Lies, damned lies, and journalists: who's telling the biggest whoppers?

MARK HALPERIN, the political director of ABC News, became the center of a minor tempest when an internal memo of his leaked to the Drudge Report. The memo, dated October 8, said that the Bush campaign was telling more, and bigger, lies than the Kerry campaign:

   The New York Times (Nagourney/Stevenson) and Howard Fineman
   on the web both make the same point today: the current Bush attacks
   on Kerry involve distortions and taking things out of context in a
   way that goes beyond what Kerry has done. Kerry distorts, takes out
   of context, and [makes] mistakes all the time, but these are not
   central to his efforts to win. We have a responsibility to hold both
   sides accountable to the public interest, but that doesn't mean we
   reflexively and artificially hold both sides "equally" accountable
   when the facts don't warrant that.

In Halperin's memo, both sides, equally, found their prejudices confirmed. Left-wingers saw in it further proof that President Bush is a shameless liar: The fair-minded, objective observers at ABC said so. Conservatives grimly noted the liberal bias of the media. But if what Halperin said was true, his memo would not be proof of bias. Surely there are sometimes elections that pit dishonest Republicans against relatively upstanding Democrats. In such cases, Halperin would be quite right: The press should not pretend that both campaigns are playing politics the same way. So the question is, Is Bush in fact being more deceptive than Kerry?

Halperin spoke for most of the press corps in saying yes. That is especially true of the most influential political reporters, such as the ones he mentioned: Adam Nagourney and Richard Stevenson of the New York Times and Howard Fineman of Newsweek. Bush faces a media environment similar to the one his father faced in 1992. That year, journalists felt that they had to make up for letting the president get away in the previous election with a demagogic campaign about issues they deemed to be fake (such as Michael Dukakis's record on the Pledge of Allegiance and prison furloughs). This year, they feel they were too hard on Al Gore for what they now regard as minor distortions, and let Bush get away with misleading promises about his budget and other matters. Many journalists seem also to think that they should scrutinize Bush especially closely because of the Swift-boat ads, which they regard as a dirty trick. (This impulse may have been what led to CBS's disgrace.)

The Halperin memo presented no evidence of Bush's lies other than what appeared in the Newsweek and New York Times stories. Newsweek's Fineman suggests that Bush's past claims about Iraqi WMD and links to terrorism have now been discredited, leaving him with "only one argument and justification for having launched a war that has cost 1,000 lives, $150 billion and whatever goodwill America had won in the aftermath of 9/11. His last-resort reason: Saddam Hussein might have developed weapons that he might have given to terrorists that might attack the United States. And even that reasoning is undermined by the new report of the Iraq Survey Group, which says that Saddam's capacities, whatever they might have been, were withering, not 'gathering,' under the weight of inspections."

Whatever else Fineman is doing here, it isn't straight reporting. That Iraq was a sponsor of terrorism is not seriously denied; only the magnitude of its involvement is disputed. It is not the case that Bush has only one argument left for the Iraq war: He also regularly argues that the war was necessary to give liberty a foothold in the Middle East, which in turn was necessary to promote American interests there. And Fineman's analysis of the Iraq Survey Group report does not consider the possibility that without the Iraq war, the sanctions would eventually have disappeared and Saddam would have re-armed. If Bush has lied, Fineman doesn't establish it.

THE BILL AGAINST BUSH

The Timesmen make several additional charges. Let's deal with them one by one. First, they say that Bush wrongly accuses Kerry of giving other countries a veto over our defense, when Kerry has explicitly denied that he would do this. Many other commentators have tagged Bush for this. But why should Bush take Kerry's denial at face value? Kerry's rhetoric on multilateralism makes no sense unless he is willing to let foreign opposition keep him from taking actions he would otherwise take. Presumably there are circumstances in which Bush, too, would let foreign opposition stay his hand; but presumably Bush thinks that Kerry would defer too much, so much that his policy could be described as giving other countries a veto over our defense. That's a legitimate argument for the president to make--every bit as legitimate as Kerry's saying that Bush doesn't care about world opinion even when he says he does.

Second, they say that Bush wrongly characterizes Kerry's health-care plan as a government takeover. The plan, they claim, "would not create any big new federal bureaucracy." Bush's critics have half a point here; the president has overstated the case against Kerry's plan. Kerry does not propose the kind of government-run health care that Canada and Great Britain have. His plan would, however, substantially expand the federal role in health care. Kerry's plan would give health coverage to millions of people; the vast majority of them, as Bush noted in the third presidential debate, would get it through Medicaid, a federal program. Would that mean that Kerry puts "big government in charge," and "not you" or "your doctor," as a Bush ad claimed? Yes, potentially, even probably. People commonly say that HMOs are interfering with medical decisions when they decide what to pay for. Under Kerry's plan the federal government would have to make such decisions, too. Over time, Kerry's plan could well lead to a Canadian-style system. But we'll be strict and count this against Bush.

Third, the Times says that Bush wrongly accuses Kerry of setting "artificial timetables" for leaving Iraq when Kerry has really said that he would withdraw troops in six months only if the country had been stabilized. In other words, Kerry has raised the expectation that the country might be stabilized within six months of his taking office, and that troops might then be withdrawn. That sure sounds like setting an artificial timetable to me.

Fourth, the Times criticizes Bush for saying that Kerry has pledged to raise taxes. Kerry has pledged not to raise taxes on the middle class, the Times points out--just on the rich. Which means, Kerry has pledged to raise taxes. Bush cut income taxes across the board. Kerry claims to favor the middle-class tax cuts in Bush's bills, but he voted against the bills nonetheless. That's fair game. While it's true that "Mr. Bush has often left out facts that might make some of the Democrat's positions look [better]," that is an absurdly high standard to hold any politician to. It is certainly not one the Times applies to Kerry.

Fifth, Bush is criticized for saying that Kerry voted for a law that contributed to recent increases in Medicare premiums. The Times doesn't really dispute the point, but merely says that Republicans voted for that law, too, and that Bush has not called for its repeal. Now it's the Times that is omitting facts that might make Bush look better. Kerry struck first, holding Bush responsible for the premium increase. Bush responded that Kerry had voted for the law--and he was right.

And that's it. By my generous count, the Times, Newsweek, and Halperin have identified one place where Bush has stretched the truth (on Kerry's health-care plan). There are, however, other examples that these journalists could have adduced. Bush keeps saying that Kerry has voted 98 times to raise taxes. That's an overstatement. Half of those votes were for budgets that assumed tax increases, but did not actually raise taxes themselves. The number is also misleading because it counts multiple votes for the same bill. Bush has often exaggerated the number of small businesses that would be hit by Kerry's tax hikes.

Are these damning examples? Let's look at the other side of the ledger, at Kerry's lies and distortions.

A LONGER NOSE

Kerry has frequently said that Bush has "banned" stem-cell research. That's not true. Bush has called for a ban on one kind of stem-cell research: the kind that involves cloning. But he has imposed no legal restrictions on private-sector stem-cell research using embryos taken from fertility clinics, and has even provided federal funding for some such research.

Kerry often accuses Bush of breaking his promise on education funding. That claim is, at best, seriously misleading. The No Child Left Behind Act reauthorized (and altered) several federal education programs. As usual, it "authorized" spending levels for those programs. It is true that actual funding, while increasing at a very rapid pace, has not reached the "authorized" levels. But nobody expected it to do so. Authorized levels are spending caps, not spending promises. The last time the programs were reauthorized, in 1994, by a Democratic Congress, actual spending fell short of the authorized level. Nobody made an issue of it. The idea that a "promise" was broken is a Democratic invention.

In the second presidential debate, Kerry strongly implied that his objection to parental-notification laws was that girls who have been raped by their fathers should not have to report abortions to their rapists. It was a misleading comment, since Kerry has voted against parental-notification bills that included exceptions for such cases.

Kerry also said during the debates that Bush's Social Security plan would cut benefits--and that the Congressional Budget Office had "very clearly" said so. But Bush has promised that he would not cut benefits for current retirees, which ought to be relevant under the media's standard on the foreign-veto question. Moreover, the CBO didn't say what Kerry claimed it did. It evaluated one Social Security plan--which Bush has not said he would try to enact--and found that under an extremely unlikely set of circumstances the plan would result in benefit cuts. (The assumptions were that taxes were left unchanged, private investment of Social Security funds did not raise returns, and the entire fiscal shortfall of the program had to be solved. In other words, it assumed massive benefit cuts.) The CBO didn't exaggerate its own findings. Kerry did that.

Are Social Security, education, and stem cells not sufficiently "important" issues for Halperin and company? If not, how about the economy? Surely it is one of the top two issues in the election.

Kerry has often said that we have lost 1.6 million jobs under President Bush. Kerry is counting only private-sector figures, without saying so; count public-sector figures and the number drops almost by half. (Mind you, I'm not happy about the private sector's shrinkage and the public sector's expansion. But Kerry's statement is false.) At the Democratic convention and elsewhere, Kerry has said that the jobs now being created by the economy pay, on average, $9,000 less than the ones we have lost. Kerry is relying on a study by a union-affiliated think tank that finds expanding industries pay less than shrinking ones, on average. Look at the data on occupations within industries, and a different picture emerges. Average earnings, meanwhile, have increased under Bush.

Then there's the draft. Kerry and John Edwards have assiduously promoted the idea that Bush would bring back the draft in his second term. Bush and other Republicans strenuously deny this. The only evidence Kerry adduces is that the military is overstretched. Basically, Kerry is promoting an urban legend. Is it an "important" issue? Both the Democrats and the Republicans seem to think it could sway a lot of voters.

Some reporters have taken Kerry to task on the stem-cell "ban." Almost nobody has called him on his distortions on education, the economy, and Social Security. As of mid-October, he has taken almost no heat in the press over the draft lie. At least "The Note," a daily political newsletter produced by ABC and thus overseen by Halperin, has recently retreated somewhat from Halperin's claim that Bush is uniquely dishonest. But his memo still expresses the view of most national political reporters.

All political campaigns involve some distortions, and all too often they involve lies. But Bush has been at least as sinned against as sinning. In claiming otherwise--and in applying unacknowledged double standards--the biggest liars in this campaign are the men and women of the media.