By Garren Shipley
I’m sure by now you’ve all seen the piece in which PolitiFact says the Lie of the Year told by President Obama and others — “if you like your plan, you can keep it” — doesn’t apply to Mark Warner, because it was all Obama’s fault.
Others have thoroughly litigated what’s wrong with this, and how it’s a direct contradiction of what PolitiFact has said and done in the past. My objective here is to call out bad journalism and patently obvious bias by the author.
Let me be 100 percent clear. My problem in not with PolitiFact. When it lives up to its own principles, PolitiFact is great journalism. I know many of the reporters who write for it, and they’re dedicated, underpaid, under-appreciated professionals.
No, my problem here is with Warren Fiske, the editor of PolitiFact Virginia and the author of the piece, who committed some cardinal sins of journalism in attempting to defend Mark Warner.
The upshot: Warren Fiske created an entire narrative out of whole cloth to defend Mark Warner’s broken Obamacare promises. He’s not quoting a Democratic operative, he’s putting his own liberal views into the story.
From Warren’s story (emphasis added):
Gillespie’s campaign is circulating tapes of two events where Warner pledged not to vote for a bill that would take away existing insurance plans: the video used in the ad and one from a September 2009 town hall meeting in Fredericksburg. Both of those recordings occurred when the ACA was being drafted. Warner was speaking about his conditions for supporting legislation; he was not offering a long-term guarantee on how the law would work.
As one of my more liberal editors liked to say, “There’s a lot of free information floating around here.”
Who is making the argument that “he was not offering a long-term guarantee on how the law would work.” Is it Mark Warner’s spokesman?
Fortunately, PolitiFact publishes the sources they use to write their stories. But the only Democratic operative Warren lists as having interacted with is Warner’s spokesman, nearly a month before his first interaction with Ed Gillespie’s campaign on the issue, and well before the ad in question went on the air.
Was that information contained in the one email from Warner’s campaign spokesman? If so, he should have written “A spokesman for Warner said…” And that would have been major news, “Warner Walks Back ‘Keep Your Plan’ Promise.”
But Occam’s razor suggest that no, it’s not Warner’s spokesman. It’s Warren Fiske, throwing his own personal view into the story. As one of my first editors told me, “Garren, nobody cares what you think” when you’re writing the story. “Just write down what the other guy says.”
Let’s move on to the second paragraph (emphasis added):
Warner wound up voting for a bill that contained language shielding existing policies from meeting the minimum ACA coverage standards, but leaving it to the White House to fill in the details. Obama subsequently imposed tough regulations that blocked insurers from adjusting the grandfathered plans to market conditions or selling them to new customers, all but assuring the death of substandard policies. Warner says he was surprised by the president’s actions.
This is a novel argument we haven’t seen before – blame Obama for breaking Obamacare.
Having read the entire bill (with a team of more than 100 volunteers) I never saw that language. I saw the exact opposite.
But maybe Warren is a better reader than I am. Maybe he can cite that language? Where’s the cite to U.S. Code in his sources? There isn’t one listed. Just trust him on that, I guess.
The only place where Warren shows that he’s captured Mark Warner’s thinking —instead of his own — is at the bottom of this paragraph, where we get a “Warner says.”
Great! When did he say that? What was the context? Got a quote? Do we get an “In an email, a Warner spokesman said…” Nope. Warner said that. Just trust Warren on that one, too.
But far and away the most damning thing here is that Warren rushed this out to print without doing the most cursory research.
An email to me or any other GOP operative would have gladly, even gleefully, pointed Warren to this CNN story, where Mark Warner and the rest of the Senate Democratic caucus voted against letting people keep their plans.
Warner voted against letting people keep their plans – after the ACA was passed and signed into law. That blows the “blame Obama” narrative Warren has crafted here to defend Mark Warner.
No, Warren Fiske has a view of Mark Warner — a view that this liberal Senator was doing his best, and then President Obama’s regulations made Warner’s assurances null and void.
If this was true journalism, we’d see cites from Democratic operatives, where they – not Warren – explain Mark Warner’s point of view. Their views would be attributed to them, not simply asserted as facts floating free in a story.
But doing actual journalism would have created a cognitive dissonance. Warner is the good guy, so he couldn’t possibly have done what those mean old Republicans said he did. So we don’t get real journalism, we get Warren Fiske’s poorly constructed opinion of what happened passed off as fact.
Newspapers are dying. The Richmond Times-Dispatch lost 43.5 percent of its daily paid circulation between March 31, 2008 and March 31, 2013 (and unlike Warren, I can cite my sources).
Garbage like this is why. Warren, nobody cares what you think. Write down what the other guy says. You’ll sell more newspapers.
Garren Shipley, a former newspaper reporter, is communications director of the Republican Party of Virginia.
