News Junkie Obama Rejects “false balance” of Media Coverage

Falsely balancedHere’s
an
interesting New York Times article
about President
Barack Obama’s voracious media diet, his stubborn (and
I think inaccurate
) belief that his political troubles are
significantly attributable to his failure “to tell a story to
the American people,” and his familiar left-of-center critique that
straight journalism’s tradition of giving credence to both sides of
a story gives an asymmetrical advantage to the lying liars of
the right. Here’s an excerpt on the latter point:

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.

Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, was previously Time
magazine’s Washington bureau chief. He said the president thought
that some journalists were more comfortable blaming both
parties, regardless of the facts. “To be saying ‘they’re both
equally wrong’ or ‘they’re both equally bad,'” Mr. Carney said,
“then you look high-minded.”

The term “false balance,” which has been embraced by many
Democrats, emerged in academic papers in the 1990s to describe
global-warming coverage.

“I believe this type of ‘accuracy’ and ‘balance’ are a huge
thing afflicting contemporary media,” said Josh Marshall, editor
and publisher of the left-leaning Web site Talking Points Memo.

It is interesting, and complicated, to ponder the manipulatable
limitations of journalistic “fairness,” and to even begin trying to
determine which broad camp of American humans is more likely to
tell, spread, and believe in lies about policy, politics, and
science. But I think it’s also important, and even telling, to
point out something that the Press Critic in Chief and his fellow
anti-false-balancers typically do not: The president is BSing, us
too. Particularly on the very topics he name-checks above:
Obamacare and the stimulus.

Do you remember when the president warned Obamacare critics that
“If you misrepresent what’s in the plan, we will call you out”?
While the anti-false balancers thundered their applause, the
president went on to tell tall tales of his own. Here’s
how I described it at the time
:

“There may be those—particularly the young and healthy—who still
want to take the risk and go without coverage,” he warned, in a
passage defending compulsory insurance. “The problem is, such
irresponsible behavior costs all the rest of us money. If there are
affordable options and people still don’t sign up for health
insurance, it means we pay for those people’s expensive emergency
room visits.” No, it means that, on balance, the
healthy young don’t pay for the unhealthy old. The whole point of
forcing vigorous youth to buy insurance is using their cash and
good actuarials to bring down the costs of covering the less
fortunate. […]

“Add it all up, and the plan I’m proposing will cost around $900
billion over ten years,” he said, trying hard to sound like those
numbers weren’t pulled out of Joe Biden’s pants, and won’t be
dwarfed by actual
costs
 within a year or two. “We’ve estimated that most of
this plan can be paid for by finding savings within the existing
health care system–a system that is currently full of waste and
abuse,” he said, making him at least the eighth consecutive
president to vaguely promise cutting Medicare “waste” (a promise,
it should be added, that could theoretically be
fulfilled without drastically overhauling the
health care system). […]

And in a critical, tic-riddled passage that many of even his
most ardent supporters probably don’t believe, Obama said: “Here’s
what you need to know. First, I will not sign a plan that adds one
dime to our deficits–either now or in the future. Period.” In case
you couldn’t quite read his lips, the president repeated the line
for emphasis. Then: “And to prove that I’m serious, there will be a
provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more
spending cuts if the savings we promised don’t
materialize.” 

If that “one dime” formulation sounds familiar, that’s because
Obama made—then almost immediately broke—the same
promise regarding taxes on Americans earning less than $250,000 a
year. Surely the no-new-deficits pledge is headed for the campaign
dustbin faster even then that “net spending cut
we’ll never see.

I wrote about journalistic critics’ preference for scrutizining
the health care remarks of Sarah Palin over at
CNN Opinion
 last year.