US Elections

In actuality, however, Politifact seems to have been trying to do exactly what the New York Times's Public Editor was asking whether journalists should do: police truth. The problem is twofold: yes, Politifact is doing an increasingly poor job of policing truth, but truth is never the cut-and-dried thing we imagine it to be. Fact-checking websites try to claim credibility by setting themselves up as impartial observers, but in politics, there are so many shades of grey that even a disinterested fact checker should be assumed to be just one more voice in the fray — potentially a highly credible voice, but certainly no kind of godlike figure.

This is a point Kevin Drum recently made:  

There are, among lefties, a smallish number of issues where we believe that conservatives routinely peddle flagrant factual falsehoods that ought to be refuted immediately. Climate change is the obvious one, and there are a few others. But the truth is that misstatements of plain facts are fairly rare. That's just not how most political debate works. I think that federal stimulus would be good for the economy. Republicans claim otherwise. Is this a fact? No: it's an argument. That kind of thing makes up about 99 percent of all political discourse. It's just not fact-checkable in the usual sense.

See also Communication Studies professor Matthew McGlone telling the New York Times that politicians get away with lying because truth is difficult to define:

Despite centuries of scholarly inquiry into the enigmatic nature of “truth,” in most cultures a simplistic notion of a dichotomy persists: statements are either true or not, and speakers who knowingly produce the former are being honest and those who knowingly produce the latter are lying. There are situations in which this formulation works, but countless more in which we pretend the line is clear — even when we know otherwise.

In particular, we know that many political messages are passed off as truths, although a little inspection reveals the statements have only some degree of truth. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead observed that “all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.”

This is the unsolvable problem of political media: we long for someone to hold disingenuous politicians to account, but cannot accept that doing so requires a definition of truth that doesn't exist. Of course, the alternative, in which partisans flee to figures who repeat their preferred definition of truth as if it were gospel is not particularly desirable either. 

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What they actually said, however, was this:

First of all, ads are propaganda by definition. We are in the persuasion business, the propaganda business…. Ads are agitprop…. Ads are about hyperbole, they are about editing. It’s ludicrous for them to say that an ad is taking something out of context…. All ads do that. They are manipulative pieces of persuasive art.

Of course the Romney team lied in its commercial, this Romney insider is saying. It's a political commercial!

Voters, of course, shouldn't accept this, and Mitt Romney should be above it. Political commercials are often designed to deceive, and in doing so, they help erode public trust in government. Telling the public they should expect to be lied to, however, erodes trust even further. A candidate who wants to lead the nation should not be telling the public they shouldn't trust the people who wish to represent them.

But, at the same time, voters do find this kind of candour refreshing. John McCain, for instance, built much of his initial popularity on his willingness to cut through the pretence of how political campaigns oeprate. When a candidate acknowledging how shady politics can be, voters feel as if they're being treated like responsible adults — that the candidate respects them enough not to think the public doesn't know it's being manipulated.

In fact, the current president is something of a master at this kind of thing. Here's Ryan Lizza, profiling Obama in the New Yorker in June 2008:  

[E.J.] Dionne wrote about a young Barack Obama, who artfully explained how the new pinstripe patronage worked: a politician rewards the law firms, developers, and brokerage houses with contracts, and in return they pay for the new ad campaigns necessary for reëlection. “They do well, and you get a $5 million to $10 million war chest,” Obama told Dionne. It was a classic Obamaism: superficially critical of some unseemly aspect of the political process without necessarily forswearing the practice itself. Obama was learning that one of the greatest skills a politician can possess is candor about the dirty work it takes to get and stay elected.

Obviously, it would be best if politicians would just foreswear unseemly practices entirely. But Romney's campaign couldn't even practice its sleight of hand correctly; rather than merely describing a sketchy tactic that campaigns generally use, and earning points for honesty in the process, they brazenly dared voters to be disgusted by their deceptions. All in the game? Sure, but here's another Omar-ism: "A man got to have a code." 

And if he can't have that, he should at least be smart about his fibs.

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