Lies, damned lies, and journalists: who's telling the biggest whoppers?

National Review, Nov 8, 2004 by Ramesh Ponnuru

MARK HALPERIN, the political director of ABC News, became the center of a minor tempest when an internal memo of his leaked to the Drudge Report. The memo, dated October 8, said that the Bush campaign was telling more, and bigger, lies than the Kerry campaign:

   The New York Times (Nagourney/Stevenson) and Howard Fineman
   on the web both make the same point today: the current Bush attacks
   on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a
   way that goes beyond what Kerry has done. Kerry distorts, takes out
   of context, and [makes] mistakes all the time, but these are not
   central to his efforts to win. We have a responsibility to hold both
   sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn't mean we
   reflexively and artificially hold both sides "equally" accountable
   when the facts don't warrant that.

In Halperin's memo, both sides, equally, found their prejudices confirmed. Left-wingers saw in it further proof that President Bush is a shameless liar: The fair-minded, objective observers at ABC said so. Conservatives grimly noted the liberal bias of the media. But if what Halperin said was true, his memo would not be proof of bias. Surely there are sometimes elections that pit dishonest Republicans against relatively upstanding Democrats. In such cases, Halperin would be quite right: The press should not pretend that both campaigns are playing politics the same way. So the question is, Is Bush in fact being more deceptive than Kerry?

Halperin spoke for most of the press corps in saying yes. That is especially true of the most influential political reporters, such as the ones he mentioned: Adam Nagourney and Richard Stevenson of the New York Times and Howard Fineman of Newsweek. Bush faces a media environment similar to the one his father faced in 1992. That year, journalists felt that they had to make up for letting the president get away in the previous election with a demagogic campaign about issues they deemed to be fake (such as Michael Dukakis's record on the Pledge of Allegiance and prison furloughs). This year, they feel they were too hard on Al Gore for what they now regard as minor distortions, and let Bush get away with misleading promises about his budget and other matters. Many journalists seem also to think that they should scrutinize Bush especially closely because of the Swift-boat ads, which they regard as a dirty trick. (This impulse may have been what led to CBS's disgrace.)

The Halperin memo presented no evidence of Bush's lies other than what appeared in the Newsweek and New York Times stories. Newsweek's Fineman suggests that Bush's past claims about Iraqi WMD and links to terrorism have now been discredited, leaving him with "only one argument and justification for having launched a war that has cost 1,000 lives, $150 billion and whatever goodwill America had won in the aftermath of 9/11. His last-resort reason: Saddam Hussein might have developed weapons that he might have given to terrorists that might attack the United States. And even that reasoning is undermined by the new report of the Iraq Survey Group, which says that Saddam's capacities, whatever they might have been, were withering, not 'gathering,' under the weight of inspections."

Whatever else Fineman is doing here, it isn't straight reporting. That Iraq was a sponsor of terrorism is not seriously denied; only the magnitude of its involvement is disputed. It is not the case that Bush has only one argument left for the Iraq war: He also regularly argues that the war was necessary to give liberty a foothold in the Middle East, which in turn was necessary to promote American interests there. And Fineman's analysis of the Iraq Survey Group report does not consider the possibility that without the Iraq war, the sanctions would eventually have disappeared and Saddam would have re-armed. If Bush has lied, Fineman doesn't establish it.

THE BILL AGAINST BUSH

The Timesmen make several additional charges. Let's deal with them one by one. First, they say that Bush wrongly accuses Kerry of giving other countries a veto over our defense, when Kerry has explicitly denied that he would do this. Many other commentators have tagged Bush for this. But why should Bush take Kerry's denial at face value? Kerry's rhetoric on multilateralism makes no sense unless he is willing to let foreign opposition keep him from taking actions he would otherwise take. Presumably there are circumstances in which Bush, too, would let foreign opposition stay his hand; but presumably Bush thinks that Kerry would defer too much, so much that his policy could be described as giving other countries a veto over our defense. That's a legitimate argument for the president to make--every bit as legitimate as Kerry's saying that Bush doesn't care about world opinion even when he says he does.

Second, they say that Bush wrongly characterizes Kerry's health-care plan as a government takeover. The plan, they claim, "would not create any big new federal bureaucracy." Bush's critics have half a point here; the president has overstated the case against Kerry's plan. Kerry does not propose the kind of government-run health care that Canada and Great Britain have. His plan would, however, substantially expand the federal role in health care. Kerry's plan would give health coverage to millions of people; the vast majority of them, as Bush noted in the third presidential debate, would get it through Medicaid, a federal program. Would that mean that Kerry puts "big government in charge," and "not you" or "your doctor," as a Bush ad claimed? Yes, potentially, even probably. People commonly say that HMOs are interfering with medical decisions when they decide what to pay for. Under Kerry's plan the federal government would have to make such decisions, too. Over time, Kerry's plan could well lead to a Canadian-style system. But we'll be strict and count this against Bush.