NEW YORK—It’s probably a truism that every candidate, in every campaign, will eventually stretch the truth. But when a lie becomes too big, or too brazen, the news media temporarily moves beyond strict reporting and decides to call a foul. At least that’s what happened over the past week in the American presidential race, when John McCain’s claim that Barack Obama supported sex education for kindergartners pushed mainstream news organizations to proclaim flatly that McCain was in the wrong.
The media’s open rebuke of McCain’s sex-ed claim, as well as other mistruths (including Sarah Palin’s claim to have rejected federal funding for Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere”), have reignited the debate over when, whether, and how often the media should call a lie for what it is. Clark Hoyt, the New York Times‘ public editor, argues in today’s paper that election coverage shouldn’t fall into the trap of false equivalency, the he-said/she-said reporting that abdicates any burden of judgment or assessment.
How this debate unfolds, and whether American journalists become more willing to pass judgment on the veracity of campaign attacks, is not an academic question, but one on which the outcome of November’s election could pivot. But what about October’s election? On Friday, the Globe‘s Steven Chase reported that Stephen Harper’s warnings against the Liberals’ Green Shift proposal are not based on any research, and not supported by experts in the field.
You could be forgiven for thinking this is a serious accusation. After all, Harper has made his attacks on the Green Shift central to his argument against Stéphane Dion. If those attacks are baseless—if experts tell us that Dion’s plan will not harm the economy, contradicting Harper’s claim—then surely it undermines the Conservatives’ broader argument to be better stewards of the economy (an argument that was already fatuous to anyone who can read a line graph).
Will Chase’s article impact future Globe coverage of Harper’s campaign, which will almost certainly continue to make the same baseless claims against the Green Shift? Should it? Harper’s statement that the Liberals would “wreak havoc on the economy” isn’t technically a lie, but only thanks to the grammatical disqualification of being phrased in the future tense. It is a misleading statement, a false cue, a present dishonesty projected forward.
I won’t argue that the Globe and others ought to insert, henceforth, a disclaimer in all future articles covering Harper’s campaign, following his claims about the Green Shift with something like this statement: “The Prime Minister’s claims are disputed by economists, and he has not provided any evidence to support those claims.” But should the onus now be on the paper to reconsider how it covers the Conservative campaign, a central tenet of which it has reported to be untrue?
Or should we just pretend that Canadian voters will remember Chase’s little aside—a whisper in the hurricane of the campaign—and proceed with the sort of judgment-free reporting that Hoyt warns against?
There’s no easy answer. But American campaigns demonstrate that once political strategists feel they can stretch the truth without serious cost, they will go on to tell bigger and bolder lies. Canadians should start asking ourselves whether we want to test the fortitude of our own politicians’ better angels.
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