Mark Schmitt

Factcheck.org Strikes Out (Again!)

I"ve picked on factcheck.org before, because I find it very disturbing that they have assumed the role of ultimate arbiter of truth in political advertising and policy claims, despite being extremely amateurish and easily played by powerful interests. Another good example today:

An e-mail from factcheck.org challenges an ad related to the digital television transition. The underlying topic is is arcane, but stick with me. I happen to know a little about this, going back to the mid-1990s, when I followed it in the Telecom Act of 1996. In a nutshell, Congress long ago decided that we should shift television broadcasting to a new digital format, on a new section of the broadcast spectrum. Existing broadcasters will get new frequencies for free, which will allow them to develop many new ways to make money, but in return, they are expected to give up their old analog channels, which will eventually make that part of the spectrum available for other uses. Complicated as it is, the basic political dynamic here has long been that the broadcasters, by consensus one of if not the most powerful lobby groups in Washington, want the new digital frequencies, but also want to hold onto their old frequencies.

The ad in question focused on one of the new uses for the old analog TV spectrum: The newly available frequencies could be used by police and fire departments that currently don't have enough frequencies for their radios, or for new systems they want to develop. (There's something about the existing analog TV frequencies that makes them "good spectrum," and thus very useful for these purposes, but that's beyond my expertise.)  In the fight against the broadcasters, these "first responders" make an appealing, succinct case for a rapid transition. The ad in question was sponsored by the "High-Tech DTV Coalition" and urges viewers to contact a group called "Support America's First Responders," which apparently is supported by Motorola. Factcheck asserts that the ad might have been paid for by Motorola, which would potentially benefit from the rapid transition by selling new equipment to police and fire departments.

The "first responders" are not quite central to the decade-long fight over digital broadcasting, and so the ad's attempt to compress the issue into something understandable might be considered a little manipulative. And if Motorola paid for the ad, sure, that should be disclosed. But factcheck.org makes only one factual point about the ad: they complain that the ad says that the digital transition "is a 'win-win,' implying that there are no losers." Jeez, "win-win" is one of the half-dozen most overused expressions in business and politics in this country today, and I wish everyone took it so literally -- that would really be a "win-win"! But the ad didn't say there are no losers. It made the perfectly accurate point that consumers are winners if they get the benefits of digital TV, and police and fire departments, among others, would be winners if they got access to new broadcast frequencies.

Factcheck says this about the losers: Consumers "would be forced either to junk their [TV] set and buy a new digital set, or to obtain a new converter that manufacturers estimate will cost about $50...Also not mentioned is that taxpayers will be asked to contribute up to $3 billion to subsidize the conversion. That money would come from the proceeds expected from auctioning off some of the airwaves now used by TV broadcasters."

But the subsidies, if they really reach $3 billion, would be intended to cover the cost of converters. So both these things can't be true. To the extent there are subsidies, consumers aren't losers. And it is only accurate to say that "taxpayers will be asked to contribute" to the subsidies if it would be reasonable to think that you could take back the analog frequencies, auction them off, and give all the proceeds to the Treasury. But you can't. If government takes back the analog frequencies, it could only be as part of a deal whereby the public (which owns the airwaves, by the way) gives the new frequencies to the broadcasters, in exchange for their old frequencies, which are then auctioned to pay for the transition that makes it possible for everyone to get TV on the new frequencies, and thus makes the change worthwhile to broadcasters. That's the "win-win" bargain.  Without that deal, there's no auction, and thus no money for the "taxpayers." It's the rare case of government thinking ahead and trying to structure a good deal that works reasonably well for everyone. And the only obstacle to this sweet deal is that the broadcasters want it all. They want an even sweeter deal, where they get the new frequencies, but don't have to give up their old ones, which they also got for free, and which will have new money-making potential after the transition.

After that excursion, I have two simple questions for factcheck.org, which have to do with their methodology and not the arcana of spectrum policy:

1. This is the first e-mail I've received from factcheck.org in several weeks. Your web site shows that you haven't released any fact checks since October 28. In the two and a half weeks since then, there have been two state gubernatorial elections, a couple of dozen controversial state ballot initiatives, and lots of last minute ads on all of those. The president gave a speech in Pennsylvania making some very specific charges about Iraq war opponents "rewriting history." The congressional majority fell out over issues of tax cuts, oil drilling in ANWR, and spending cuts. The president withdrew a Supreme Court nominee and put forward a new one more amenable to the hard right. Print and broadcast ads were run on these issues and many others.  On what basis did you conclude that this mildly misleading ad that stretched the term "win-win" was the only ad in this entire eventful period that deserved a "fact check"??

2. Did contacts from any of the well-funded lobbyists on the broadcasters' side influence your choice of this topic over the many others available in this period or the substance of your critique? Did you contact advocates on the other side of the issue, or neutral experts, to obtain any perspective on the underlying issue??

And finally, a question for me: "Why do you get so worked up about this?" Answer: It's because I believe there is a real potential for a neutral arbiter of factual claims in ads and speeches. Factcheck.org has occupied that space. There's only room for one. And it is infuriating that they allow themselves to be spun, played and manipulated by some of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington. They must do better, or else their reports should be considered not credible by the national media, and some other organization should take over their role.

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Hertzberg gets the Kempton Treatment

I was fortunate yesterday to get a slightly-early copy of a new book: Hendrik Hertzberg's Politics: Observations & Arguments, 1966-2004. My immediate reaction was that this 650-page collection seemed almost like a counterpart to the retrospective of columns and articles by Murray Kempton published about a decade ago, Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events, right down to the introduction and jacket blurb from David Remnick of the New Yorker. (My memory tricked me here: Remnick wrote a blurb, but not the introduction to the 1996 Kempton collection, although he did write an introduction to the more recent Modern Library reissue of Kempton's Part of Our Time, his book on the 1930s.) But that seems bizarre: The Kempton collection appeared when the author was in his late 70s, and Hertzberg is not only young, he seems even younger. It is astonishing to think that his career goes back to 1966, as editor of the National Student Association magazine, especially for a lot of readers who only became acquainted with Hertzberg's work when he returned to the New Yorker and began writing the lead political piece in Talk of the Town most weeks. Other than the New York Times op-ed page, or perhaps a Time or Newsweek column, that's probably the most widely read political slot there is.

The comparison with Kempton goes further, though, because you can't name another weekly writer about politics whose work retains any interest even two months after it's written. Kempton's mind-altering syntax, his obsessive moral complexity, his dedication to leaving poignant questions in the air rather than tying down every loose rope, make even short columns from 50 years ago, about politicians or labor leaders you've never heard of, as fresh as the Iliad. I admire David Broder, but the only reason to read a Broder column from the 1988 presidential primaries, for example, would be for seriously wonky research purposes. (Which is not to say that such writers can't write great books with lasting value, just that their weekly output does no more than it is intended to do, which is to enlighten the readers in that week.) I suppose some people think George Will is such a writer, since they buy his collected columns, but to me, regardless of whether I agree with him, his columns seem reliably faux-erudite and formulaic. I haven't read mch the Hertzberg collection yet, but he is such a writer and I'm looking forward to it.

(It should go without saying, by the way, that if you are reading this, and you have never read anything by Murray Kempton, you must. I was fortunate enough to live in New York during his last flourishing, as a columnist for New York Newsday, which published from 1985 to 1995 and is probably the only paper I ever loved. I sometimes try to reproduce that experience of tabloid fun mixed with serious insight by reading the New York Post and the Financial Times, and nothing else, but it's not quite the same.)

As soon as I got the Hertzberg book, I l flipped pages looking for a piece that he had written in the New Republic in June 1987, which I vaguely remembered as a profound thought about politics and culture. I recalled it as a long essay -- to be more specific, I can picture myself reading it standing on the uptown #1 train at the end of a day shortly before I moved to Washington -- but in fact the key insight is in just a paragraph, really a single sentence, in a column reacting to the newspaper-photo evidence of adultery that abruptly ended Gary Hart's front-running campaign for the 1988 Democratic nomination:

The gross violation of the privacy of Gary Hart, Lee Hart, and their children is part of a general degradation of the public sphere and a general weakening of the distinction between the public and the private realms of life in the United States. This is a social phenomenon with many sources -- the Reagan Administration's deligitimation of public action, the human potential movement's hostility toward "hypocrisy" and exaltation of "authenticity," and the feminists' dictum that the personal is the political, to name three. But none of this justifies the Miami Herald and the Washington Post any more than the correlation between poverty and crime justifies mugging.

There are so many heavy ideas in that sentence, some of which are perhaps infuriating, an insight so complicated that if David Brooks had it, he would parlay it into a three-book contract. (What a smooth cheap shot, coming out of nowhere!) But the idea that stuck with me, and that has seemed hugely relevant through all the Clinton melodrama and into the Bush era, is that there is a symbiotic relationship between the weakening of the boundaries of private life, and the denigrating of the public sphere. The more we made the private public, the more we would erode the idea of the public sphere as a separate one with its own moral obligations. The more the boundary is smudged, the more private virtues substitute for public duties, and private vices are allowed to distort and twist the public debate about health care or taxation, the more illegitimate and merely a matter of individual preference will the larger moral choices we make as a society seem.

This is obviously a helpful insight into Bill Clinton, especially coming at the moment when he seems to have almost given up, and allowed so many of his television interviews to be devoted more to his private shame than his public record, rather than holding firm as he did in 1998. But it is also key to the understanding of George W. Bush's bizarre glorification of private morality. "I will restore honor and integrity to the White House" meant absolutely nothing more than that he would refrain from screwing the interns, for which we are expected to give thanks. Meanwhile, to take only the most obvious of a hundred examples, Bush is entirely comfortable gleefully denying gays and lesbians the right to form loving legal partnerships, safe in the certainty that he himself is "a good man," "not a hater," and not "against" homosexuals as people. The only reason that the press and public buys for one minute the idea that Bush's private decency -- which for these purposes we will not question -- somehow substitutes for or offsets his public endorsement of cruelty is that they made private behavior and attitude the ultimate measure of fitness to serve in public office.

Hertzberg's point also suggests why it is not sufficient simply to show that Newt Gingrich cheats on multiple wives with progressively younger women, that Bill Bennett spends his evenings in his underwear pumping hundred-dollar coins into slot machines installed in his VIP suite, that Dick Cheney says fuck. All true, and these are all creepy characters. But exposing them does nothing to restore the idea that we have a public sector in which we as a society have an obligation to ensure that people have the means to make a living, that some goods belong to all of us and cannot be parceled out to owners. By making "hypocrisy" the principle standard of morality, it reinforces the idea that private acts and attitudes prevail over public deeds, especially for politicians. Perhaps I'm reading too much into a sentence, but it is amazing that Hertzberg understood in 1987 exactly where we were headed.