Transcript
BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. Brooke Gladstone is away. I'm Bob Garfield. Here's an ad that ran recently in Iowa, paid for by a conservative political action committee called "Club for Growth." [CONSERVATIVE PAC AD PLAYS]
WOMAN: What do you think of Howard Dean's plans to raise taxes on families by 1900 dollars a year?
MAN: What do I think? Well I think Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, Sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading--
WOMAN: Body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.
MAN: Got it?
BOB GARFIELD: Okay. It's funny, in a hateful sort of way, but as one of our listeners points out, like many political ads, it is factually suspect. According to Thomas Summerall of Norwich, Vermont, a quick series of web searches confirmed that Vermont has only 3 Sushi restaurants in the whole state; 23 tattoo parlors, compared to Iowa's 89, and incredibly, only 2 Starbucks. So if Howard Dean is an elitist, he's being one a long cultural way from the Upper East Side. By no means, though, do right-wingers have the monopoly on political nastiness and spin. So now comes a web site, sponsored by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, providing due diligence on false and misleading claims, Republican and Democrat, left and right. It is called factcheck.org, and its director is former CNN political correspondent Brooks Jackson. He joins me now. Brooks, welcome to OTM.
BROOKS JACKSON: Thank you, Bob. Glad to be here.
BOB GARFIELD:Factcheck.org is a great idea and a wonderful service to journalists and the public, but sort of a misnomer, isn't it, because politicians often use nominal facts out of context to float all kinds of mis-impressions and lies. So you're not just checking facts, are you?
BROOKS JACKSON:Well, we're checking facts and the way they're used and the context. I think that's fair. And whether they've been twisted or distorted or mis-represented.
BOB GARFIELD: I understand you caught a Richard Gephardt ad in Iowa making use of some dodgy job-loss facts. Let's listen to that. [RICHARD GEPHARDT AD PLAYS]
RICHARD GEPHARDT:George Bush has lost more jobs than any president since Herbert Hoover. He's lost more jobs than the last 11 presidents. Bush's budget deficit is almost twice what it was under his father. And 41 million Americans have no health insurance. Now another George Bush, another recession. I believe...
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, so there has been a net loss in, in jobs, but this ad isn't quite right. How isn't it right?
BROOKS JACKSON:Well, for one thing the total job loss -Democrats love to say that we lost more than 3 million jobs. In fact, they're talking about private sector employment rather than total employment, and because government workers continue to get hired, the total job loss peaked at about 2.7 million, at the worst of it back in June. What Gephardt and others do by comparing George Bush to Herbert Hoover [LAUGHS] however, is really kind of laughable. If you look at other measures of the depth of the recession and the, the job slump, in fact it's been one of the milder ones on record since World War II. If you recall, unemployment hit 10.8 percent at the worst of the Reagan administration. I think it's just been revised downward to 6.2 percent at its worst in this most recent recession. I should say Dean also has a problem, one of his figures that he keeps using that's just not correct -- he says 60 percent of us got only 304 dollars from the tax cut. Well the fact is the median -- that is the one right in the middle is 470 dollars. So 50 percent of us got more than 470 dollars.
BOB GARFIELD:How about the so-called facts that come to citizens not in campaign mailings or in stump speeches but in the, the newspaper from reporters who presumably would have themselves checked out the accuracy of the claims? Is there any one statistic that you continue to hear during the race for the Democratic nomination, for example, that just drives you crazy, cause you know it's just plain wrong?
BROOKS JACKSON:Oh, boy. I've already cited two I think, the 3 million job loss figure which is not correct is one that keeps coming up. Dean's "60 percent of us got 304 dollars only in a tax cut" keeps coming up.
BOB GARFIELD: How does this stuff slip through if so clearly campaigns have a political ax to grind with every number that they cite?
BROOKS JACKSON:Well, you know, every since Teddy White wrote that wonderful book, The Making of the President, 1960, reporters have been, I think, tilting too far in the direction of reporting campaigns as horse races, reporting the inside skinny on what the campaigns are up to, how they're using polling, how they're raising money, who's in, who's out. I think the pendulum swung a generation or even two ago a little too far in the direction of reporting process. If factcheck.org makes a small effort toward nudging that pendulum back in the direction of covering substance, then I think we will have accomplished something worth accomplishing.
BOB GARFIELD:Well, Brooks, thank you. My only regret is that our Brooke is on vacation and can't be doing this interview 'cause the hellos and goodbyes between Brooke and Brooks would have been so much more interesting. [LAUGHTER] But nonetheless, many thanks for joining us.
BROOKS JACKSON: My pleasure, Bob. Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Brooks Jackson is the director of the Annenberg Political Fact Check -- his web site is www.factcheck.org.
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