2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumHow telling. Romney pollster: You fact-checkers won't run our campaign!!!
Critics have for many years inveighed against "false equivalence" or "false balance" in the mainstream press. This long crusade has finally achieved its grail, or at least a version of it: In this campaign season, political reporters have been shucking the old he-said-she-said formulation and directly declaring that certain claims are false. This new approach was signaled on Sunday, when, as James Fallows has noted, The New York Times, in a front-page story, flatly stated that a Romney ad was "falsely charging that Mr. Obama has 'quietly announced' plans to eliminate work and job training requirements for welfare beneficiaries."
But what if it turns out that when the press calls a lie a lie, nobody cares?
Here in Tampa, the new assertiveness is getting its first test on a big stage, and so far the results are not encouraging. As Ben Smith of BuzzFeed has pointed out, the Romney campaign is simply swatting aside the media's objections to its welfare ad: "We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers," said Neil Newhouse, a Romney pollster.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/were-not-going-to-let-our-campaign-be-dictated-by-fact-checkers/261674/
progressivebydesign
(19,458 posts)We've been waiting for you!
As for the Romney Campaign.. they won't let their campaign of lies be dictated by FACTS. Pretty much. I think they may have pissed off the media too many times... Bush got a pass from the reporters on the road because he was entertaining, and treated them like frat brothers. Romney's camp treats them with disdain, and actually calls them names to their face.
You can't treat people like shit and expect them to go to bat for you. The journalists are not "the help." You can't fire them, Mitt.
LiberalFighter
(51,170 posts)If they did then they wouldn't need to fact check them. And they would have a better campaign.