Here’s something you might not realize about the newspaper, or publication website, where you’re reading this column — the company that publishes the news and information for Greater Media Newspapers has more moral integrity than many of the national news organizations, at least when it comes to paid political advertising.
Here’s why: Back in the day when I was executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers — and with the full support and encouragement of the corporate legal department — we instituted a policy that we would simply not publish political advertisements that we knew to be untrue. The thinking was relatively simple. Newspapers, and other disseminators of information, can be held accountable in many circumstances if they knowingly publish information that they know is untrue, or potentially libelous. Granted, there are exceptions; for example, if the untrue statements come in the form of clearly recognizable opinion, or are spoken in a public forum, like a speech, in open court, or in court documents, among others. But we, and our parent corporation, Greater Media Inc., felt that it just wasn’t worth the risk.
We certainly didn’t have the resources to fact-check every political advertisement submitted by a candidate or a campaign, but we did what we could. If a claim was made in an ad submitted for publication that failed our sniff test, we fact-checked to the best of our ability. And if we believed that the ad played fast and loose with the facts, we gave the advertiser two choices. They could rewrite the advertisement, or they could try to place it somewhere that didn’t have such rigorous standards. If they declined to reword the advertisement, we turned it down. We apply the same standards to letters to the editor.
We weren’t looking for a pat on the back, andwe certainly aren’t unique. In fact, the New Jersey Press Association regularly publishes guidelines for political advertising, and in their question-and-answer forums have frequently stated that newspapers, radio stations and television stations are responsible for the ads they run, in the same way they’re responsible for the statements made in their news sections. I don’t know if this issue has ever been adjudicated in state court — but most news outlets in New Jersey comply simply because it’s the right thing to do.
Which is the main reason the national controversy last week over certain GOP presidential candidates running television ads that are outright lies and distortions made me scratch my head. At issue in particular was an ad from Mitt Romney’s campaign that completely misrepresented statements by Barack Obama. In that one, Obama is shown saying, “If we keep talking about the economy we’re going to lose,” as evidence that the president simply doesn’t care about the plight of his suffering constituents. In reality, Obama said those words, but he was talking about what his opponent, John McCain, had said about the issue.
When confronted about the patently unfair, and untrue distortion, folks in Romney’s campaign glibly explained that they were only playing “hardball,” and Obama should get used to it, because there was more of the same coming down the pike. “We’re not going to take our foot off the gas pedal,” said senior aide Eric Fehrnstrom.
Around the same time, Rick Perry’s campaign aired a commercial head-butting Obama for calling Americans lazy. In reality, Obama had made a comment saying that the federal government and many corporations had been lazy in recent years when it came to attracting foreign investment dollars. When confronted with the unfair distortion, spokesmen for Perry’s campaign said pretty much the same thing as Romney’s people — all’s fair in love and war, so get used to it.
There hasn’t been any coverage of the trend of Republicans making it up — neither on conservative networks, nor among pundits of similar political persuasion. But what’s confused me is that those on the liberal side — like the bleeders at MSNBC, and on the op-ed pages of The New York Times — have spent so much time wagging the fingers of shame at the candidates and their campaigns. And to date, I haven’t seen a single one of them pointing the finger where it belonged — at the news organizations and networks that allowed the untrue advertising to be aired in the first place. I don’t imagine we’ll see that happening, either, because there’s a whole lot of money to be made in a presidential campaign from advertising sales to various campaigns, and it doesn’t seem like anybody at the networks is eager to turn it down simply because it’s a humongous lie.
Which brings me back to my original statement — that the folks who own and produce your local newspaper, like this one, have more moral integrity and belief in truth, and fair play, than many of the big boys and girls at the national companies.
This won’t come as a surprise to most of the people involved in New Jersey journalism, but it’s something to keep in mind while you’re reading, or listening.
I think I might be just about done writing about music, because I always get something wrong and get myself in trouble. Regular readers will remember the “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy” imbroglio of recent weeks, but what they don’t know is that I barely escaped another blunder when I wrote a headline for one of those columns referencing the lyrics to Steppenwolf’s classic “Born to Be Wild.” See, I’d always thought the lyrics to that song began, “Bitchin’Ford a runnin’, head out on the highway,” but when I Googled it before publication, I learned that the actual lyric is “Get your motor runnin’, head out on the highway.”
Another disaster narrowly averted. It’s a good thing I wasn’t writing about the Jimi Hendrix classic “Purple Haze,” where the actual lyric is “excuse me, while I kiss the sky,” but I always thought was “excuse me, while I kiss this guy.”
Do any of you readers have similar stories? Send me some of your best, and I’ll share.
Gregory Bean is the former executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at [email protected].