Comments on: “Even about your Lie of the Year there is doubt.”

By: Romney, Jeep, and China: A Case Study in America’s Fact-Checking Fetish |

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 16:58:16 +0000

[...] NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen, who wrote a piece marveling at the Romney campaign’s once and ongoing disregard for the consensus of the [...]

By: Richard Aubrey

Richard Aubrey — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 05:24:51 +0000

I think the fact that it is actually true is not particularly relevant.

By: Abadmna

Abadmna — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 04:00:42 +0000

““Lie of the Year,” people in the establishment press called it. As bad as it gets.”

I’ll get to this in a moment.

First though maybe the lie of the year should not be a statement the the Washington Post called “technically correct” or according to politifact

“The Romney campaign was crafty with its word choice, so campaign aides could claim to be speaking the literal truth, but the ad left a false impression that all Jeep production was being moved to China.”

The literal truth.

Both Kessler and politifact digress from the fact Chrysler will be producing at least some Jeeps in China to editorials on outsourcing. They find ,shockingly, the Romney campaign tried to interpret the facts in the worst possible light. Perhaps the Romney campaign could have been cut a little slack as suddenly after being hit for months on Bain and how bad outsourcing was, they find outsourcing is actually a good thing.

One can see how claims like Bain capital, and by extension Romney was responsible for,a woman’s death by cancer or that Romney cheated on his taxes pale in comparison to this. Both by the way are both misleading and literally lies.

Or perhaps the lie that the Benghazi attack originated from a mob incensed by an obscure video.
This was literally a lie. The first ambassador killed,in over 40 years is part of the story. As well as three other murdered Americans. It directly informs on American foreign policy and the much ballyhooed Arab Spring.

Still, literally correct but misleading building jeeps in China is as bad as it gets.

Asymmetry?

By: Graham Shevlin

Graham Shevlin — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 13:00:42 +0000

Your attempt to change the subject is inept, to say the least.
Jay set out to address the issue that the Romney campaign spokesperson is still trying to retrospectively change the media assessment of BS (at the least) on claims made by his campaign (aka The Guy Who Lost). He has no obligation to write about the achievements of the POTUS. If you want to discuss the latter subject, write about it yourself.

By: abigail beecher

abigail beecher — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 22:27:44 +0000

In a perfect world, all “journalists” would be like Steve Kroft.

Right Jay?

By: abigail beecher

abigail beecher — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 21:38:09 +0000

Gee,why is Jay relitigating the relitigating of the guy who lost the POTUS election?

Well, he wouldn’t want to focus on the guy who actually WON would he? I mean, why would Jay focus on the guy who has real power rather than the guy who doesn’t?

Wouldn’t be prudent. Easier to be the bully kicking sand in the face of the powerless rather than challenge the powerful.

Which is where “journalism” is these days.

Isn’t it Jay?

By: Procopius

Procopius — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 08:18:50 +0000

I don’t think the blame for this state of affairs is being allocated to the right people. What we see is not what the reporters report. What we see is what the publishers/owners of the media direct their employees, the editors, to allow to be published. There was some discussion of this (not nearly enough, in my opinion) during the Vietnam War. An especially egregious example was Henry Luce and Time Magazine. The reporters in Vietnam were writing stories accurately describing the burning of villages, the “tiger cages” for political opponents, the oppression of buddhist monks. The magazine was mostly printing stories from the Pentagon. Luce, the child of missionaries in China, was determined to use his magazine to fignt Communism. He probably honestly believed his friends, high ranking Pentagon and White House officials, knew the true situation better than the reporters in Vietnam because they had access to classified information the reporters did not. In any case all the major media were doing the same thing, ignoring the stories from witnesses, their reporters on the ground, in favor of the establishment version of the truth. Why should the current corporate owners of the media (and now there are so few of them) be any different?

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 21:02:22 +0000

Keep in mind that Jay wanted last year’s “Lie of the Year” to be categorized as moral depravity by Democrats but not an actual lie.

Speculating on Steven’s intent as a way to push a favorite partisan theory is punditry at best.

By: Steve Tuckner

Steve Tuckner — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 19:08:30 +0000

So we agree that the reason for “balance” is to deflect blame. The real question is what can replace “balance” that journalists now rely on? I don’t think that giving journalists a shot of courage will work either. What is needed is an alternative mode of operating that allows the cowardly journalist to either have more courage (because they have more support behind them) or a strategy to survive criticism while in search of the truth.

By: Jay Rosen

Jay Rosen — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 15:09:25 +0000

I like the way Greg Sargent of the Washington Post summarized my perspective. Better than I did!

“As you may recall, top Romney strategist isasking the fact checkers to revisit the Romney campaign’s epic Jeep-to-China falsehood. But why? Jay Rosen posits that it’s rooted in the inability of Republicans to come to terms with just how much of an outlier the GOP has become, something that continues to pose a dilemma to news orgs unwilling to shed the illusion that the party’s dishonesty is just business as usual.”