A Modest Proposal to Media: Please Replace “Said” with “Claimed”
“Should the Times be a Truth Vigilante?” is the title of an online column today by New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane. It’s raising a lot of dust, and well it should. Is there something lawless about printing the truth? Are reporters some sort of lynch mob? Brisbane chose a terrible word for his headline. What’s more, news consumers have been expressing their frustation for years about politicians and public figures uttering lie after lie and getting away with it, while news organization stand by abetting the outrage by uncritically repeating these statements. By now, readers might well appreciate a reader going rogue and unleashing a fury of anger on an obfuscating source. To cut Brisbane some slack, I think he’s asks readers if Times reporters and editors should be calling out the falsehoods uttered by public figures–calling a lie a lie line by line–or continue simply reporting the statements of those figures, surround those statements with deep and solid reporting, allow readers to judge the veracity of those remarks, and leave the up-front opining on such statements to features clearly marked “News Analysis” and to writers and columnists on the Editorial and Op-Ed pages. While I’ve also long been frustrated with news reporting’s refusal to call a lie a lie (i.e. the Swift Boating of John Kerry), I think before we make reporters into referees of truth–which could make reading a news story as boring as watching a football game when a disputed touchdown has been sent up to the replay booth for labored review–there is a very simple way to ameliorate much of the problem. I recommend that news organizations institue the following policy.
Reporters and editors at newspapers and all news orgs should routinely replace the word “said,” as in “Mitt Romney SAID President Obama apologized for America”–which is the false statement at issue in the public editor’s column–to”Mitt Romney CLAIMED President Obama apologized for America.” This would signal clearly to readers that Romney’s statement was an assertion of opinion, not a statement of objective or established fact.
I’ve been doing this for years as I read news article and I urge you to do it for yourself. Try it the next time you read or hear a news story that does little more than give a platform to a typically tendentious statement by say, a press flack blowing smoke about a defective consumer product, duly repeated in a news story. Like this,
“Spokesman Joe Flaherty said that Prostate & Grumble uses only the finest materials in assembling their baby cribs. Flaherty also said the company had received no other complaints about their cribs collapsing in a heap.” Now, try this: “Spokesman Joe Flaherty claimed that Prostate & Grumble uses only the finest materials in assembling their baby cribs. Flaherty also claimed the company had received no other complaints about their cribs collapsing in a heap.” It takes the unearned authority away from the statement, rendering it less powerful, not so magisterial.
A final point regarding Mr. Brisbane’s column. Why did the Times close comments online so quickly? Yes, there was lots of pushback, but so what. Guess they can’t handle the truth.
Please try it and let me know what you think. If you like it as much as I do, please recommend it to your favorite news organization.
Certainly worth trying in cases where the reporter doesn’t know whether the statement is true. But it ducks the larger question of when is it the reporter’s obligation to check and correct claims. To say “always” is to ignore the pressure to report the news quickly and the impossibility of always checking everything. (Or so I “claimed” when i was a reporter.)
Thanks for reading my blog and for commenting, especially since you were a reporter. I’ve never been a reporter myself, but a member of the media as a book publisher. I agree that my modest proposal doesn’t solve the larger issue of when a statement or a claim should be checked for its accuracy, but I find it improves a lot of otherwise deplorable reporting. An example is this one from last Sunday’s NY Times, which I wrote about over the weekend on my blog in a post called “From the Annals of Colossal Republican Nerve & Media Failure.” In an article about Pres Obama’s recess appointments, “Appointments Challenge Senate Role, Experts Say,” reporter Jonathan Weisman gave an unwarranted platform to David Addington, V-P’s former chief of staff. Readers are blithely informed in the article:
“The president, [Addington} SAID, violated constitutional law.
‘I’m kind of surprised he did it, because more so than most presidents, this guy has a personal ability to assess the constitutional implications,’ Mr. Addington SAID, referring to Mr. Obama’s experience as a teacher of constitutional law. ‘It’s flabbergasting and, to be honest, a little chilling.’”
Nowhere does Weisman’s article point to the too-rich irony that that statement was made by a member of an administration that never failed to arrogate more power to itself. Surely, Weisman could have pointed at this without injecting the dreaded appearance of undue opinion-making into his piece. His editor should have insisted on more perspective in the story. But had they just inserted CLAIMED for SAID, it would have injected some warranted skepticism into the story, I believe.
Thanks again, Philip