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Reporting the controversy

Reporting the controversy

Last updated on: July 29, 2009 at 4:27 pm by Fred Clark

Reporting the controversy 2009-07-29T16:27:29-04:00 Fred Clark

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We've been thrown a lifeline, given an unexpected and probably undeserved second chance. The newspaper business is being swept away but here is an opportunity, if we have the sense to take it, to regain our footing and step back onto solid ground.

And it comes from the unlikeliest of places.

The YouTube clip shows Rep. Mike Castle, R-Del., taking questions from his constituents at a town hall meeting in Georgetown, Del. "This lady in red has had her hand up for some time," the avuncular congressman says, pointing to a woman in the audience. And then bedlam ensues.

The woman is a "birther." Working herself up into a frenzy, she begins shouting that President Barack Obama is "a citizen of Kenya" and not of the United States. The crowd goes wild. "I don't want this flag to be changed," she shouts, choking up with anger, "I want my country back!"

"If you're referring to the president there," Castle responds, "He is a citizen of the United States." The crowd boos and shouts him down.

So here, then, is our chance — a chance to start doing again what it was newspapers were supposed to be doing all along: Telling the truth.

Outside of the sports pages, we don't really do that much anymore. We don't check things out and find out what are, in fact, the facts of the matter. We don't evaluate claims to see if they correspond with any discernible reality. We just repeat the claims. We "report the controversy," but timidly refuse to suggest whether the facts support one set of claims or the other. We have pitched our tent in the excluded middle and abdicated any responsibility to check things out.

"One faction claims A," we report — if you can even call that reporting, "While another faction claims Not-A." It's even worse than that, actually. Whenever anyone, anywhere makes any claim "A," we don't go looking to see whether or not A is actually true, we instead go off in search of some representative to assert the competing claim of Not-A. If we have to invent such a representative, or to elevate some barking mad lunatic to play that role, then we will do so in the name of "balance." Balance between A and Not-A. That's another name for madness, but we'd rather be crazy than be accused of bias.

This cowardly irresponsibility is what is killing newspapers.

We're busily pointing fingers at a thousand other causes, desperate to blame our slow death on something beyond our control. It's Craigslist killing classified revenue. Or the Internet. Or the geometric explosion of competing news outlets. No. Those things don't help, but those aren't the main problem. The main problem is that we're no longer doing our job. We no longer think that it is our job to do our job. The main problem is that we refuse to tell the truth for fear that someone, somewhere, might disagree with it.

So the demonstrable nuttiness of the birthers seems like exactly the slap in the face that newspapers desperately need. Here is a claim so outrageously false and so easily disproved that it exposes the absurdity of our irresponsible "report the controversy, not the facts of the matter" betrayal of our vocation.

We needed this. We needed to be confronted with obvious, ugly and ridiculous lies. We needed to trip over a supposed "controversy" that no reasonable person could ever think of as actually controversial. We needed a situation in which we could see, hold, touch, taste and smell the undisputed and undisputable facts of the matter and have some crazy person in a red shirt stand up and angrily deny that reality should be allowed to have any bearing on the claims we make about the world.

It's a lifeline, a chance to grab hold and pull ourselves back to shore. All we need to do to seize that lifeline is to say that the truth is true and the lies are not. All we need to do is our job. And in this case that would seem to be gloriously easy.

But yet I don't know if we're quite able to do it. Old habits die hard and our truth-telling muscles have atrophied from disuse. We've reached for the lifeline, but our hands have grown too weak to grasp it firmly.

Here are the first four paragraphs of our paper's article on Castle's encounter with birther insanity:

When a woman in a red shirt stood up in a Georgetown senior center on June 30 and began yelling at U.S. Rep. Mike Castle about President Barack Obama's birth certificate, her rant was caught on video and has since become a TV and Internet sensation.

Clips from it have been featured worldwide — on CNN, MSNBC, the Drudge Report, Rush Limbaugh's radio talk show — and catapulted the woman into the unlikely role as a spokeswoman for the "birther" movement, whose members question whether Obama is a native-born American and eligible to serve as president.

While there are some die-hard conservatives who truly believe Obama was born in Kenya and not Hawaii, the impact of the Georgetown video shows how public perceptions can be easily distorted in the digital age, said Josh Dyck, an assistant professor of American politics at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

"The existence of the Internet and the existence of cable news allow things like this to become sort of bigger than they are, quickly," he said. "There is this very strong anti-Obama sentiment that exists among conservatives in this country, and so anything that can be latched onto sort of manifests."

We report on the existence of the controversy. We repeat the competing claims of the full-gonzo whackjob lunatics. Then we cite an outside expert — we don't want to be seen as saying this ourselves, because who are we to say what is and isn't true — who provides some context and background on how widely this claim seems to be embraced, prefaced with the timid, qualifying "while … some …" construction.

It's only in the ninth and 10th paragraphs that we finally back into a statement of the facts of the matter:

Theories that Obama was born abroad abounded during the presidential campaign, even after an official Hawaii birth certificate was produced, along with August 1961 birth notices from two Honolulu newspapers. Numerous lawsuits and emergency appeals were lodged challenging Obama's eligibility to be president. All were rebuffed.

Allegations that Obama is not a U.S. citizen have been refuted by state officials in Hawaii, who say they've checked health department records and verified that Obama was born there Aug. 4, 1961.

It took us eight paragraphs to screw up our courage enough to state the facts and side with them by using the words "rebuffed" and "refuted." Good words, those, even if they don't quite capture the plain-spoken punch of words like "true" and "false."

But maybe it's a start. The birthers are insanely devoted to demonstrable lies, but no more so than the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" were five years ago. And five years ago our paper didn't have the courage or the integrity to use words like "rebuffed" or "refuted" when we were feverishly "reporting the controversy" and avoiding the facts of that story. Baby steps.

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