MIKE PESCA: This is On the Media. I'm Mike Pesca. George Bush may indeed be the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net job loss, but one industry has boomed under his watch: people whose job it is to vet the words of politicians. The George W. Bush era is clearly the golden age of presidential vetting. At the age of 26, Bryan Keefer is already a veteran vetter -- he and his two partners run the website spinsanity.com. And they have all now written a new book called All the President's Spin. Bryan, welcome to OTM.

BRYAN KEEFER: Thank you very much for having me on.

MIKE PESCA: I'm looking at the cover of your book, and there's a picture of George Bush crossing his fingers, but you never use "lie" in the title of this book, so what exactly are you accusing the Bush administration of doing?

BRYAN KEEFER: Well, they're not really liars. You know, in the book I think we document two or three places where they've said something that they knew was untrue. What we've found was that they were very sophisticated misleaders, in the sense that they'll say things that are half-true or partially true or there's a little grain of truth, and because they don't lie, outright, the media very rarely calls them on it.

MIKE PESCA: And sow what are the ones that are just outright lies?

BRYAN KEEFER: George W. Bush would stand up after September 11th and say, "During the campaign I said in Chicago to the American people that only under three circumstances would I run a deficit -under war, recession or national emergency, and I never imagined we'd hit the trifecta." And it was his way of sort of defending himself from blame for the budget deficit which was growing and has grown since, and there's no record anywhere that he ever said anything like that during the campaign. White House reporters couldn't come up with it, the White House couldn't come up with it themselves. And so really it just didn't happen.

MIKE PESCA: So why do you think he says these things that are lies? Is that the real slip-up, because usually he's disciplined enough to go right up to the truth but not cross it?

BRYAN KEEFER: Karen Hughes writes in her book: "My first rule is -- you don't tell a lie. Because the media will call you if you lie, but they won't do it if you say something that's really heavily spun but may have a grain of truth to it."

MIKE PESCA: But I've seen so many stories comparing the things that the Bush administration said linking Saddam Hussein to September 11th -- it got played in the media as these were purposefully misleading statements. So did the fact that they didn't maybe commit the dictionary definition of "lie" really get them off the hook in that case?

BRYAN KEEFER: Well, you know, it got them off the hook before the war. What they really did is they exaggerated the certainty of what they knew. They would say "We know Saddam has weapons of mass destruction" when the intelligence reports really didn't tell them that. They told them well, probably. But probably doesn't sound very good in a sound bite. And so what they did is they really presented it as certain when it just wasn't certain at all.

MIKE PESCA: Now, the website which I go to a lot, Spinsanity, it basically vets everyone -- it does it for Bush - it does it for Kerry - it does it for media figures like Bill O'Reilly and Michael Moore -- but this book is all the president's spin and everything we've been talking about so far is about how the president lied. There is a long history of presidents perhaps embellishing the truth. So how come you're saying it's so unprecedented with Bush?

BRYAN KEEFER: Well, what they've done is they've taken what's sort of normal for presidents under fire, under scandal or during a campaign and made that their day to day M.O. in the way they govern the country and the way they present their policies. They've made this sort of image creation that Reagan was go good at -- the 24/7, you know, non-stop rapid response that Clinton was very good at under fire -- combined it with these misleading public relations tactics, and really taken this to an entire 'nother level.

MIKE PESCA: If this book were just about the campaign, and all the ads that people see -- have there been more lies coming out of the Bush side than the Kerry side, in your estimation?

BRYAN KEEFER: I would say Bush has been a little bit more aggressive, but there's plenty of spin to go around here, and Kerry has really adopted the tactics that Bush has pioneered in the White House -- picked up and that and really run with on this campaign season.

MIKE PESCA: In the interest of fairness, give me a good example of a Kerry whopper.

BRYAN KEEFER: Sure. Well he's said 3 million jobs have been lost under Bush. It's a classic example of taking a number and stripping it out of context, because that's the number for the private sector, or they say manufacturing jobs, sometimes. But Kerry has gone out and said "That's the overall number, you know, 3 million jobs have been lost," when really the number is down to about 1.1 -- there's still a net loss, but it's not nearly as large as Kerry has said it is.

MIKE PESCA: The most cynical part of me says - you know what -- he put that misleading figure out so that the correction stories would also reflect poorly on George Bush. [LAUGHS]

BRYAN KEEFER: Right. But it's amazing to watch the press try and cover this. The AP, even after getting the number correct, let Kerry continue to spin them, printed it as if it were a fact without any sort of contradiction for weeks after Kerry started saying it.

MIKE PESCA: One thing that I see is that people who have a horse in the race either way, they want the media to be more outraged by either Kerry's lies or Bush's lies, but they can't hammer it because if one side lies more, and then the media's always pointing it out, it really makes it seem like they're rooting for the other side.

BRYAN KEEFER: Well, the media has interpreted objectivity to often mean artificial balance. So what happens is when Bush says something like "The average tax cut was 1500 dollars," the media will print that, and then if they're going to contradict it, they'll go to some outside expert or maybe they'll go to the opposite campaign saying "No, it wasn't 1500 dollars. The average tax cut for people in the middle income bracket was a few hundred." But the problem is, is that when it's he-said, she-said, the readers don't really get a sense of who's right and who's wrong.

MIKE PESCA: But in the major papers of America, I see an effort to run features that they might call an ad watch or an ad check, where they tell you who's lying, as someone who's reported on campaigns, there's nothing we reporters like more than catching anyone in a lie.

BRYAN KEEFER: I mean, ad watch pieces are wonderful, as far as they go, but the problem is they're out of the news cycle, and when Bush says Kerry voted 350 times for higher taxes, eventually they do an ad watch piece and an op-ed kind of piece, and finally it finds its way into the news coverage a month later. And so the problem for readers is that they hear the misleading sound bite long before they hear it debunked. You know, the Annenberg Public Policy Center did a survey of voters in swing states in particular asking them about the claims that had been in ads, like the 350 votes for higher taxes, and they found that people believed them, for the most part.

MIKE PESCA: The interesting thing [LAUGHS] about that survey is that people said you know I don't believe these ads; I know to take 'em with a grain of salt, but then when they say - well what about 350 votes, they say oh, well that's a fact.

BRYAN KEEFER: Right. Right.

MIKE PESCA: If George Bush wins this election, it will seem to him and his advisors that these tactics have been validated. Paint me the picture -- how will this all change if John Kerry wins the election?

BRYAN KEEFER: I mean the scary part is it may not change if John Kerry wins the election. You know, the incentive for politicians is, if you can game the system, and if you can get better coverage or less critical coverage than you probably deserve, go for it.

MIKE PESCA: Thanks very much, Bryan.

BRYAN KEEFER: Thanks very much for having me.

MIKE PESCA: Bryan Keefer, author of All the President's Spin, a spinsanity.com production. [MUSIC]