Posted by Eugene Volokh:
"Dishonest or Insane":
[1]Slate's Chatterbox column is running a new series called "The
Fleischer Watch" -- "an ongoing inquiry into dishonest or insane
assertions buried inside Ari Fleischer's White House memoir." Here's
the [2]first item, posted Tuesday:
In his new book, Taking Heat: The President, the Press, and My
Years in the White House, Ari Fleischer, the former White House
press secretary, lays out various "biases and predilections" of
"the liberal press." Among these is its 'belief that government is
a mechanism to solve the nation's problems," its insistence that
"emotional examples of suffering � are good ways to illustrate
economic statistic stories," and its tendency to stay "fixated on
the unemployment rate." Fleischer might just as well have
complained that the press believes the Earth revolves around the
sun.
At risk of belaboring the obvious:
1. If the government doesn't exist to solve problems, what the hell
do we have it for? We can argue about the particular problems
government should solve, and about how successfully government
addresses them at any given time, but not, I think, about whether
government should be in the problem-solving business.
2. Un-picturesque though they may be, people do tend to suffer when
the economy is faltering, as it did throughout the period covered
in Fleischer's memoir. If a lagging economy didn't cause people to
suffer, there would be no great reason to keep track of the economy
at all. Anecdotes about individual sufferers help the public
understand in a concrete way what it means to have a weak economy.
3. The principal way people suffer when economic growth is weak or
nonexistent is by losing their jobs. The statistic that keeps track
of the people who lose their jobs is the unemployment rate (at the
moment a so-so 5.4 percent). Fleischer doesn't want the press to
focus on the "micro" story of individual suffering, but neither
does he want the press to focus on the "macro" story of economic
statistics. In effect, Fleischer is saying that it's unfair for the
press to cover the economy at all.
Now unfortunately the column doesn't point to the page number on which
the quotes appear, so if they appear in more than one place the
following might be mistaken. Still, if the quotes are indeed to p. 100
of the book, then the mistake -- or rather mistakes -- seem to be
Slate's.
Page 100 starts with the heading "The Liberal Press?," and is followed
by a page-long block quote. On the top of page 101, Fleischer says
"That's what ABC News said in its influential daily newsletter The
Note on February 10, 2004, in a breathtakingly frank and rare internal
assessment of the journalism business. The public largely agrees."
1. So already we see something odd about the Slate column: It doesn't
even mention that the quotes aren't composed by Fleischer, but
actually come from The Note (I think they've been credited elsewhere
to The Note's editor, Mark Halperin). Now Fleischer does seem to be
endorsing the quote in considerable measure. But when people quote a
page of material, they don't always completely endorse every clause.
Surely it would have been helpful for Slate to have mentioned that the
"dishonest or insane" material statements aren't Fleischer's, but
rather someone else's and were simply quoted favorably by Fleischer.
Or am I missing something? (Incidentally, if you want to read the
quote, the original is [3]here.)
2. There's more. Slate derides Fleischer's complaint about the press's
"insistence that 'emotional examples of suffering � are good ways to
illustrate economic statistic stories.'" Believing that such emotional
examples are good ways to illustrate stories is as normal and
sensible, the item says, as "believ[ing] the Earth revolves around the
sun."
But the material that Fleischer quoted says that the press believes
"that emotional examples of suffering (provided by unions or consumer
groups) are good ways to illustrate economic statistic stories." Slate
simply replaced the parenthetical with ellipses. Yet is believing that
emotional examples provided by unions or consumer groups are good ways
to illustrate stories the same as "believ[ing] the Earth revolves
around the sun"?
Is it "insane" (even allowing for some hyperbole on Slate's part) for
Fleischer to think that the press shouldn't rely on examples provided
by interest groups? Perhaps the interest groups are providing examples
that are unrepresentative, or that are in some way spun or
incompletely described. Or perhaps not -- perhaps relying consistently
on examples provided by interest groups is just fine. But isn't there
some difference between complaining about the press's using emotional
examples as such, and complaining about the press's using emotional
examples provided by interest groups? And if there is such a
difference, shouldn't Slate have kept the parenthetical?
3. Quoting the three small items from the whole page, it seems to me,
fails to do justice to The Note's criticisms. Thus, The Note quote
said:
[The press] does not accept the proposition that the Bush tax cuts
helped the economy by stimulating summer spending.
It remains fixated on the unemployment rate.
Earlier in the long quote, The Note pointed to the press's belief
"that more taxes on corporations and the wealthy are good ways to cut
the deficit and raise money for social spending and don't have a
negative effect on economic growth." Presumably, the complaint isn't
just that the press is talking about unemployment, but that it's
"fixated" on unemployment -- unduly focused on it -- and doesn't deal
adequately or fairly with other important economic items.
4. Finally, there are the substantive weaknesses of the "Fleischer
Watch" (i.e., Halperin Watch) critique: For instance, when The Note
criticized the "belief that government is a mechanism to solve the
nation's problems," I take it that it wasn't saying that "government
doesn't exist to solve problems" -- rather, it was criticizing the
belief that government is an effective mechanism to solve the nation's
problems, or that the government is a mechanism to solve all or most
of the nation's problems. Perhaps The Note put the point more
ambiguously than it should have (though Fleischer understandably
quoted the ambiguous and less effective parts alongside the clearer
and more effective parts). But it seems that Chatterbox resolved the
ambiguity by using the least plausible and most unfavorable
interpretation.
Naturally, my complaints 3 and 4 are less significant than complaints
1 and 2. But when I put them all together, it seems to me that this
inaugural post in the Fleischer criticism series says more negative
things about the critic than about Fleischer.
Finally, one note: Because the block quote on p. 100 occupies the
whole page, it's possible to at first glance miss the fact that it's a
block quote. It does have a ragged right margin, unlike the rest of
the text, and if you look closely through the sheet, you'll find that
the left margin is indented relative to the left margin on the
preceding sheet; but a first look could indeed fail to grasp this. But
on second glance, one would find that the very next paragraph, on top
of p. 101 begins with "That's what ABC News said in its influential
daily newsletter The Note on February 10, 2004"; and a quick search
would confirm that the block quote is indeed a block quote.
References
1. http://slate.com/id/2114874/
2. http://slate.com/id/2114874/
3. http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/TheNote/TheNote_Feb1004.html
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