In today's New York Times, there is a great display of the dynamics that created the poor-quality horse-race reporting that has defined this campaign season. Here's the lede:
Responding to criticism from Democrats, campaign aides to Gov. Sarah Palin on Tuesday defended her practice of billing Alaska taxpayers for more than 300 nights she spent at home in her first year-and-a-half in office.
Jeez, our reader thinks, what is this criticism? How are the Democrats going after Palin now? The reader looks down and find that "Democrats immediately seized on the revelation on Tuesday" to criticize Palin. How? Well, there are no examples except that "Senator Barack Obama’s campaign circulated the Post article to reporters on Tuesday." That's it. In fact, as far as I can tell from a Nexis and Google search, no one in Obama's campaign has even commented on Palin's per diem.
But they're not the only Democrats out there! Two more, or rather two spokespeople for Democratic governors -- Ed Rendell in Pennsylvania and David Paterson in New York -- are quoted in the article as well. I spoke with them both this morning, and both told me that the New York Times had called them to ask whether their governors claimed similar expenses. Neither had issued statements or were acting as Democratic surrogates. Only one, Rendell's spokesperson, Chuck Ardo, said anything critical -- "To charge the citizens of any state for home visits is somewhat beyond the pale."
From this thin gruel, the Times decides to start the article with "Responding to criticism from Democrats"? It's just made up. But it's important for another reason: What we are talking about is the factual nature of Palin's term as governor. If newspaper readers believe that this is just partisan bickering, they won't care about the actual nature of the charges, which so far as I can tell were first raised by either the AP or the Washington Post without any Democratic involvement. Instead of doing their job by reviewing Palin's public record and explicitly saying, "We're reporters, we're checking out whether the Governor of Alaska paid herself to live at home," they create, out of whole cloth, a story about Democrats criticizing her. Is that good or useful journalism?
--Tim Fernholz
