News: Reporters check facts at RNC
The RNC provided the predictable rhetoric and cause for indigestion ( for some of us, at least). In fairness, I didn't give some speakers a full hearing because their speeches were bombastic and clearly not to be taken at face value. For instance, I get that Arnold Schwarzenegger was playing a character, but I wondered whether he is as clueless as he appeared when he 1) praised Richard Nixon; 2) glossed over the fact that the 1968 conventions were not an idyllic moment ; 3) chose to overlook the fact that people of the wrong color and caste can work hard and still not find their dreams in America. (The story Arnold told about fearing Soviet soldiers would pull his father or uncle from a car and beat or imprision them, maybe even kill them, is a real fear in some American neighborhoods today.)
Journalists have let some of these finer points slide in their convention coverage, but as Thomas Lang, of Columbia Journalism Review's Campaign Desk, notes, reporters for the Associated Press, The New York Times, and Washington Post, did a good job of checking the facts that President Bush and others served up in their speeches, and the reporters some facts (and true) AWOL. Lang writes:
After a less-than-inspiring performance by the major news organizations in fact-checking Vice President Cheney's and Sen. Zell Miller's Wednesday night, Campaign Desk woke up this morning to a new world: the Associated Press, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, as if the scales had fallen from their eyes, rose up as one and subjected the speakers at the last night of the Republican National Convention -- including the president -- to a rigorous fact-check. Moving at last beyond he-said/she-said reporting, all three news organizations struck back in their own voice at the mis-statements and subtle distortions of the record that the evening's speakers produced.
Such factchecking should be routine, but the situation brings to mind the old definition about news: When a dog bites man, it's not news; when a man bites dog, it's news. Sadly, political reporters go out of their way to make candidates' accountable so infrequently that reporters who do are a novelty.
8:38:03 PM 
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