The Facts as the Media Defines Them: MSNBC’s Fact Check
Thursday, January 24th, 2008
I have grown to appreciate Pat Buchanan as a commentator in recent years. I definitely do not agree with his stance on illegal immigration and super-small government that is incapable of helping out the neediest among us. Buchanan has been an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq and is the surprising voice of reason in many conversations in his role as an MSNBC commentator. The Columbia Journalism Review has an online article regarding Buchanan’s success as the lone fact checker in recent election coverage on MSNBC.
The tiff between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton has relied heavily on taking things out of context. Senator Clinton and her vice presidential candidate/husband have done what Republicans have done so successfully over the last decade: pick apart sentences and parse bill language without context. Obama can be accused of increasing the racial aspects of the presidential campaign and occasionally taking pieces of Clinton’s past out of context. While MSNBC host Amy Robach and producers were content to facilitate the perpetuation of unfounded arguments with sound bites, Buchanan’s attempt to place the arguments of both sides into context was a breath of fresh air.
Media consumers across the country are getting tired of “truth squads” within campaigns as well as “fact check” sessions on news networks. The words “truth” and “fact” mean nothing in national campaigns as candidates frame issues to bend objective information into something palatable to a slim majority. The two solutions to the problem of facts and truth on the campaign trail have their faults. A boycott of networks like MSNBC would be great though there are bits of insight from people like Buchanan in the expanse of garbage spewed by Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson. The other option is to continue the flood of blogs, podcasts and online videos devoted to picking apart individual claims by politicians. I like the idea behind democratizing political fact checking but I am not convinced that the same biases that pervade political campaigns won’t pop up in citizen fact checking.
