By Nick Ubels (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: September 12, 2012
Two weeks ago, in Tampa Bay, Republican Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan turned heads with a blistering critique of the Obama Presidency at the Republican National Convention. But there’s a catch. Many of his talking points were built on misrepresentation and fuzzy numbers.
Take Ryan’s claim that Obama was responsible for the closure of a GM plant in his Wisconsin hometown. The plant closed in December 2008 before Obama was sworn in.
Some analysts dismiss Ryan’s errors as unimportant in light of his success at rousing the party base with the spirit of his speech.
But I disagree. Facts matter. Details matter. And journalists do the public a disservice by not calling out politicians on such false premises.
Page five of this week’s issue features an in-depth interview with BC NDP MLAs Gwen O’Mahoney (Advanced Education critic) and Megan Mungall (Skills Training critic) conducted during their recent UFV visit by The Cascade’s Joe Johnson.
The two MLAs are critical of the state of post-secondary education funding under the Liberal provincial government and cite a range of numbers to back up their arguments. For example, O’Mahoney states that BC’s apprenticeship completion rate is 34 per cent. Mungall later mentions that it’s 36 per cent. A small discrepancy, but it was enough to convince me to do some digging.
According to an op-ed by Tom Sigurdson, executive director of BC Building Trades, that appeared in The Vancouver Sun on August 28, BC currently has an apprenticeship completion rate of 37 per cent. A July 2 article appearing on the independent BC news website The Tyee stated the rate was 40 per cent. The most recent BC Apprenticeship Student Outcomes survey results available online is from 2011. Finally, I decided to go straight to the source. I called the 24-hour BC government media relations hotline only to encounter a message that the operator was currently on holiday. And that I should call the 24-hour hotline instead.
My conclusion? Verifying the numbers is difficult, frustrating work. It won’t always yield the results you’re looking for, but it’s a worthy pursuit. When politicians spout off numbers to back up their arguments, they’re just as likely as we are to include misremembered stats.
The format of The Cascade’s interview with O’Mahoney and Mungall makes editing for factual accuracy a bit of a dilemma. Our news editor and I debated adding some kind of disclaimer about the veracity of the statistics in the article or including corrected numbers in square brackets, but ultimately felt obligated to print their responses as given.
Ultimately, this sort of mix-up is understandable when on the spot. But just because it’s a small error doesn’t mean it’s not one worth noting.
As journalists, we’re tasked with sifting through murky facts to provide the best obtainable version of the truth. Yet statements from politicians present a bit of a predicament. How should we balance uncensored interview content with fact checking?
Should we interrupt interviews with on-the-spot fact checks? Should we include a disclaimer with any errors at the bottom of the article? Or should we leave slight errors like this one lie and leave it up to you to investigate.
It’s just like Mungall said. Democracy is not a spectator sport.
