists, in particular — keep playing along. And by “it” I mean just about everything. Their dire predictions. Their theories about Obama’s motivations. Their claims about his policies and their impacts.

I know how that sounds. It sounds “biased” or “partisan” or “liberal.” But I’m not any of those things. I am, in the final equation, a reporter. My job is to point out factual things, describing the best version of reality I can. And the truth is that again and again as journalists we’ve given conservatives the benefit of the doubt on claim after claim. We’ve peddled their narratives and given them the benefit of “equal time” and “balanced coverage” even when their past performance proved shockingly off-base and often turned out to represent deliberate falsification.

Here’s the thing: If these guys were businessmen, we would never, ever invest our dollars with them. But we keep spilling pages of ink and investing our own credibility in their accusations, theories, predictions and dire warnings. Here’s a partial list of the utter nonsense we’ve wasted America’s time with over the past half-decade. We covered Benghazi as if it were a real, smoking-gun Watergate-style scandal. Not just a dangerous muddle, the kind of bad thing that happens in a tough world, but evidence of some kind of dark conspiracy.

We covered the debate over “Obamacare” as if it might really involved death panels, or at the very least as if it might serve to “socialize” a big chunk of the American economy. We talked about the Affordable Care Act’s incompetently designed website as if that kind of human, bureaucratic (and, yes, stupid) misstep was somehow far more important than the millions of new Americans gaining access to healthcare.

We jumped on the idea that Obama’s foreign policy response to Russia’s militarism — economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation — was incompetent and naive, echoing concerns that the President might be essentially adolescent, long before any of the the measures had actually been implemented. (It turns out Russia’s economy is now in free-fall, thanks in part to the White House’s efforts.)

Early in the Obama years, we talked “even-handedly” about the Federal stimulus and the bailouts of banks and auto makers as if they might plausibly be harbingers of a new communist movement in America, even though those policies had long precedent in American administrations, Republican and Democrat, and had been launched under President Bush.

We journalists echoed talking points about Obama’s open border policy and his lack of focus on immigration enforcement, even as his administration rounded up and deported far more undocumented workers than any other White House. We talked (endlessly) about President Obama’s incompetence on the economy even as the U.S. steadily and consistently outperformed Europe, Japan and every other part of the world with the exception of China. We jabbered on about the White House’s anti-energy, tree-hugger, hippy renewable energy policies even as the U.S. transformed itself into a far more self-sufficient energy producer.

It is, taken together, a remarkably and even stunningly poor performance, roughly on par with our dismal incompetence in accepting the Bush administration’s claims for why America needed to go to war in Iraq. Rather than pushing hard for facts and evidence and needed context, we grabbed our stenographer’s pens and cheerfully echoed the most far-fetched, thinly-sourced nonsense that conservatives dished up.

I actually don’t think there’s much mystery about why this is happening.

The first reality is that media organizations today are fundamentally weaker than they were a generation ago, with fewer resources, fewer experienced reporters, less institutional memory and less professional courage. Crummy journalists grab onto the latest zeitgeistian set of blather and run with it in the hope that it will garner them lots of “hits” and “eyeballs.” If they’re lucky, a punchy headline will go viral or be posted on Drudge’s popular and often fundamentally dishonest website.

The actual hard work of digging toward the truth, debunking nonsense, and calling out the liars and demagogues and phonies? That rarely gets done anymore. And there’s almost no accountability. Pundits who get things horribly wrong get called back for more air time, not because they have a record of being factually correct, or because they’re committed to informing the public, but because they’re colorful and feisty and they “give good TV.”

The second reality is that the right has a highly disciplined message machine that incorporates Fox News (where an astonishing 47% of conservatives get their information), AM talk radio, a handful of influential editorial pages, Republican and tea party politicians, as well as a constellation of well-funded think-tanks and websites. These organizations skillfully push ideas and memes, even when they are demonstrably, factually false — and they do so with such efficiency and message discipline that in many cases the rest of the media ecology eventually goes along.

There’s no easy fix for our current media dilemma. But it’s worth noting that the old formula of “fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me” applies to the journalism community. We own this. And like any reporter who’s been fooled by a source, we need to dial up our skepticism to 11. It’s long past overdue that when our “colleagues” in the right wing media spin up tales about conspiracies or Kenyan birth certificates or socialist-anti-colonialist tendencies or Benghazi-style conspiracies, we demand clear, unequivocal evidence before the rest of our news organizations jump on board.

In fact, our baseline, public reaction — to conservative bloviators ranging from Dick Cheney to Rush Limbaugh to Bill O’Reilly — should be fairly simple: These are people who’ve gotten so much wrong, so often, and often through a well-documented intention to deceive that we simply shouldn’t trust them. These are, in the parlance of our trade, not credible sources.

Granted, that’s a frightening reality. It’s frightening when high-level politicians and media institutions of such power and influence are revealed as phonies and liars. But we’ve been here before from Joseph McCarthy to Richard Nixon to the architects of the Iran-Contra scandal. In the past, journalists found the courage and the skepticism necessary to “out” these leaders and to describe them accurately for what they were. Not in the pursuit of a partisan agenda but because our job, again, is to describe reality.

None of this is to suggest that there aren’t strong grounds for critical, independent, factual reporting about this White House. Some of that reporting should, if my guess is accurate, be scathing. But in these last two years of President Obama’s term, reporters would be well-served to remember that they’ve been gamed shamefully over and over since 2009. Our recent history of chasing after dog whistles and false alarms and red herrings will serve as one of the shabbiest chapters in a history of American journalism filled with shabby episodes.

The Washington Post’s recent exercise in memory and context? That was a good start. We all need to do more of that.

Tags: meddia, politics