"Are your lips moving?"I’d like to invite The Wall Street Journal’s editors to attend my beginning news writing class at Utah State University this fall. If they do, they’ll learn that there’s difference between fiction and opinion — and they’ll get an earful about the press’ responsibility to deliver the latter.
Karl
Rove’s June 22 op-ed, “Why
Obama is likely to lose in 2012,” is chock full of inaccuracies and lies.
A
few highlights:
•
Rove claims that, while unemployment now stands at 9.1 percent, President
Barack Obama “promised much better, declaring that his February 2009 stimulus
would cause unemployment to peak at 8 percent by the end of summer 2009 and
drop to roughly 6.8 percent today.”
Mr.
Rove (and apparently The Journal’s editors) need a civics lesson. The American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, commonly known as “The Stimulus” was a
complex piece of legislation passed by Congress (that’s the way it works in
this republic.) It might be fair to call the bill Obama signed into law a
Democratic stimulus (since most Congressional Democrats voted for it and all
but three Republicans voted against it) but assigning Obama ownership of the
bill is simply inaccurate. (As is the very notion of ObamaCare.)
Furthermore,
Obama didn’t “promise” or “declare” anything. Rove’s numbers appear to come
from a report
by Christina Romer, of the Council of Economic advisors, and Jared Bernstein,
of the Office of the Vice President-elect.
Yup.
Elect. The report was written before Obama and Vice President Joe Biden
even took office — weeks before the stimulus was debated by Congress. Obama
didn’t write it, didn’t sign it, didn’t pass it out to his book club.
In any case, Romer and Bernstein didn’t promise anything. They made some estimates. That’s what economists do.
And
under no stretch of the English language are "estimate" and
"promise" synonyms.
• Convenient things, ellipses. You can use those little bastards to make people say anything. For instance, I can use them to make Rove say: “President Barack Obama is... great.”
For
his part, Rove cut down an Obama quote from June 2010 in this way: "Our
economy . . . is now growing at a good clip."
What
Obama actually said was: “Our economy, which was shrinking by 6 percent when I
was sworn in, is now growing at a good clip.”
I
can’t imagine why the senior adviser to Obama’s immediate predecessor
might have wanted that middle part excised from the record, can you?
In
the same speech, by the way, Obama said, “I’m under no illusion that we are
where we need to be yet.”
Obama
also once said, “Karl Rove... is a ... peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”
As
I tell my students, using ellipses to eliminate a part of a quote that does not
materially affect its meaning is appropriate. Using them to change the meaning
of a quote is dishonest.
•
Rove writes that “Americans believe they are worse off than when Mr. Obama took
office by a 44 percent to 34 percent margin.”
That’s
factually incorrect.
According
to the Bloomberg
poll that Rove cites, 44 percent of Americans believe they are worse off
now than when Obama took office and 34 percent believe they are better off.
That leaves 22 percent of Americans who don’t think their lot has changed much
at all.
Plugging
those figures accurately into Mr. Rove’s syntax would result in this sentence:
“Americans
believe they are worse off than when Mr. Obama took office by a 44 percent to
56 percent margin.”
Of
course, that would be a bit confusing, because it would appear to say that most
Americans don’t, in fact, believe they are worse off than they were two years
ago. And low and behold, that’s the case. Most Americans believe they are
something other than "worse off."
It’s
still not particularly flattering to point out that 44 out of every 100
Americans thinks their lives suck more now than two years ago — and that’s what
Rove should have said. Instead, he tried to make the numbers look even worse
than they are. And that resulted in a lie.
That’s
too bad, because when Rove sticks to doing what he does best — making political
analyses — he does just fine. Indeed, most of his logic is sound: Obama’s in
big trouble. Key groups of supporters have fallen out of love with him. Most
aren’t impressed with his handling of the economy.
So
yeah, Obama has a re-election problem — but Rove has a truth problem.
And
that’s not fiction or an opinion.
It’s
a fact.
Matthew D. LaPlante is an assistant
professor of journalism at Utah State University.
