Word of the Day: Mendacity

IT's sort of the current substitute for factual reporting. I lose hope that the press will actually be worth anything ever again, now that the most influential parts of it have joined corporate America. A couple of examples:

I meant to comment yesterday on this OpEd in the NYT by Melinda Henneberger. The basic dishonesty of this piece is revealed (unintentionally, I'm sure) here:

Over 18 months, I traveled to 20 states listening to women of all ages, races, tax brackets and points of view speak at length on the issues they care about heading into ’08. They convinced me that the conventional wisdom was wrong about the last presidential contest, that Democrats did not lose support among women because “security moms” saw President Bush as the better protector against terrorism. What first-time defectors mentioned most often was abortion.

"First time defectors" from the Democrats. Do you suppose she talked -- mmm, "listened to" -- any first-time defectors from the Republicans? What do you suppose they might have said?

So where's the mendacity? Simple: What's Henneberger's agenda? You won't find any hint in the OpEd. Check out this very good comment on it from Tom Hilton at If I Ran The Zoo, who traces a bit of Henneberger's history, coming up with the revelation that, sure 'nuff, she's a forced-birth Republican. Digby, of course, nails it.

Henenberger is anti-choice. Fine. She went out and found some anti-choice people just like her and extrapolated from their conversation that abortion was killing the Democratic party, just as she personally thinks it is. But she never says that. Instead, she pretends that she has conducted some objective reporting which led to the inevitable conclusion that the Democratic party is losing because of abortion. That is shoddy journalism, opinion or not.

She should have written a straight up anti-choice op-ed. That's perfectly legitimate. But she is being completely dishonest to say that her opinion has any empirical value. It doesn't.

This is, I think, the lead-in to the under-the-table Republican campaign for next year. Of course, NYT is in the forefront, and I suppose WaPo will be jumping on the bandwagon soon: publish the upcoming mantras as if they had some validity, and then push the "story." The best thing the Democrats can do is to ignore crap like this.

The right wingnuts are still flogging the "liberal bias in the press" horse, which is dead enough that it really is starting to smell. Jamison Foser at Media Matters noted a couple of studies:

Conservative media critics, eager as always to discuss what is in the hearts and minds of journalists rather than what is actually in newspapers and on television, have seized on MSNBC's list of 144 journalists who "made campaign contributions from 2004 through the first quarter of 2007."

Matt Drudge hyped the article with his lead headline: "THE GREAT DIVIDE: REPORTERS GIVE DEMS MONEY OVER REPUBLICANS 9 TO 1!" On Fox & Friends, hosts Steve Doocy and Gretchen Carlson agreed that the study shows a "media bias in the country" and that it also showed there isn't one at Fox News. . . .

For starters, MSNBC found fewer than 150 journalists who have made political contributions. There were more than 116,000 working journalists in America as of 2002. The 144 who made contributions not only constitute a tiny fraction of American journalists, they cannot be considered a representative sample of the whole. Indeed, we know that they are un-representative of all journalists: They made reported campaign contributions, and their colleagues did not.

Furthermore, 144 journalists may be a tiny number, but it is also a grossly inflated one. As Matthew Yglesias noted:

This effort at ginning up controversy by revealing political contributions made by employees of media organizations seems fundamentally misguided. For one thing, no effort is being made to see if the people named have any ability to impact coverage of national politics. They have, for example, a former copy editor here at The Atlantic on their list, but what nefarious influence is she supposed to have had on the magazine's coverage?

Indeed, if you look at MSNBC's list, you won't find Tim Russert or Bob Woodward or Maureen Dowd. You won't see many contributions from reporters for CNN or The New York Times or The Washington Post or ABC News. But you will find sports copy editors for the New Hampshire Union Leader and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, a sports statistician for The Boston Globe, sports columnists for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, and a sports editor for the San Jose Mercury News. Who dares even to imagine the liberal claptrap that must seep into coverage of the Fort Worth Flyers basketball games?

This has become such a sad little ploy. It's really pathetic. Desperate times and all that, I guess. (Read Foser's full post. It's a good one.)