By Marc Jampole
Today we saw a duel for spin control between our two most
prominent newspapers, the New York Times
and the Wall Street Journal.
The spin concerned how to interpret the response that New
Jersey Governor Chris Christie received in his first town hall meeting since
the Washington bridge scandal burst into national consciousness a few months
ago. It was the 110th town hall meeting
Christie has held since assuming the mantle of Governor of the Garden State.
These town hall meetings have come to symbolize the image of Christie that the
mainstream media liked to portray before Bridgegate: open, direct, frank,
straight-talking, action-oriented. This town hall meeting took place somewhere
in Republican-leaning Monmouth County near the Jersey coastline that Superstorm
Sandy battered.
The headlines in the print versions say it all:
WSJ: “Christie Style Is on Display” (which in the Internet version became the more objective “Christie
Hosts First Town Hall Since Scandal”)
NYT: “Christie Finds Hostility in Setting He Once Ruled” (which was also changed in the
Internet version to “For
Christie, Awkward Return to a Setting He Once Ruled”
The first
sentences of the respective stories—in print and online—seem to be describing
different events:
WSJ
He consoled displaced Superstorm Sandy victims,
joked about his undying love for Bruce Springsteen and even used salty language
at times as he bantered with detractors and admirers.
It was mostly vintage Chris Christie on Thursday at
the Republican governor's first town hall meeting since last June
NYT
When
Chris Christie started to talk over a complaining questioner, a signature
tactic of the bellicose, pre-scandal governor, the audience here briefly turned
on him.
“Answer
the question,” some shouted.
When
he took a microphone from a long-winded speaker, the man startled Mr. Christie
by snatching it right back.
Each story builds on the basic idea
established in the print version of the headline and the first paragraph. The NYT version basically shows a hostile
crowd fed up with Christie. The WSJ version
depicts an accomplished and popular politician using his skills to have the
audience eating out of his hand.
The rival newspapers even differ in
where they say the meeting took place:
the dateline in the Times
reads Port Monmouth, NJ, while the dateline in the Journal says the meeting occurred in Middleton, NJ. When you input
the two place names into Google Maps, they show up as being about four miles
away from each other, but we’re definitely talking about the same meeting. We
can recognize three or four of the same people in the same position relative to
the meeting room in the photos used in both papers.
Which story is true? As a progressive
who abhors the crony capitalism at which Christies seems to excel, I want to
side with the Times version of the
facts and a careful reading of the two stories does reveal that the Times has more specific detail. But
based on my decades as a news media analyst, I’m guessing that they’re both
wrong—and they’re both right.
The centrist New York Times and the right-leaning Wall Street Journal are both trying to define the storyline going
forward: The Journal wants Christie
to recover and be the victorious GOP hero in 2016, whereas the Times—I’m not sure what the Times wants when it comes to the Christie
story, but let’s assume that despite liking Christie in the past, it has turned
against the big guy because of Bridgegate.
We see different media and different
political leaders and parties vie to control public perception of a story all
the time. Centrists and left-leaners saw only the mostly good news in the
Congressional Budget Office analysis of the impact of raising the minimum wage
to $10.10 an hour on various aspects of the economy, whereas right-wingers
clutched to the probably wrong estimate that such an increase would lead to a
three tenths of one percent increase in unemployment. The rollout of the
Affordable Care Act and the investigation of the Benghazi incident are two
other recent examples of different parties and media outlets trying to place a
different spin on the same facts.
But just as often, the entire mass
media goes with the same spin, and usually it’s wrong. Let’s take two examples
from four years ago:
- All the media invoked the Glenn Beck rally on Constitution Mall in Washington, D.C. as proof of the ascendancy of the Tea Party in the lead-up to the 2010 Congressional elections and as proof that the media should be covering only Tea Party campaigns. But the most reputable sources estimated that the rally attracted 85,000, the same number who attended the mostly ignored and forgotten union-oriented rally in favor of progressive policies at the same location a few weeks later. Why was one the symbol of a political sea change while the other wasn’t?
- A 2010 study by the National Center for Health Statistics revealed that that more than 61% of all women live with someone else in a romantic or sexual relationship sometime in their lives without the benefit of marriage. All the news media, top to bottom, ignored or buried this finding, preferring instead to report that the study showed people who cohabit are 6% less likely to be together 10 years after marriage than people who don’t live together before getting hitched. Instead of presenting a truly dramatic change in social mores, the mainstream media preferred to depict a threat to the institution of marriage.
In both of these stories, myths and
political desires superseded a concern for the facts or their real
significance. These stories exemplify my belief that at the end of the day,
most mainstream media really do agree on the big stuff. Before questioning this
opinion, try to find the last time the Times
published any story that supported or discussed lifting the cap off income that
must be assessed the Social Security tax. Or go back to see how the Times initially covered the Occupy
Movement or the proposal by New York Mayor (then candidate) Bill De Blasio to
tax those who make a million a year or
more to pay for universal pre-K. The Times’
position on Occupy and pre-K funding was similar to the Wall Street Journal’s until the people spoke and made their
position clear.
What’s a
poor truth-seeker to do? For one thing, we should be aware of the predilections
and prejudices of all media. We should learn to suspect the reports when they
seem to go against common sense or they don’t have a lot of specifics. Beyond
that, it’s probably wise to read a variety of media from the left, right and
center, and to make sure that the stories come from different sources. For
example, you can typically read hundreds of versions of the same story using
the same facts but with slightly different headlines every day, since most of
the stories we see are reprints, interpretations or revisions of original
sources. Quite often whether you read the story in the St. Louis Dispatch or the Los
Angeles Times or see it on the local CBS affiliate in Denver, it’s the same
story written by the same Associated Press, Gannett or Bloomberg News reporter.
If you really want to know what the news is and what it means, you’ll have to
consult several independent sources, something that’s much harder to do since
the consolidation of ownership of media outlets.