Spinmeisters give truth short shrift in US campaign

TRUTH IS one of the first casualties of a US presidential campaign. “The stakes are too high. Both political parties will twist the facts or spin them if they think it will give them political advantage,” says Glenn Kessler, the author of the Washington Post’s Fact Checker column.

In his Wednesday briefing, White House press secretary and spinmeister Jay Carney referred to an article on the Market Watch website. “Of all the falsehoods told about President Obama, the biggest whopper is the one about his reckless spending spree,” Carney quoted reporter Rex Nutting.

Nutting wrote that while almost everyone believed that Obama had presided over a massive increase in federal spending, it didn’t happen. “This president has demonstrated significant fiscal restraint and acted with great fiscal responsibility,” Carney added.

Carney, a former journalist, lectured White House correspondents “to check it out; do not buy into the BS that you hear about spending and fiscal constraint . . . I think doing so is a sign of sloth and laziness.”

A new anti-Obama advertisement broadcast the same day began with an actress saying that “Obama started spending like our credit cards have no limit”. In his fact check of the ad, Kessler found that “the increase in debt is mostly the result of a sharp decline in revenue at the start of the recession, before Obama took office ... but also the automatic economic stabilisers (such as unemployment insurance) created by the recession.”

Kessler gave the Republican ad two Pinocchios, out of a possible four.

The Republican candidate Mitt Romney portrays Obama as a big spender in every speech. In Iowa last week, he spoke of Obama’s “debt and spending inferno” and warned that “a prairie fire of debt is sweeping across the nation ... Rather than putting out that spending fire, [Obama] has been feeding it”. It is a measure of the Republicans’ success that many Democrats believe the Obama-as-spendthrift myth.

Other Republican canards include allegations that the $787 billion Recovery Act created no jobs, that Obama raised taxes (he has in fact lowered them) and that, in Romney’s words, Obama “has adopted an appeasement strategy” and “apologises for America”.

Kessler examined Romney’s dual assertion that he created over 100,000 jobs at Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded, while 100,000 jobs were lost in the auto industry under Obama.

The job creation claim was “untenable and unproven,” Kessler wrote. And he found that “jobs overall have grown substantially in the auto industry under Obama”. Romney received four Pinocchios.

But the Obama campaign also took a blow this week, when Kessler gave one Pinocchio to its advertisement about Bain’s takeover of a notebook plant in Indiana, where workers were fired and told they could reapply for jobs with lower wages and poorer healthcare benefits.

“What I found frustrating about the Obama Bain ads is that yes, the facts they present are correct,” Kessler says. “But the overall picture of Romney as a Robin Hood taking from the poor and giving to the rich . . . Yes, this particular company was handled badly. But you can look at Staples or Domino’s Pizza (companies bought by Bain), where people have jobs they wouldn’t have had.”

Michael Dobbs, a long-time Washington Post correspondent, started the Fact Checker in 2007, the same year the Tampa Bay Times launched its PolitiFact website. At least nine other US newspapers have followed suit.

In The Rise of Political Fact Checking, a report published by the New America Foundation in February, Dobbs dates the start of the fact-checking movement to Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when Reagan claimed trees caused four times more pollution than automobiles. The movement has snowballed – “a shift of power back to the media following a low point during the run-up to the war in Iraq when . . . leading newspapers failed to seriously challenge the White House line on ‘weapons of mass destruction’,” said Dobbs.

“Judging from the emails and calls I get, there’s a real hunger for this kind of information,” Kessler says. “The White House gets very upset whenever I hand them Pinocchios. They play the same game the Republicans do. It’s a little like the pot calling the kettle black.”

Republicans seem to expect to be caught out, Kessler adds.