[I’m on the road in Syracuse, and posting to the site has become slow and challenging thanks to losing half the letters on my keyboard, including a, s, and c. The problem has required me to compose by copying words from other sources and pasting them into sentences—you know, like ransom notes cut from newspaper headlines?—or using the online keyboard, which is like writing in alphabet soup. This means that I may have to add some fixes when I get home tonight, and that I will be about five topics behind. Thanks for your patience.]
The coverage of the Wisconsin recall was not a good sign for those of us hoping that the news media might choose to reform its ethics and objectivity standards in time to serve the public properly during the 2012 campaign season. Remember when Fox was the only network openly cheerleading for particular candidates, political figures and parties? MSNBC soon topped it in that regard to a nauseating extent, and now all of the networks, and much of the print media, are following the trend.
It makes no sense in the case of the recall. Why should journalists have a position to push in Wisconsin politics? Why are they taking the sides if public unions? The phenomenon has to be market driven, or, in the alternative, the result of widespread stupidity. Yes, I suspect the latter.
Everyone was gung-ho on covering the recall as a major story, until polls started to show that Gov. Walker was likely to fend off the counter-attack on his policies by angry public unions. Then much of the news media went silent, down-playing the importance of the likely survival of a Tea Party governor is a famously liberal state to Democrats and the President and seeking, some argue, to minimize the damage to Democrats by burying the story. There was also an ethical issue to cover, one which may have had an effect on the vote: should governors face recalls just because a lot of people disagree with the policies he or she is enacting, or should recalls be reserved for actual misconduct in office? Of course, demagogues for the unions and professional demagogues like Jesse Jackson compared Walker’s castration of the public unions to fascism and mayhem, but that was just incivility, hysteria and dirty politics: the clear example of misconduct was the conduct of Walker’s foes in the Senate, who famously fled the state to avoid losing the vote on his bill, as if democracy in action was some kind of plague. There is a time for throwing elected officials out of office, and it is called an election. This was an unethical recall. The news media either didn’t notice, or didn’t care/
Then came the night of the recall. Most polls showed Walker with a 5 point lead. Yet the second the voting closed, CNN was on the air with huge graphics reading “50-50!” and “Recall a Dead Heat!” John King was using various charts analyzing this “surprising” development, and the “dead heat” analysis went on for more than an hour. MSNBC was doing the same routine, and the news blogs were proclaiming that the race was “a cliff-hanger.” This was all confirmation bias and wishful thinking, not competent reporting. From the minute the first actual votes came trickling in, Walker was ahead. At one point, when NBC finally gave up the ghost and pronounced him the winner, Walker was ahead by 20 points, 60%-40%. It was never a cliff-hanger, not for a second. Eventually the margin was almost 7 points, 53% to 47% for his challenger, the mayor of Milwaukee.
Bathed in grief, the networks started spinning like mad. The favorite and most absurd theme: Walker’s victory had actually been a victory for…Barack Obama. Never mind that Obama had, early on in Walker’s battle with the unions, attacked him; never mind that at one time Democrats were advertising the recall as a referendum on Obama’s policies as well as Walker’s; never mind that many Wisconsin Democrats and labor leaders were furious with the White House for limiting Obama’s support in the waning weeks of the campaign to a single tweet: the recall was a victory for Obama because exit polls of the Wisconsin electorate showed the President with a significant 9 point lead over Mitt Romney. This was, the journalists neglected to mention, the same exit polling that had their networks claiming the recall vote was a “dead heat.”
How desperate. How embarrassing.Why not just report the news and the facts? Were the networks repeating some talking points released by the DNC or the White House, or were the reporters and producers themselves that determined to find a microscopic silver lining for Obama in Walker’s victory? I am unsure which scenario is more damning.
Then came the morning headlines. Someone at Media Bias Central had declared that the phrase of the day was “Walker Survives Recall.” Many stories used the adjective “narrowly.” Narrowly? Six percentage points isn’t narrow, nor is it “surviving.” It is a clear and decisive win. Walker’s victory, over the same opponent, surpassed the margin in his original election in 2010.
Spin is an effort to distort how facts are perceived by manipulating the context beyond what is dictated by an objective view of the facts. Political partisans do it, and it is dishonest coming from them. It is unforgivable coming from supposed journalists, and the entire news media ought to take a hard and critical look at its professionalism and ethics during the reporting of the Wisconsin recall.
It was an embarrassment.
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Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at jamproethics@verizon.net.
Ethics Alarms 
May the MSM (mainstream media, for the uninitiated) R.I.P.. Almost everyone with a brain has already left the funeral.
Good Lord, Jack. I think most bloggers in your situation would simply say, “due to tight scheduling and missing three frigging letters on my keyboard, the site will be on hiatus for a couple of days.” Your conviction is most admirable.
On the other hand, who need them three letter you don’t got? You might work round it. You got twenty-three letter left. Four of them even be vowel. You might find lot of other word. Cutting and gluing got to be tedium.
Come to think of it, that Nigerian prince that keeps e-mailing me must have the same problem with his keyboard.
Full disclosure: I didn’t watch the coverage in question. I spent the evening preparing to teach the next morning, checking in occasionally on two or three websites when I needed a distraction from preparing a lecture on the ramifications of the Irish Penal Laws. (My professional life is nothing if not glamorous.) Perhaps my impression would have been different if I’d been following along. That said, my response to this post is “Oh, c’mon.”
My personal view is that we ought to use exit polls only after the fact and adopt a European-style system, announcing the winners the next night, when all the votes are counted, without making the running tally public. That isn’t going to happen, though, so we’re stuck with this. And the more charged the topic, the more likely exit polls are to be off by a couple of points, because, quite simply, people lie. Exit polls almost always skew too much toward approval of gay marriage in referenda, for example. It’s not surprising that they’d also skew towards the challenger to a governor who is, if nothing else, polarizing. Yes, a competent news organization would account for this in their projections. Clearly, at least a couple of networks didn’t.
Returns came in sooner from parts of the state that voted for Walker than they did from areas that voted for Barrett. This is standard, and accounts for the fact that the race finished 14 points closer than it was when it was called. I frankly thought NBC called the race too early, not too late: when fewer than a third of the votes were actually counted and fewer than 1 in 8 had been counted in either Madison or Milwaukee, big jurisdictions with lots of votes and a decidedly Democratic electorate.
It was inevitable that whoever won would claim that the race meant more than it did, and that whoever lost would claim it meant less than it did. Did you really expect the Republicans to express their thanks for the $25 million in out-of-state donations, or for the Democrats to say, “maybe the more responsible thing to have done would have been to not put the state through this, and to run hard against Governor Walker in his regularly scheduled re-election bid”?
Similarly, it was inevitable that someone–whichever side won–was going to try to claim that the election was in some way a harbinger of things to come in November. I think it qualifies as news that this was clearly not the case, as President Obama fared 15 points better in exit polls than Mayor Barrett did in actual balloting (and 9 points–well above the margin of error–ahead of Barrett’s exit polls). This doesn’t mean that Governor Romney won’t win Wisconsin, but he won’t if it matters. That is, if Obama loses Wisconsin, he’ll do so only as part of a nation-wide collapse. But yes, the fact that it’s also outside the margin of error that Governor Romney is, right now, faring better against Obama than Senator McCain did four years ago is also worthy of mention.
And, of course, it was the MSNBC website that headlined their story the next morning “GOP’s Gov. Walker wins by big margin in Wisconsin recall vote.” 6 points might not be narrow, but I wouldn’t call it “big,” either.
In short, we’re at the same place we’ve been before–about media, about PolitiFact, etc.: you see bias; I see garden-variety incompetence. La la, how the life goes on.
I expect the parties to claim as you suggest; I don’t expect the media to do it for them. MSNBC on the air (I didn’t see the website) was almost hysterical. I think an objective review would conclude that they not only have surpassed Fox in naked partisanship, but they are far more amateurish about it—maybe because so many of their talking heads aren’t journalists, but politicians.
The 50-50 silliness reminded me of the pro-Kerry returns in 2004, which were then used to build conspiracy theories about voter fraud. If it were incompetence rather than bias, wouldn’t the incompetence occasionally tilt the other way?
I’d suggest you reconsider the blatant bias you hold Fox in. While they are partisan with the right, and admittedly so, they are more of a center-right position than a far right one. Why does this matter?
Because when you look at all of the other MSM outlets, in comparison they DO look far right. But they aren’t. It’s just that the MSM has been so biased, you consider their implicit (but not admitted) leftward-bias as normal, not biased.
Just consider the to-date lack of vetting of Obama. Or the widespread Bush Derangement Syndrome of 2000-2008. Or the “civility” of MANY on the left regarding conservative women like Malkin, Coulter, Palin, Bachman. Agree or disagree with Conservatives, fine, but the amount of curse words and baseless vilification on a personal level that they received from “respected, notable” liberals is embarrassing.
If you had actually read Jack’s other posts, he’s already brought up all of the points raised in your post (and more).