reporting

Reporters should call out interviewees who lie

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

I was just watching CNN, the anchor (I think it was Brianna Keilar) interviewing Erin Hawley who is “Of Counsel” for the ironically named “Alliance Defending Freedom.” The discussion was about the case State of Louisiana v US Food and Drug Administration, in which the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is currently hearing arguments. (The case is an attempt to restrict access to mifepristone by mail.)

What caught my ear, and kept me watching to the end of the interview, was that during the few minutes I watched, Hawley said—three times—that the drug sends “one in point five women to the emergency room.” She also harped on the drug’s “black box” nature, and compared sending it through the mail to sending cocaine. But that “one in point five women…” bit, that’s what made me yell not at the guest, but at the interviewer. I yearn for the days when reporters paid attention to what interviewees were saying and called them on it. “One in point five”? What does that even mean? Why didn’t Keilar call her on that non-statistic to ask Hawley what the hell she really meant?

Digging through this group’s web site, I think the statistic Hawley was trying to quote was that “roughly one in 25 women who take mifepristone as directed will end up in the emergency room.” And she was probably conflating it with another biased group’s study quoted on the ADF web site that analyzed 866,000 prescriptions and found nearly 11 percent of women suffered serious complications, “which is approximately 22 times higher than the less than 0.5 percent figure the FDA cites.”

Statistics don’t lie, but the uses one puts them to—especially when misquoting them—mean that we’re not getting the whole story. In this case, the story probably would not have changed had the anchor called out the guest for spouting nonsense, but when people are presenting themselves (or being presented) as experts, they really ought to be able to communicate the truth correctly.

And for a news program to let such miscommunication go by, forcing me to dig through the guest’s web site to figure out what she was saying, makes the news program much less useful to me (which is bad) and the guest far less credible (which in this case, is fine with me. She represents a group which has morals [okay, that’s acceptable] and is trying to force those morals on others [which is completely out of line]).

The decline of news interviews

~ ianrandalstrock ~ Leave a comment

As much as I’m annoyed by the double-talking, deflecting, lying politicians, the interviewers aren’t doing much better.

This morning, I watched parts of both NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’s Face the Nation, and they both share the same problem.

On Meet the Press, the host/interviewer was talking with Senator J.D. Vance. She asked him, if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, would he have voted to certify the election, or done what Donald Trump wanted. Each time, he deflected, noting that “it’s you who wants to keep talking about that election. We’re focused on the present and the future, and in the present, we have the massive border crisis,” and the drug crisis, and whatever else usually comes at the end of that litany. A perfect opening to ask “Okay, so as a member of the Senate, what are you doing to address that border crisis, and drug crisis, and all the rest?” But she just let the pitch go by, and went back to “But you might be on Trump’s list for vice president in the next campaign. What would you have done in 2021?”

On Face the Nation, the interviewer was talking with Speaker Mike Johnson. After four rounds of “President Biden doesn’t need any legislation to fix the border crisis,” without a return question of “then what do we need the Congress for?”, she showed several clips from Johnson in 2019 saying “an impeachment should not be a one-party action.” A great intro for the House’s current impeachment activity against Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas. “So why are you moving this impeachment now?” to which he responded, “Mayorkas has broken the laws. We’ve got three committees investigating,” etc. But there was no return question of “you’re going through all the motions, as the Democrats did before you, but it still looks to be a one-party activity.” Or the even easier question: “You say he’s broken the laws. Which laws?” As most interviewers these days do, she ended with “We hope to have you back, because there are so many more things to talk about.” Completely missing the irony of the fact that each question-and-response was repeated four times, so of course they couldn’t get to too many issues.

Mind you, I didn’t watch the entirety of either program, but I did also see that each also had National Security Council Spokesman Jake Sullivan. Meet the Press asked him if, in the ongoing response to the death of the three US soldiers in Jordan, we could expect attacks in Iran itself. He said “I’m not going to comment on our activities and plans on television.” The interviewer’s response to that? “So you’re not ruling it out?” And he responded, “I’m not going to talk about it on television.” Five times they went through that back-and-forth.

Yes, I understand that repeating a question can sometimes get the interviewee to break down, get angry, and snap out an unintended answer. But come on, people, listen to the responses you’re getting. You can follow them to even more interesting questions and non-answers. I’m disappointed in you.