The closer we get to the November election, the more I hear from people demanding what I interpret as a false equivalency in our stories and opinion pieces.
No. No. No. No. No.
The only standard that matters is truth.
If we write six stories in six days about lies, exaggerations or wacky statements by Ohio’s JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential candidate, we’re not going to write six stories about his Democratic opponent Tim Walz simply to match up. We follow the news. Also, Vance is from Ohio, which is what we cover. Of course, we focus on him.
False equivalence is a pox on our political discussion these days. Some believe newsrooms are unfair unless everything they do cuts straight down the middle. But news is messy, not some perfectly balanced math equation. There are times – like the week of the Republican convention – when one side commands most of the attention.
And there are eras, like the current one, when people in one party lie, exaggerate or make wacky statements more than the other. To do our job, we have to report that. To pretend otherwise is where the falsity arises.
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Although the vast majority of people I hear from applaud how we approach politics, I still hear from some who say our coverage of the Republican ticket is biased.
It’s not. It’s truth. Readers who say they don’t like it are really saying they don’t want the truth. They want bias, but on their side of the equation.
The latest jabs have come because of some appearances I’ve made on Nicolle Wallace’s MSNBC show, Deadline: White House. She has invited me on to talk about the Ohio viewpoint on Vance and the presidential race.
I’m a Wallace fan, as are quite a few others across the country. A strategy of the right, though, is to claim that MSNBC is biased to the left the way Fox News is biased to the right, and anyone who appears on MSNBC is showing a bias. That’s another false equivalence. MSNBC is nothing like Fox News.
I’ve argued all year that Fox News is the single biggest threat to democracy in America. Huge numbers of Americans watch it, believing it to be a news outlet that purveys the truth. Fox News is not a news outlet. It is a money machine for Rupert Murdoch and his family that has learned to rake in billions by lying. People on Fox News lie by the minute, seriously undermining faith in our institutions.
If you listen to Wallace and her guests on MSNBC, however, you don’t hear lies. They tell the truth.
MSNBC is not a counterpart to Fox News. There is no counterpart to Fox News. Other broadcaster don’t have a business model based on lying. You might not like what Wallace and others say on MSNBC, because they portray your party in a poor light, but that doesn’t mean they don’t tell the truth. They do.
I wish one of the major news organizations – one with resources our newsroom lacks -- would do a daily fact check on all the lies told in the previous 24 hours by Fox News. It would hold this dangerous organization accountable.
Think about it: Plenty of news organizations do fact checks on statements made by politicians, while Fox News, which reaches far more people, lies with abandon.
Bill Adair is the founder of PolitiFact, which has won a Pulitzer Prize for fact checking. He has a book coming out in October called “Beyond the Big Lie,” which examines the state and evolution of political lies in America. I’ve known him since our newsroom partnered with PolitiFact more than a decade ago, and he calls from time to time to hear the viewpoint from a regional newsroom. He sent me an advance copy of the book, which I’ll write about in more detail closer to publication.
It’s worth reading just for the prologue, a powerful anecdote that I won’t spoil. Overall, the book lays out a strong case for America to get back to holding people accountable for lies. We’ve become numb to lying since the rise of Donald Trump, who has lied too many times to count.
And the book takes Fox News to task repeatedly for its lies.
The only way to stop Fox News from undermining our political discourse is to start fighting back, to put a spotlight on the many ways it lies. Yes, I understand that Fox News viewers likely would not see those fact checks, but calling out the lies day after day would have an impact. The alternative – doing nothing – ensures that Fox News continues to wreck our discourse, continues arming a large part of America with information that is false.
Journalists have a responsibility here. Fox News has corrupted what we do by purporting to be one of us, relying on our credibility to spread damaging lies. We have a duty to protect a profession that has been a key check on government since the republic was founded.
As for MSNBC, if Wallace invites me on to her show, I’ll be there. She’s a journalist who fights falsehoods every weekday. The more journalists who do that, the better our chances, as a nation, of once again having discussions based on truth, not the baloney proffered by Fox News.
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