Ad hominem galore (3/29)

By Bryan Keefer

With Congress out of town on their Easter Recess, some pundits have filled the news vacuum with ad hominem attacks on their least favorite commentators and politicians.

Eric Alterman's latest column in The Nation criticizing Andrew Sullivan provides one example. Alterman's piece addresses very little of the substance of Sullivan's views, instead resorting to personal attacks and inflammatory jargon. Alterman condemns Sullivan's attacks on anti-war dissent (as we have on Spinsanity), but suggests that Sullivan "has set himself up as a one-man House Un-American Activities Committee" and claims his comments amount to "the Sullivan Inquisition". Noting the conservative commentator's distortion of and insinuations about the position of several prominent Democrats, Alterman claims "Can there be a better illustration of the modus operandi of the ideological commissar--the McCarthyite mullah--than this kind of mindreading?"

Sullivan, for his part, has ignored the substance of Alterman's charges (such as they are) in favor of his own set of ad hominem responses. Sullivan claimed that "I'd correct the many factual errors, sly smears, half-truths and innuendo in his hatchet-job. But that would assume that reasonable readers believe Alterman could write an honest piece in the first place."

In the same vein, National Review's Mark Levin attacks Washington Post columnist Michael Kinsley for his piece on an open letter by Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, published in the Wall Street Journal:

But at the root of Kinsley's rant is his contempt for Justice Thomas. The Thomas-haters simply cannot abide a black Supreme Court justice who does not conform to their racial stereotype but instead adheres to what Kinsley ignorantly dismisses as "a few magic words such as 'judicial restraint' and 'strict constructionism.'"

And Kinsley and his ilk damn a lady with Mrs. Thomas's class, who proudly stands with her husband, while they praise the likes of Hillary Clinton, who exploited her husband's position to fulfill her own ambitions.

None of this refutes the substance of Kinsley's comments about the politics of judicial appointments. Instead, Levin imputes a motivation for Kinley's comments. Finally, in a classic example of implying guilt by association, he attaches Hillary Clinton's name to "Kinsley and his ilk" as a way of discrediting the columnist by association.

Finally, in an article on the National Review Online yesterday, Jack Dunphy goes after Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA). Dunphy reports on the controversy over alleged comments by Rick Caruso, president of the Los Angeles Police Commission, who, according an anonymous letter sent to city officials referred to the Representative as "the bitch Waters." After detailing Waters' political beliefs and commenting on her web site, Dunphy claims:

From accounts I've heard, Rick Caruso is a gentleman of the first order, a man highly regarded by peers and subordinates alike. But, for the sake of argument, let's say that in a fit of pique he was a bit unguarded in his reference to Ms. Waters. The OED offers one definition of "bitch" as a "malicious or treacherous woman." In any action for slander, the truth is an absolute defense. Let the reader decide.

Alterman, Levin and Dunphy all illustrate an all-too-common tactic: attacking the messenger rather than the message. Such vitriol adds nothing of substance to public debate.

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3/28/2002 08:37:34 PM EST |

McCaslin reign of error continues (3/28)

By Brendan Nyhan

Immediately after John McCaslin revived the myth that Ken Lay was an overnight guest in the Clinton White House in the Washington Times, it was repeated by syndicated radio host Paul Harvey. Now the McCaslin claim has been repeated in yet another newspaper - in this case, in a March 19 letter to the editor to the Sun-Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Two days later, the Sun-Sentinel joined the ranks of the many publications forced to issue a correction of this recurring myth.

Also, Robert Wallace repeated the myth (in its original form, not the McCaslin claim that Lay stayed over eleven times) in a March 22 article in the Eastside Journal, a small Seattle newspaper. On March 27, the Journal issued its own correction.

As my co-editor Ben Fritz wrote earlier this week, trying to kill a political myth is almost impossible. It just keeps popping back up. One wonders when the Ken Lay myth will die (if ever).

Note - 4/3/02 10:32 AM: A reader points out that the Eastside Journal circulates in the Seattle suburbs east of Lake Washington, not in Seattle proper.

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3/28/2002 08:32:37 PM EST |

Stupid white lies (3/25)

Why does Michael Moore keep saying the Bush administration gave $43 million to the Taliban -- months after that story was debunked?
By Ben Fritz

Trying to kill a political myth once it's been spread by the media is like a game of whack-a-mole -- as soon as you bust one source for getting it wrong, another pops up with the same misinformation.

So it is with the myth that the Bush administration gave $43 million to Afghanistan's Taliban government last year to reward it for banning opium production. That money actually paid for food aid and security programs run by nongovernmental organizations and agencies of the United Nations to help relieve a famine in Afghanistan. While the Taliban reportedly stole some of the aid, none of it was given directly to the oppressive regime. At the time, Secretary of State Colin Powell hinted that the aid was connected to recent moves by the Taliban to crack down on opium production, but made clear no money would be going to the government.

Working off a poorly phrased New York Times story, however, Robert Scheer repeatedly spread this falsehood in his syndicated column. It was later repeated in numerous other publications, including the Nation, the New Yorker and Salon (which later corrected its mistake).

By November, after articles in Spinsanity and the Boston Phoenix debunked the myth, this lie seemed ready to die. Yet it's back in the news again, most recently thanks to author and filmmaker Michael Moore. Moore repeated it in a recent appearance on "Politically Incorrect" to promote his new book, "Stupid White Men." Moore is a repeat offender in the spread of this myth, having repeated it in other media appearances, including on Fox News Channel's "Hannity and Colmes" in January.

It's not hard to imagine where Moore may have picked it up, however, as it has been found in several newspapers in the past few months. USA Today said in an infographic in January that "The United States gave the Taliban $43 million in aid last May as a reward for banning poppy cultivation in Afghanistan." Other publications printing it this winter include the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, the Tampa Tribune and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which ironically cited it in a column criticizing the press for not asking difficult questions of political leaders.

Perhaps the real tough question is why, in cases such as this and the myth that Ken Lay slept over in the Clinton White House, the political media and commentators keep spreading discredited lies. Some stories, it seems, are too good not to be true, even after they've been proven false.

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3/26/2002 02:07:01 AM EST |

Dueling media bias assertions (3/25)

by Bryan Keefer

The recent furor over Bias by former CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg, which argues that the media are politically biased against conservatives, has highlighted how much of the debate over media bias lacks the support of empirical evidence.

A case in point is a recent exchange between The New Republic's Jonathan Chait and Media Research Center president and syndicated columnist Brent Bozell. Chait's article argues that while there may be some truth to claims about liberal political bias in the media, many of them rest on ideological appeals rather than on hard evidence, and that "making judgments about media bias requires an Olympian detachment from one's own perspective." He goes on to argue that one type of media bias detached from ideology is the tendency of the media to stick to stereotypical storylines; this, he suggests, "is the reason we invariably see more stories about poverty and environmental despoliation during Republican administrations, and more stories about government bloat and military unpreparedness during Democratic ones."

Bozell responded with a syndicated column attacking Chait's conclusions. In the middle of the piece, he makes a point about empirical evidence:

Chait thinks conservative media criticism is weak because the job of criticism requires "Olympian detachment." But what it requires is evidence, patiently recorded instead of imagined. If Chait had done that, he wouldn't have written the empirically false statement that "we invariably see more stories about poverty and environmental despoliation during Republican administrations, and more stories about government bloat and military during Democratic ones." I challenge Chait to produce all the "military unpreparedness stories" the networks reported in the Clinton years. He might locate one, somewhere. There wasn't much talk of government bloat, either, just salesmanship for "reinventing government" initiatives.

The problem here is that both writers are making empirical, verifiable claims without bothering to check their facts. Chait's assertion that there are more stories about specific topics depending on which party controls the White House is completely unsupported. Yet Bozell's claim that there were no stories on military preparedness during the Clinton years is just as flimsy - and easily disproven. A cursory search through the Nexis database reveals several stories on the major networks about military preparedness between 1992 and 1999, and many more on the issue during the 2000 presidential campaign. Bozell's own Media Research Center even reported on network coverage of military preparedness issues during the campaign.

All of this is not to suggest that the media is or is not biased in the way it reports and discusses current events. While both Bozell and Chait may be correct in their assertions about the media, the problem is that their arguments are just that: assertions. Claims of media bias need to be backed up by empirical evidence, rather than unsubstantiated assertions, if they are to be contributions to the public debate instead of partisan spin.

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Related links:
-Spinning Chandra: Making the Condit Affair Partisan (Bryan Keefer, 7/23/01)
-MRC's network bias claim [sidebar to "Spinning Chandra: Making the Condit Affair Partisan"] (Bryan Keefer, 7/23/01)

3/25/2002 11:10:22 AM EST |

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