"the epic dishonesty of Romney’s campaign is finally prompting something of a debate..." [View all]

[babylonsister]

Call out the lies right in your headlines
By Greg Sargent


This doesn’t happen every day, but good for the Los Angeles Times for calling out the ubiquitous falsehood about Obama supposedly waiving welfare reform’s work requirement right in its headline:

Rick Santorum repeats inaccurate welfare attack on Obama

As Kevin Drum says: “it’s about time reporters and copy editors started putting this stuff front and center.” And, indeed, the LA Times does this, in its headline and with this highly placed sentence: “In fact, Obama did not waive the work requirement.”

The lie debunked here, of course, is central to Mitt Romney’s campaign; it is airing in ads in multiple swing states that are reportedly backed by heavy buys, and Romney and his surrogates have been repeating it in one forum after another for weeks on end.

I didn’t expect this, but the epic dishonesty of Romney’s campaign is finally prompting something of a debate among media types about whether what we’re seeing here is unprecedented — and how to appropriately respond to it. This debate is focused partly on whether there’s a racial dimension to this attack. But it’s also about (as I noted here yesterday) what the media should do when one campaign has decided that there is literally no set of boundaries or standards it needs to follow when it comes to the veracity of the core assertions at the heart of its entire argument.

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As Steve Benen and James Fallows keep arguing, this poses a test for the news media. What would happen if a nontrivial number of articles and broadcasts about the welfare lie and other Romney falsehoods called out his dishonesty right in their headlines, prominently featuring unequivocal declarations (not mealy-mouthed he-said-she-said nonsense) that Romney is misleading people and has done so again and again and again, despite knowing the truth?

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/call-out-the-lies-right-in-your-headlines/2012/08/29/6e263346-f1fe-11e1-adc6-87dfa8eff430_blog.html