In “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man,” now in an enjoyable and timely revival on Broadway (extended but scheduled to end this week), the lead character – a candidate for president in 1960 – poses a rhetorical question:
“Since when has the truth been a deterrent at this convention?”
And at another juncture, that character, William Russell, observes to his opponent: “We’ve both gone beyond the truth now. We’re in dangerous country.”
It’s strange to think that the play was written more than half a century ago. But looking around corners was something at which Mr. Vidal, who died in late July, excelled. The Times’s Charles Isherwood, in his otherwise lukewarm review last April, gave Mr. Vidal props for just that: the playwright’s “undeniable prescience about future trends in American politicking.”
Questions of truth – in the particular guise of “fact-checking” – are front and center just now, both on the presidential campaign trail generally and, more specifically, at the political conventions.
In the blogosphere and on Twitter, a debate is raging among prominent media critics. New York University’s Jay Rosen is leading the charge for the importance of aggressive fact-checking, with Jack Shafer of Reuters playing his favorite role of contrarian, saying, in essence, politicians always lie – why get so worked up about this?
The reporter Michael Cooper’s story in The Times last weekend was very much in the discussion, seen by some as a sign that the mainstream media is taking the whole matter of truth-telling, truth-stretching and the pesky matter of factuality with a new level of seriousness.
It was a strong piece. And more like it would be welcome.
The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post have done some of the best fact-challenging work in recent days.
I caught up with Mr. Cooper on Tuesday morning to talk about the response his pieces on this topic have generated. In short: a lot.
“My reader e-mail is exploding,” he said. “The takeaway is that readers are hungry for context.”
They are looking to the press to point out misleading statements or the leaving out of key facts.
“I’m getting heat from both sides,” Mr. Cooper said. Democrats thought that The Times’s recent stories on this subject did not go far enough. Republicans thought they were unfair or too tough.
The shadow topic here is “false balance,” the equal and ultimately meaningless quoting of both sides in every story, on every subject.
“I’ve tried hard to avoid false equivalence,” Mr. Cooper told me. “It can be trickier than it looks.”
A Times reader, Richard Joffe, chimes in by e-mail, on just this point. He wrote:
One reason fact-checking does nothing to limit the amount of political lying is because, as with all its coverage of politics, the media insists that both sides are equally to blame. According to the media, both sides are equally to blame for refusing to make compromises, both sides are equally to blame for threatening political violence, and both sides are equally to blame for lying. The Times article, with its headline, “Campaigns Play Loose With Truth,” is a perfect example of this fallacy. Although the Republican Party has grown increasingly indifferent to speaking truthfully, it has paid no price, just as it has paid no price for the violence of its language, and its refusal to compromise, because regarding each of these tendencies, the media continues to blame both parties equally.
My former paper, The Buffalo News, offered an analysis piece by its Washington bureau chief Jerry Zremski last weekend, which might have disturbed Mr. Joffe. It began: “The Democrats have been lying. For months.”
Whatever the conclusions, whatever the effectiveness, of challenging facts, the idea that we have to debate the necessity of doing so strikes me as absurd.
What is the role of the media if not to press for some semblance of reality amid the smoke and mirrors? Gore Vidal, I imagine, would agree.