Fair and Balanced

Fair and balanced

My favorite commentator, Rachel Maddow, brought up something that is very near my heart this week: the false idea of balance in journalism. Rachel was commenting on how McCain, and his surrogates, are able to say things about Barack Obama. The media then picks up McCain’s (or surrogates) comments and asks Obama to respond. The media considers this balance. The media, however, never asks if the original comment was even true.

Why doesn’t the media just call something a lie or at the very least wrong. If a person were to go on the air and say that Dallas was the capital of Texas, he would be corrected. If said person were to also claim he was an expert on Texas, he would be laughed off camera. You would not bring in people from Dallas and ask them if they were indeed the capital of Texas. You would not have a debate between Austin and Dallas! This however is how our media treats everything.

When I was a junior in High School, I had a teacher who, when preparing us for the Texas achievement tests (whose name I can’t remember because it’s gone through so many variations) explained a simple fact about writing a paper defending an opinion: facts are facts, opinions are opinions. This seems simple, but apparently isn’t. Who’s the player who scored the most touchdowns in a game? This is a simple fact. Who’s the greatest player to ever play football? This would be an opinion.

Let’s take these last two questions. As to who holds the record for most touchdowns in a game the answer is Ernie Nevers, Dub Jones, and Gale Sayers each tied with 6. That is a fact. Anyone can look it up. Now who’s the greatest player in football? That’s arguable, but even the argument has to be based on facts. If I were to claim the greatest player was Jerry Rice, I would have several facts I could point to in order to back up my opinion. Rice holds career records in touchdowns, receptions and receiving yards. So those would be evidence in his favor. However, if I claimed that he held the record for most touchdowns in his rookie season or that one of the teams he played for was Houston, I would be told that I’m wrong and my ability to participate in this debate would be called into question. In fact, people probably wouldn’t listen to me at all. I would never be allowed to comment on ESPN ever again. But that’s o.k. because I can just go into politics where facts don’t matter.

Now lets use this same analysis on John McCain. McCain claims he has better foreign policy experience than Obama, however, McCain recently mentioned Czechoslovakia as if that country still exists, confused Sunni and Shia, claimed Iraq shared a border with Pakistan, and claimed Iran was training Al-Qaeda in Iraq. Each of these items is a fact that can easily be verified and checked.

Czechoslovakia split in 1993, 15 years ago, and became the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Sunni’s are a religious minority in Iraq that held power there until the US invasion and routinely persecuted the Shia’s. Much of the fighting we see in Iraq is between the Shia and Sunnis. The reason Iran couldn’t be training Al-Qaeda in Iraq was because Iran is Shi’ite and Al-Qaeda is Sunni. And finally Iraq and Pakistan do share a border and it’s called Iran, much like Mexico and Canada share a border called America.

Now if I were on CNN and made these mistakes, no one would take my opinions seriously, however McCain is still a presidential candidate. In fact, Obama still receives more criticism of his foreign policy than does McCain. Hell, Obama receives more criticism than McCain does period.

Now what about a political opinion? Say gas tax holidays or drilling for oil? These things are opinions, but what about the facts behind them. The gas tax holiday would’ve saved no more than .18 a gallon and that money would be taken from government money that goes to support bridges and highways. Which is important, since we just passed the year anniversary of the I 35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis. Which could have been prevented had we had more funding, not less.

And drilling for oil? One of the big myths, or non-facts, being put out by republicans is that we need to drill for more oil and stop getting our oil from foreign sources. The problem with this is, like many lies, is it operates on the fact that you and I don’t understand how the system works. You see, even if we drilled for more oil here in America, and that oil was available tomorrow. It doesn’t just come straight to us. It goes on the world market and we have to buy it back. And since our oil industry isn’t nationalized the money from selling that oil goes to Exxon or whoever drilled for it. And since there are such big loopholes in tax policy, not to mention tax breaks for oil companies, they make lots of money and we keep paying. And, of course, in reality the oil we started drilling for today wouldn’t even go to market for almost 10 years and we might not see price effects till 2030.

And another thing we don’t understand about the oil market is that the price of gas is so high, because our dollar is so weak. If oil were traded in Euros, gas would be cheaper. But since the dollar is currently worth .6 euros or .5 pounds you have to mark it up just to get a fair price. If you want to get 1 euro you need essentially 2 dollars. So if gas were traded in Euros, the cost for gas would probably be only $75 dollars a barrel right now, and our gas would be a lot cheaper. Of course, if trading were to change over to Euros now, it would crash the American dollar. And if you thought times were bad now, that would be worse.

Once again, these are facts that can be looked up and verified. The journalist shouldn’t bring in opposing viewpoints as if these opinions had actual merit, but ask these questions themselves. If a statement doesn’t pass a fact-check, it shouldn’t be presented as such.


A small list of websites I visited to write this. Not by any means comprehensive but ones that had the most concentration of points I made.

On media bias towards candidates
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-onthemedia27-2008jul27,0,712999.story.

For a short history of the gasoline tax.
http://www.artba.org/economics_research/reports/gas_tax_history.htm

For a short article on the correlation between dollar and oil
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2004/11/b258795.html

For info on off shore drilling (it’s an editorial, I know, but it presents the case clearest)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/opinion/19thu1.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

I also used Wikipedia and ESPN.com for my research on football. Also, Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann’s programs were used as performance enhancers in the writing of this.