FAIR MEDIA ADVISORY: Are All Candidates' Exaggerations Considered Equal?
November 3, 2000
While mainstream media outlets have been quick to charge Vice President Al Gore with exaggerations after the presidential debates and throughout the campaign, a series of comparable exaggerations and distortions made by Republican candidate George W. Bush have received far less coverage.
Media were fervently interested in Gore's claim in the first debate (10/3/00) that he accompanied FEMA director James Lee Witt on a trip to Texas-- hardly an issue of pressing public concern, yet a Nexis news database search shows that Witt's name comes up some 250 times in post-debate coverage.
Media also showed a keen interest in Gore's recounting the story of a Sarasota, Florida student who was forced to stand in her science class due to overcrowding. While many reports chalked it up as another Gore embellishment, few journalists acknowledged that the story was essentially accurate, and can be confirmed by reports from the local newspaper documenting the overcrowding problems that have resulted from a $17 million budgetary shortfall (Salon, 10/11/00).
Strangely, the media seem less interested in Gore's distortions when they are directly connected to public policy issues. During the second debate, Gore claimed that "for 24 years I have never been afraid to take on the big drug companies."
In fact, one of the first major issues of the campaign involved Gore's efforts on behalf of drug companies to get South Africa to stop manufacturing affordable versions of patented AIDS drugs--a life-saving move that is allowed under international trade laws, but would have threatened pharmaceutical industry profits. (See Extra!, 9-10/99, http://www.fair.org/extra/9909/gore-aids.html .) FAIR could find no mainstream news outlet that brought up this contradiction.
In contrast, media seemed uninterested in Bush's distortions across the board, whether the issue was Bush's personal record or important policy matters. Here are some examples of what would seem to be Bush's deliberate stretching of the truth during the debates:
* Bush commented during the second debate (10/11/00), "There's only been one governor ever elected to back-to-back four-year terms, and that was me." What Bush doesn't mention is that Texas governors served two-year terms until voters approved an extension of the term of office in the 1970s. The last governor to serve 2-year terms left office in 1979. Prior to that, five different governors had served four two-year terms, duplicating Bush's re-election feat in terms of years served. We could find no reference in the Nexis database to this blatant resume-padding.
*In the same debate, Bush said that with his tax plan, "by far the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder." In fact, according to Congress' bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, households making less than $40,000-- roughly the bottom half of the economic ladder-- would receive only 10 percent of Bush's income tax cut.
This does not include the effects of eliminating the estate tax; an analysis by Citizens for Tax Justice found that the total Bush tax plan gives less than 13 percent of its cuts to the bottom 60 percent of households, and 51 percent to the top 5 percent. Only a handful of journalists (notably the New York Times' Richard Stevenson, columnist Paul Krugman and the Washington Post editorial page) pointed out this whopper.
* Again in the second debate, Bush claimed that "We spend $4.7 billion a year on the uninsured in the state of Texas." But "we" turns out not to mean his state government-- it means anyone within the boundaries of Texas, including federal government officials. The state of Texas actually spends less than $1 billion on the uninsured, with the rest of Bush's figure coming from private, local and federal spending. According to USA Today, one of the few outlets to scrutinize Bush's claim, hospitals in Texas account for almost half of such spending (10/18/00).
* Touting his support for a patients' bill of rights in the third debate (10/17/00), Bush said: "As a matter of fact, I brought Republicans and Democrats together to do just that in the state of Texas, to get a patients' bill of rights through."
In fact, Governor Bush vetoed the Patients' Bill of Rights the Texas State Legislature passed in 1995. When it was passed again in 1997, the bill's support was strong enough to withstand his threatened veto (New York Times, 10/18/00).
Most of Bush's debate distortions, and several others like them, were mentioned in scattered articles in various news outlets. But none of them became the focus of sustained media attention, like Gore's FEMA gaffe or the Florida school crowding anecdote. And none of them resulted in media head-scratching about why Bush can't seem to tell the truth.
"The story line is Bush isn't smart enough and Gore isn't straight enough," according to ABC's Cokie Roberts. "In Bush's case, you know he's just misstating as opposed to it playing into a story line about him being a serial exaggerator" (Washington Post, 10/15/00). A "story line," of course, is another way of saying that the media have preconceived notions about the candidates, which Roberts suggests are influencing reporters' decisions about which distortions are newsworthy and which are not.
The result of the media's drumbeat coverage of Gore's exaggerations has been a rising public perception that Gore is not trustworthy-- a perception, pollsters say, that has contributed to Gore's falling standings in the polls, and may have a determining influence on who the next U.S. president is.
In fact, of course, Gore is not trustworthy-- in the sense that his statements should not be taken on trust. Nor should reporters accept what Bush says without doing the essential journalistic task of checking the facts. But all too often, media behave as though applying skepticism to a politician's words is something that one does only in unusual circumstances.
* * *
For more on media exaggeration about Al Gore's exaggerations, see:
--"He's No Pinocchio," by Robert Parry (Washington Monthly, 4/00):
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2000/0004.parry.html
--"Good Politics, Bad Journalism," by Eric Boehlert (Salon, 10/11/00):
http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/10/11/gore/index.html
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