It's Not That Hard
The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder (who, to his credit, very much tries to be an honest broker) has a post entitled "The McCain Ad Shell Game." In it, he writes:
Take McCain's latest ad, for instance, which takes the art of lying to new levels. In the ad, McCain takes a completely non-controversial Obama quote so far out of context as to completely invert its meaning. It is audacious in its brazen dishonestly. And to their credit, some reporters have pointed this out. It's not hard to do.
The simple reality is that if all reporters did this, we'd stop seeing ads like this pretty quickly (at least the ones sponsored by the candidate's themselves). Being called a liar repeatedly on television is just not something that any candidate can tolerate. But until reporters are actually willing to call a lie a lie, we're just going to see more of these ads.
McCain campaign airs provocatively misleading ads.This strikes me as a false dilemma. The problem is that the news networks rarely try option 1, which Ambinder describes as airing the ad and pointing out how misleading it is. Rather, the standard practice is to air the ad over and over and invite both sides on to discuss it. Yes, there's usually someone on there, a "democratic strategist" perhaps, who points out that the ad is very misleading, but that message gets watered down in the back-and-forth.
The press has a conundrum.
If we want to point out how misleading they are, we air the ad.
McCain's campaign wins the point.
If refuse to point out how misleading they are, McCain's campaign escapes criticism.
Take McCain's latest ad, for instance, which takes the art of lying to new levels. In the ad, McCain takes a completely non-controversial Obama quote so far out of context as to completely invert its meaning. It is audacious in its brazen dishonestly. And to their credit, some reporters have pointed this out. It's not hard to do.
The simple reality is that if all reporters did this, we'd stop seeing ads like this pretty quickly (at least the ones sponsored by the candidate's themselves). Being called a liar repeatedly on television is just not something that any candidate can tolerate. But until reporters are actually willing to call a lie a lie, we're just going to see more of these ads.
posted by A.L. at 2:06 PM
6 Comments:
You gotta admit Steve Schmidt is running a smart campaign for John McCain. Obama should have stayed in the public financing system. The media playing right into his hands by airing the negative ads negates Obama's money advantage.
The media's excuse is to "show" Both sides of a disagreement, even when 1 opinion is 100% correct, and the other half is lying. Not to the extent of lying, by why do we keep mentioning ID when discussing the Scientific findings of Darwinism?
Some times, when the truth, or lie is obvious, the other side's opinion isn't worth the time it has wasted.
The irony of Ambinder's conundrum is that a mere three posts earlier, he posted the false McCain ad, simply calling the attack "notable". No pointing out the lies--nothing.
So, I have a hard time believing that he's actually interested in doing anything with the false McCain ads other than spreading them and then claiming that he doesn't know what to do with them.
I don't see exactly how the McCain ad is misleading. Obama did say that Iran was a tiny country that doesn't pose a serious threat. Of course, that may not paint a complete picture of Obama's views of Iran (indeed it is hard to say what Obama's views on the subject actually are), but on this occasion Obama was emphasizing the lack of a threat posed by Iran.
If this is misleading, would you agree that it is misleading when the Obama campaign takes snippets of language by McCain without putting them into context? For example, when it takes a couple of positive remarks by McCain about the economy to suggest that McCain thinks the economy is just fine, while leaving out the many statements he has made indicating the opposite.
MLS, please. You're smarter than that. There's taking something out of context and then there's this. What McCain did in that ad was completely change the substance of what Obama said. Obama was saying that Iran was tiny compared to the Soviet Union and that Iran was not a threat like the one posed by the Soviet Union. That's a completely non-controversial statement that I'm positive McCain agrees with. And he changed it into a statement almost no one, including Obama actually believes. That's WAY more dishonest that a typical political ad and certainly far more dishonest than anything I've seen Obama do. If you can find an example of an equally dishonest ad from Obama, I'd love to see it.
AL- if Obama had said that Iran is a serious threat, but we should still have negotiations with it, or that Iran is a serious threat but not as serious as that posed by the Soviet Union, it would have been much more difficult for McCain to attack what he said (although I am not sure that McCain would agree with the latter statement). But that isn't what he said. In fact, I think a reasonable person reading Obama's remarks would reach the conclusion that he doesn't think that Iran is a serious threat, or at least that was the message he was sending on that particular day.
And I did give you an example of where Obama did exactly the same thing-- with regard to McCain's statements on the economy.
The reason you react differently to Obama's attacks on McCain is that you feel that they are true at some level, even if they do involve taking snippets of McCain's statements out of context. But McCain's partisans feel exactly the same way about McCain's ad, that it captures the essence of Obama's views on Iran, even though Obama's statements, put in context with things he has said about Iran on other occasions, could be read more charitably.
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