Newsweek, Niall Ferguson, And The Conservative Echo Chamber

JOHN WHITEHOUSE/Media matters for america

Niall Ferguson's Newsweek cover story on President Obama exemplifies a deficiency in today's media. As criticism of Ferguson's shoddy work mounted -- both from outside and inside of Newsweek/The Daily Beast --Newsweek explained to Politico's Dylan Byers that Newsweek "rel[ies] on our writers to submit factually accurate material." Indeed, Byers also noted that Newsweek does not even have a fact-checking department.

This admission is disturbing on face. Newsweek wants to sell you stories and news about the world but can't even be bothered to check the claims it publishes. Even worse, they didn't seem all that uncomfortable with the admission. Newsweek's defense is that others are this lackadaisical at journalism, which is to say Newsweek has no defense. In a media environment without fact-checkers, it's no wonder we have fabulists and problems with factsand the media. But there's a more pernicious ramification of Newsweek's abdication of journalistic practices: This is what the predatory conservative echo-chamber and Fox News count on.

Fox and the right-wing echo chamber exploit these vulnerabilities in the media. When the media process seems shoddy (regardless of whether it actually is) and the result produces news that is inconsistent with conservative ideology, right-wing media pounce and attack the outlet as part of some left-wing media cabal. We've seen Fox do this from Dan Rather to Politico to ABC News to MSNBC and more. On the other hand, when they find the argument useful, the right-wing echo chamber can herald the piece and ignore inaccuracies within.

It's no surprise that while discussing Ferguson's article across multiple programs, Fox never discussed the myriad factual problems in Ferguson's piece that one could find with a rudimentary Google search. This is even as Ferguson's self-professed friend who writes for the same outlet called the piece "absurd propaganda."

But Fox ingeniously imbues its perspective with what Stephen Colbert famously labeled "truthiness." For example, appearing on On the Record With Greta Van Susteren, here is how Washington Examiner chief political correspondent Byron York described Ferguson:

I think the striking thing about the story is that it comes from Niall Ferguson, who's kind of a member of this global, glamorous elite, people who are at home in London, they're at home in New York, and it's very fashionable among most of them to support President Obama. So for someone to come out and give an across the board denunciation of the Obama presidency - and he's right, he spends a lot of time on Obama's foreign policy, as well as accusing him of failing on economic policy - for somebody to give such an across the board indictment -- of his stature is pretty unusual. [Fox News, On the Record With Greta Van Susteren, 08/20/12]

York did not say that Ferguson is part of a group that supported Obama, or that Ferguson himself ever supported Obama (both would be outright lies). It's that York wants the conservative audience to be vindicated because Ferguson feels like someone with his biography is more likely to be aligned with liberals. York's point relies on innuendo, so it's impossible to fact-check directly. But it's precisely this kind of argument by innuendo that allows Fox to make it big news that a former McCain adviser wrote an anti-Obama article.

Meanwhile, Newsweek's avoidance of fact-checking is just one example of a larger erosion of journalism, led byshrinking newsrooms, layoffs, and more. The erosion of the structures of journalism in turn fuels a growinglack of credibility for the media in general, and offers an opportunity for the conservative echo chamber to fill the gap. This trend is incredibly hard to reverse, largely because of what Julian Sanchez has labeled epistemic closure.

The only antidote for this right-wing approach is truth. Fact-checked, rigorous, researched truth. And that can be especially hard in these days of shrinking media budgets. This is why it's increasingly challenging for an outlet like Newsweek to do what it does and progressively easier for Fox and right-wing media to do what they do. That's why it's important to support journalists who do their job well, and outlets that have a fair and honest process. It's the only chance to save the rest of the media from becoming like Fox.

Unethical Commentary, Newsweek Edition

Paul Krugman/New York Times

There are multiple errors and misrepresentations in Niall Ferguson’s cover story in Newsweek — I guess they don’t do fact-checking — but this is the one that jumped out at me. Ferguson says:

The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.

Readers are no doubt meant to interpret this as saying that CBO found that the Act will increase the deficit. But anyone who actually read, or even skimmed, the CBO report (pdf) knows that it found that the ACA would reduce, not increase, the deficit — because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for.

Now, people on the right like to argue that the CBO was wrong. But that’s not the argument Ferguson is making — he is deliberately misleading readers, conveying the impression that the CBO had actually rejected Obama’s claim that health reform is deficit-neutral, when in fact the opposite is true.

More than that: by its very nature, health reform that expands coverage requires that lower-income families receive subsidies to make coverage affordable. So of course reform comes with a positive number for subsidies — finding that this number is indeed positive says nothing at all about the impact on the deficit unless you ask whether and how the subsidies are paid for. Ferguson has to know this (unless he’s completely ignorant about the whole subject, which I guess has to be considered as a possibility). But he goes for the cheap shot anyway.

We’re not talking about ideology or even economic analysis here — just a plain misrepresentation of the facts, with an august publication letting itself be used to misinform readers. The Times would require an abject correction if something like that slipped through. Will Newsweek?