Editorialising and the News: Fact, Opinion, and Untruth

[ubertuber]

Link: NY Times Article

Originally Posted by NY Times

May 30, 2007
Economix
Truth, Fiction and Lou Dobbs
By DAVID LEONHARDT

The whole controversy involving Lou Dobbs and leprosy started with a “60 Minutes” segment a few weeks ago.

The segment was a profile of Mr. Dobbs, and while doing background research for it, a “60 Minutes” producer came across a 2005 news report from Mr. Dobbs’s CNN program on contagious diseases. In the report, one of Mr. Dobbs’s correspondents said there had been 7,000 cases of leprosy in this country over the previous three years, far more than in the past.

When Lesley Stahl of “60 Minutes” sat down to interview Mr. Dobbs on camera, she mentioned the report and told him that there didn’t seem to be much evidence for it.

“Well, I can tell you this,” he replied. “If we reported it, it’s a fact.”

With that Orwellian chestnut, Mr. Dobbs escalated the leprosy dispute into a full-scale media brouhaha. The next night, back on his own program, the same CNN correspondent who had done the earlier report, Christine Romans, repeated the 7,000 number, and Mr. Dobbs added that, if anything, it was probably an underestimate. A week later, the Southern Poverty Law Center — the civil rights group that has long been critical of Mr. Dobbs — took out advertisements in The New York Times and USA Today demanding that CNN run a correction.

Finally, Mr. Dobbs played host to two top officials from the law center on his program, “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” where he called their accusations outrageous and they called him wrong, unfair and “one of the most popular people on the white supremacist Web sites.”

We’ll get to the merits of the charges and countercharges shortly, but first it’s worth considering why, beyond entertainment value, all this matters. Over the last few years, Lou Dobbs has transformed himself into arguably this country’s foremost populist. It’s an odd role, given that he spent the 1980s and ’90s buttering up chief executives on CNN, but he’s now playing it very successfully. He has become a voice for the real economic anxiety felt by many Americans.

The audience for his program has grown 72 percent since 2003, and CBS — yes, the same network that broadcasts “60 Minutes” — just hired him as a commentator on “The Early Show.” Many elites, as Mr. Dobbs likes to call them, despise him, but others see him as a hero. His latest book, “War on the Middle Class,” was a best seller and received a sympathetic review in this newspaper. Mario Cuomo has said Mr. Dobbs is “addicted to economic truth.”

Mr. Dobbs argues that the middle class has many enemies: corporate lobbyists, greedy executives, wimpy journalists, corrupt politicians. But none play a bigger role than illegal immigrants. As he sees it, they are stealing our jobs, depressing our wages and even endangering our lives.

That’s where leprosy comes in.

“The invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans,” Mr. Dobbs said on his April 14, 2005, program. From there, he introduced his original report that mentioned leprosy, the flesh-destroying disease — technically known as Hansen’s disease — that has inspired fear for centuries.

According to a woman CNN identified as a medical lawyer named Dr. Madeleine Cosman, leprosy was on the march. As Ms. Romans, the CNN correspondent, relayed: “There were about 900 cases of leprosy for 40 years. There have been 7,000 in the past three years.”

“Incredible,” Mr. Dobbs replied.

Mr. Dobbs and Ms. Romans engaged in a nearly identical conversation a few weeks ago, when he was defending himself the night after the “60 Minutes” segment. “Suddenly, in the past three years, America has more than 7,000 cases of leprosy,” she said, again attributing the number to Ms. Cosman.

To sort through all this, I called James L. Krahenbuhl, the director of the National Hansen’s Disease Program, an arm of the federal government. Leprosy in the United States is indeed largely a disease of immigrants who have come from Asia and Latin America. And the official leprosy statistics do show about 7,000 diagnosed cases — but that’s over the last 30 years, not the last three.

The peak year was 1983, when there were 456 cases. After that, reported cases dropped steadily, falling to just 76 in 2000. Last year, there were 137.

“It is not a public health problem — that’s the bottom line,” Mr. Krahenbuhl told me. “You’ve got a country of 300 million people. This is not something for the public to get alarmed about.” Much about the disease remains unknown, but researchers think people get it through prolonged close contact with someone who already has it.

What about the increase over the last six years, to 137 cases from 76? Is that significant?

“No,” Mr. Krahenbuhl said. It could be a statistical fluctuation, or it could be a result of better data collection in recent years. In any event, the 137 reported cases last year were fewer than in any year from 1975 to 1996.

So Mr. Dobbs was flat-out wrong. And when I spoke to him yesterday, he admitted as much, sort of. I read him Ms. Romans’s comment — the one with the word “suddenly” in it — and he replied, “I think that is wrong.” He then went on to say that as far as he was concerned, he had corrected the mistake by later broadcasting another report, on the same night as his on-air confrontation with the Southern Poverty Law Center officials. This report mentioned that leprosy had peaked in 1983.

Of course, he has never acknowledged on the air that his program presented false information twice. Instead, he lambasted the officials from the law center for saying he had. Even yesterday, he spent much of our conversation emphasizing that there really were 7,000 cases in the leprosy registry, the government’s 30-year database. Mr. Dobbs is trying to have it both ways.

I have been somewhat taken aback about how shameless he has been during the whole dispute, so I spent some time reading transcripts from old episodes of “Lou Dobbs Tonight.” The way he handled leprosy, it turns out, is not all that unusual.

For one thing, Mr. Dobbs has a somewhat flexible relationship with reality. He has said, for example, that one-third of the inmates in the federal prison system are illegal immigrants. That’s wrong, too. According to the Justice Department, 6 percent of prisoners in this country are noncitizens (compared with 7 percent of the population). For a variety of reasons, the crime rate is actually lower among immigrants than natives.

Second, Mr. Dobbs really does give airtime to white supremacy sympathizers. Ms. Cosman, who is now deceased, was a lawyer and Renaissance studies scholar, never a medical doctor or a leprosy expert. She gave speeches in which she said that Mexican immigrants had a habit of molesting children. Back in their home villages, she would explain, rape was not as serious a crime as cow stealing. The Southern Poverty Law Center keeps a list of other such guests from “Lou Dobbs Tonight.”

Finally, Mr. Dobbs is fond of darkly hinting that this country is under attack. He suggested last week that the new immigration bill in Congress could be the first step toward a new nation — a “North American union” — that combines the United States, Canada and Mexico. On other occasions, his program has described a supposed Mexican plot to reclaim the Southwest. In one such report, one of his correspondents referred to a Utah visit by Vicente Fox, then Mexico’s president, as a “Mexican military incursion.”

When I asked Mr. Dobbs about this yesterday, he said, “You’ve raised this to a level that frankly I find offensive.”

The most common complaint about him, at least from other journalists, is that his program combines factual reporting with editorializing. But I think this misses the point. Americans, as a rule, are smart enough to handle a program that mixes opinion and facts. The problem with Mr. Dobbs is that he mixes opinion and untruths. He is the heir to the nativist tradition that has long used fiction and conspiracy theories as a weapon against the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese, the Jews and, now, the Mexicans.

There is no denying that this country’s immigration system is broken. But it defies belief — and a whole lot of economic research — to suggest that the problems of the middle class stem from illegal immigrants. Those immigrants, remember, are largely non-English speakers without a high school diploma. They have probably hurt the wages of native-born high school dropouts and made everyone else better off.

More to the point, if Mr. Dobbs’s arguments were really so good, don’t you think he would be able to stick to the facts? And if CNN were serious about being “the most trusted name in news,” as it claims to be, don’t you think it would be big enough to issue an actual correction?

E-mail: Leonhardt@nytimes.com

There's probably a whole thread in here about Lou Dobbs alone. However, this article also got me thinking about how we receive our news.

I know I quote the NY Times a lot on this site, and that is mostly because that was my hometown paper for many years. However, in my daily news scanning, I usually make a practice of reading as many different sources for my information as I can. Google News has been wonderful, and I've got my RSS reader set up to capture feeds from several different places, including Al Jazeera. One choice that I consciously make is to read Op-Ed pieces - I like absorbing someone else's views and testing them against other things I've read.

However, I'm increasingly getting the idea that there are many people who consider themselves well-informed but rely solely on these types of articles for their information. This would seem problematic in our current age of Video Editorialists. In this particular article, it looks like it would be a mistake to consider Dobbs to be a real source for factual information at all.

Are there really lines between reporting and editorializing, or is this a distinction that exists mostly in my head? Is there an ethical problem with this type of reporting? Even if there was, would ethical considerations trump economic ones for CNN?

[Rekna]

I'm sure this happens a lot in the media, especially now that they are out to make profit first news later. Sometimes late at night i'll leave the TV on foxnews, this is when they really put a lot of trash on (like redeye). Anyway one of the commercials was for some conservative magazine and their tag line was "We don't just report the news, we shape the news". I thought to myself umm thats not what I want out of a news publication, i want the facts and the writer to check his opinion at the door.

[roachboy]

there are alot of problems raised directly and indirectly via this article...first obviously concerning dobbs himself and his role in routinizing the neofascist discourse on "illegal immigration"--which i almost hesitate to raise given that the responses on this topic never seem to vary---knitting this paranoid fiction into the register of information simply via repetition and the refusal of acknowledge distinctions between types of information (factoids versus dobb's paranoiac glosses on them)...

then there is the wider framework of american mass media within whcih this kind of action is itself routine..with a particular degree of egregiousness amongst what remains of the conservative set, which appears to buy the illusion that they were previously victimized at the hands of journalists who attempted at least to make some separation between information and their view of information (whether this worked or not is another matter, and points to the level at which this issue gets complicated)....

so given that assumption, it follows that the wholesale erasure of any meaningful distinction between factoids and their interpretation followed, such that in conservativeland information becomes an extension of therapy becomes the playground of ideological claims fobbed off as other than ideological claims....which would not be terribly problematic were it not for the other, bigger blurring of information into commodities in general, "news" into entertainment, selection of information streams into comsumer choices in general, such that it somehow became routine that one would choose information the way one chooses a shirt, whatever goes better with your predispositions or with your pants or socks that day being better information....so it follows that "being informed" and "seeing what you want to see" have come to be interchangeable---and this forum is often but a multi-staged demonstration of this sad state of affairs--but then again, so are election results.

you'd think that information would be understood as fundamental to a functioning democracy and that its generation would be understood as a public function and not as a means to the end of profit on the part of entertainment conglomerates--but this pollyanna view applies at no level to the united states, which does not have a functioning democracy and for which there is no meaningful distinction between information and entertainment. and this not at the level of those who gather information, but at the level of the form that is imposed on information here.

you really have to cut in and out of american infotainment streams to get any idea of what is going on. it is only on that basis that you can acquire a number of interpretive frameworks and a range of information such that you can, critically, work out something of what is happening in the world. if you restrict yourself to american sources--PARTICULARLY american television infotainment--in terms of information, you are simply fucked.

you'd think this would be a source of concern.