VOICES
Calling a Lie a Lie
The dicey dynamics of exposing untruths
This is a corrected version of the story that appears in the print issue.
When a president's honesty is impugned, the stakes are high. A string of modern leaders — Johnson and Nixon, Reagan and Clinton — saw their administrations killed or maimed by official deceit. Now George W. Bush, after a long post-September 11 honeymoon, is facing scrutiny for this potentially fatal vice.
Yet as of early August, Bush seemed to be weathering his credibility crisis. A majority of Americans, polls say, still see him as honest (although in a July Time/CNN survey, more people voiced "doubts" about his reliability than judged him trustworthy). The issue may well fade before campaign 2004 hits full stride.
Why should this be the case? The record shows that Bush, although hardly a liar of Nixonian proportions, is no more truthful than any other recent chief executive. Whether the issue of Bush's credibility gap waxes or wanes, it's worth asking why the press sometimes seizes on a lie while at other times passes it by.
What catapulted Bush's credibility onto the front pages was the failure to find nuclear, chemical, or biological materials in Iraq last spring. Suddenly, the president's critics, including some hawks — call it invader's remorse — questioned whether Bush, in agitating for war, had misrepresented the state of Saddam Hussein's weapons program. In July, the administration confessed that the president had made false claims in his State of the Union address in January — specifically, his line that Saddam had tried to buy uranium from Africa — and "Uranium-gate" took root.
The scandal directed public attention to the scattered writings of journalists who had long argued that Bush lied quite regularly. Respected columnists, along with indie Web sites like Buzzflash, Bushlies, and Bushwatch, framed the uranium deceptions as part of the president's familiar M.O., which was to utter untruths with such nonchalance that no one could possibly believe he was deliberately lying. On close inspection, the Iraq claims turned out to be no more spurious than other statements Bush had made:
- On the economy, Bush said that the middle class would reap the gains of his tax cuts, which in fact were regressive.
- On the environment, he said that the science was incomplete about the reality of global warming, when in fact a scholarly consensus knows the phenomenon to be real.
- On abortion, he claimed that he banned funding for family-planning groups overseas because he didn't think public dollars should finance abortions — a statement that couldn't possibly be true since the money wasn't actually paying for abortions.
- On stem-cell research, he stated that the strictures he imposed still gave scientists more than sixty usable lines of such cells, when they had only one.
One could go on — and some respected opinion journalists, like The Nation's David Corn, The New York Times's Paul Krugman, and The New Republic's Jonathan Chait, did. But if the notion of Bush as a dissembler won currency in liberal quarters, it failed to gain traction in the news pages of mainstream papers, on the wire services, on the nightly network broadcasts, and in other bastions of the purportedly impartial press.
Uranium-gate, to a degree, changed that. Whether Bush has been
lying came under debate. Conservatives who once ignored such charges
felt compelled to respond. Discussions of Bush's honesty entered
the staid precincts of the news pages as well as the larger culture.
For all that, Bush's lying has yet to metastasize into a full-fledged scandal, and it may not. And that seems peculiar — not just because of Bush's track record, but also because the press normally will make hay of anything approximating a political lie.
Every day, journalists struggle to reconcile two clashing professional mandates. On the one hand, their stature rests on a reputation for fairness and objectivity; if they appear to be taking ideological shots at a president, their credibility suffers. Yet they also hearken to the muckraker's trumpet, the injunction to scrutinize and challenge the powerful. One principle calls for restraint and evenhandedness, the other for skepticism and zeal.
Almost uniquely, official deceptions allow reporters to align these goals. When a public figure lies, journalists can simultaneously flaunt their adversarial stance and style themselves defenders of truth.
To the axiom that journalists love lies, however, there's one important corollary — and it helps explain Bush's Teflon coating. Reporters like only certain lies. Perversely, those tend to be the relatively trivial ones, involving personal matters, such as Clinton's deceptions about his sex life. Similarly, Al Gore's talk of having inspired Love Story was seized on by reporters as a "lie," even though it was true. Here, the press can strut its skepticism without positioning itself ideologically.*
The lies reporters dislike, in contrast, center on what are usually more important matters: claims about public policy — taxes, abortion, the environment — where raising questions of truthfulness can seem awfully close to taking sides in a partisan debate. Most of Bush's lies have fallen in this demilitarized zone, where journalists fear to tread.
As part of its reverence for objectivity, journalism esteems balance. A reporter can demonstrate objectivity by quoting two opposing sides of an issue equally. In America's two-party system, the Republican and Democratic positions conveniently serve to demarcate those sides. Democratic claims receive every bit as much credence as Republican claims, and vice versa, and for a reporter to suggest otherwise is seen as joining the partisan fray.
In discussing which party's policies are preferable, this evenhandedness makes sense. But in reporting which party's claims are true, sometimes there's one right answer. Often, however, that truth isn't apparent to the lay person or the average reporter but only to experts — scientists, doctors, economists, or scholars. Reporters must themselves work through the numbers or diligently mine the experts' research to ferret out the truth — or, more likely, they fall back on presenting both sides' claims equally. Bound by professional strictures, news reporters can wind up giving a lie the same weight as the truth, while it falls to opinion writers to note when a president has lied about his tax cuts or stem-cell research policy.
Getting away with such policy prevarications has grown easier because of one last factor: the rise of the party message machines. In the 1970s and '80s, Republican leaders set out to coordinate their public arguments; under Clinton, the Democrats learned to do the same. Loyalty has come to mean not just voting with your party leader but mouthing the line on TV, to reporters, or in press releases. Faithful pundits, too, will parrot the official message. Thus, when a president lies about policy, so does a chorus of members of Congress, columnists, and commentators — and try calling every Republican or Democrat in Washington a liar. In contrast, on a lie about a personal matter like sex, the offender stands alone or with just a few loyalists, and so it's plainly his honesty alone that's at issue.
Although a policy matter, Uranium-gate has drawn stricter scrutiny than Bush's other lies because, as Slate's Tim Noah has noted, the administration itself admitted that Bush had misstated the facts. Although it backpedaled immediately thereafter, this admission let other Republicans distance themselves from the president; Senator Pat Roberts, for one, reversed himself on whether Congress should investigate the subject. Bush — or at least his team — was left isolated. Despite administration efforts to finger speechwriters, intelligence officials, or nonexistent fact-checkers, what had been a claim endorsed by all war hawks came instead to be seen as Bush's personal word, a test case of his integrity. To the workaday news reporter prizing impartiality, the act of questioning the claim's veracity morphed from a partisan act into a nonpartisan pursuit — indeed, into a paramount journalistic duty. A policy lie became something like a personal lie. Open season commenced.
Whatever the outcome of Uranium-gate, it's dismaying that the conventions of news reporting have combined with the mechanisms of Washington media politics to erect such high barriers to freethinking journalism. The current rules end up encouraging media hysteria about personal lies of scant importance and deterring inquiry into topics that matter incalculably more.
* The original version of this article, which was published in CJR's September/October issue, included, among the examples of the kind of lies reportlers tend to seize on, "Al Gore's talk of having inspired Love Story," and "John Kerry's failure to correct misimpressions that he's Irish." The article should have made clear that neither example was in fact a lie. Kerry neither claimed to be Irish nor denied being Jewish; misperceptions by other people do not constitute a lie. And, as CJR reported earlier (September/ October 2000), Love Story’s author, Erich Segal, had “confirmed in an interview with The New York Times that, as a young man at Harvard, Gore, along with the actor Tommy Lee Jones, was indeed the model for the male character."
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