BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
Did you know that 11 states now have more people on welfare than they have employed?
Really? Yeah, swear to God. It was on the Internet.
Well, that piece of gossip is just not true. It was concocted from statistics contained in a magazine article.
I know that because I read FactCheck.org. In fact, when I get stuff like that forwarded to me, I send it to my good friend Brooks Jackson to find out what is true, half-true, or untrue. He would always send me a link to an article on the FactCheck.org site which had, what else? The facts.
Brooks recently retired from FactCheck.org, the project he founded with the Annenberg Public Policy Center to help people separate fact from fiction in the demolition derby of factual integrity, the American political system, and of late, the Internet.
Fact checking was the heart and the soul of journalism when I worked for a small town paper in Galesburg, Illinois. It was something you did. The editor who taught me the craft couldn’t stand a faulty fact or a split infinitive. If either showed up in our writing, someone would get taken to the woodshed and probably be too embarrassed to go down the alley for a beer with the rest of the newsroom after the presses rolled. I know.
Fact checking was the core of the reactor, the piston of the engine, the entree of the meal you served up to your readers. Facts were everything. That was mostly because news didn’t contain commentary or conjecture or bias like it does today, so facts were easier to surmise, easier to get right. Reporting was more math than poetry; it was more Jack Webb than Will McAvoy.
Today, too many play fast and loose with the facts. The Internet is a cesspool of misinformation and campaign ads are just plain despicable in their distortions, innuendo, exaggerations, and outright lies.
Into that void of veracity stepped Jackson and Annenberg. It was Jackson who offered the consumers of news and infotainment an oasis where they could drink from the cool water of truth in advertising. Today FactCheck is duplicated by media outlets all over the country, including the Washington Post.
Last April 19th, the Annenberg Public Policy Center and the Annenberg at the University of Southern California hosted a lunch at which the first Brooks Jackson awards were presented to four news organization — KUSA in Denver, CNN, KARE in Minneapolis, and WBNS in Columbus — and two individual journalists, Marshall Zelinger in Denver and Tom McKee in Cincinnati — for their work in keeping the facts straight.
The awards are a simple reminder that when you keep citizens armed with reliable information, the information eventually evolves into knowledge and knowledge translates into self-government that works so much better than some of its alternatives.
What are now the Walter Cronkite/Brooks Jackson awards are a fitting tribute to someone who has put fact checking back on the road to good journalism and an informed electorate. It’s nice to have some place to go where you are closer to truth than falsehood.
But the awards luncheon also had a subliminal message. The dais and much of the audience were dominated by journalists feting journalists, praising themselves and their profession with the platitudes and self-indulgence that is so often the hallmark of such gatherings.
The luncheon shortchanged one of the reasons there is such a desperate need for fact checking in the first place. Why is there a marketplace for what Brooks Jackson created? Why has his project been duplicated all over the country?
The first reason is the erosion of honesty, credibility, integrity, and civility in our public discourse, whether it is a political campaign or a town meeting. We have let go these basic, fundamental values that have, particularly in times of trouble, held our society together and kept the fabric of our political process strong. Now, we allow ourselves to believe whatever we choose to believe and listen only to those who say what we want to hear. We allow our facts to become so fluid and so flexible, they can mean whatever we want them to mean or prove whatever we want proved. The discipline of truth has dissolved.
But the second reason is the one the media ignores. There is a necessity for separate fact checking because too many media don’t think facts are critical to good reporting anymore. Verified facts seem no longer essential to the delivery of news and information. I will never forget what Arianna Huffington once told media critic Howard Kurtz (who is also sloppy with the facts). She said the Huffington Post didn’t worry so much about the facts because the information would “self-correct” as the story unfolded. According to Huffington, what was critical was getting the story out first, not factual.
The examples of factual flip-flopping are too familiar to us all, from the character assassination of Richard Jewell after the bombing of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games to the recent blunder by CNN’s John King who claimed a dark-skinned man had been arrested in the Boston Marathon bomb attack.
These are high-profile examples but even the most basic “who, why, what, when, and where” in the gathering of news no longer seem to be a priority.
For example, I read with disbelief a story in the Washington Post on March 1st about lobbying. Most reporters get their facts wrong on this profession anyway, but what stood out was the basic stuff. T.R. Goldman, identified as a freelance writer, wrote in the Style section that “the OB-C Group’s Larry Harlow reports that among other cost-cutting measures, we trimmed the health plan a little bit…”
I work for the OB-C Group and was very surprised that Larry Harlow was cutting our health care plan. Larry Harlow is a prominent Republican lobbyist but he’s never worked at the OB-C Group. The principal of OB-C is Larry O’Brien, a prominent Democrat lobbyist. Anyone who knows the least bit about lobbying in Washington knows the difference between these two well-known professionals. There were other things wrong with the story, none of them excusable. That’s why Brooks Jackson has to keep doing what he does.
Politics need fact-checkers, but so do media. If we are returning to a brand of journalism where we can’t tell the difference between a news story and a commentary; where reporters are free to exercise their personal and professional biases; where there is less distinction between news and advertising; where you can’t tell the difference between a journalist and an entertainer, then we need a FactCheck.org for the media, too, maybe more so.
Brooks, come out of retirement.
Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.