written: 11:27am 10/14/04
published: ABCnews.com 10/14/04

Why Let the Facts Influence a Good Debate?
The Candidates, Truth and Campaigns
COMMENTARY
By HARI SREENIVASAN

Oct. 14, 2004 — After each presidential and vice presidential duel, big media, small media and watchdog groups have made it their point to "fact check" the candidates and their statements, but the truth these groups exhume just doesn't seem to matter to the candidates.

It seems among all the other categories of competition, the candidates also try to best one another on redefining shades of gray to a population seeking black-and-white information/positions and perhaps even a fact.

Even if we assume that both candidates live completely in a bubble, sheltered from the stray shrapnel of information -- it's not as if their cadres are blind to the major news dailies or the blogs that pick apart the podium presentations.

Vice President Cheney even went so far as to try and vindicate himself of a Halliburton barb from Sen. Edwards by citing factcheck.com during the veep debates. This indicates to us that the idea of independent sources has at least crossed the radars of these men. What also became immediately clear to anyone familiar with the site Cheney was referencing was that he meant to say factcheck.org. Honest mistake? Likely -- but more disconcerting was that Cheney must not have read the site too carefully -- because factcheck.org's findings in this matter are not in the vice president's favor.

Does it take so much time to whisper into the ears of either Sen. Edwards or Sen. Kerry that perhaps when mentioning the cost of the war in Iraq -- a change in verb tense would make their statement much stronger. (KE04 frequently say the war has already cost $200 billion. While in fact it likely will, Congress has not actually authorized that much, nor has that much been spent). There is always a guy that comes out a couple of minutes before the president and sets his speech on the podium. It would likely be far above his pay grade and the end of his career if he were to go through and make a couple of line edits, right? He couldn't, for example, tell the president to lay off the "98" alleged votes Kerry cast to raise taxes. Multiple outlets have examined this statement and discounted it.

Some statements are just so wrong one has to wonder what the candidates were really thinking about when they blurted it out or were trying to defend themselves from it. In the tempest in Tempe, when Kerry cited Bush early on as having said he wasn't thinking much about Osama Bin Laden, the president quickly denied it and called it an "exaggeration." For the record, the president said back in March of 2002 regarding Osama -- "I don't know where he is. I, ah [laugh] I repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him." In case anyone missed it -- the DNC ran that phrase in a TV advertisement.

Equally silly is Kerry saying that the president didn't meet with the congressional black caucus or civil rights leaders. While Kerry might not know that the president met with members of the caucus in the Roosevelt room regarding the Haiti situation, he certainly knew that the president spoke in front of the National Urban League, because Kerry spoke to them in Detroit a day before the president did.

After each debate, Peter Jennings has made it a point to include Fact Checks with Jake Tapper, culling information compiled by members of our political team. But perhaps because we don't allow spinmeisters to clutter up our post-debate analysis with predictable vitriol, the campaigns pay us no heed. I say that in jest because the daily political Note ABC News distributes is likely to be found in the e-mail box of any operative worth their weight in campaign buttons.

Let's say it's a predisposition by both campaigns toward a wholesale discount the analysis from television networks. "The Wall Street Journal" has done a decent job of picking apart the financial policy prescriptions from both campaigns, "The New York Times" offered real-time debate analysis and "The Washington Post" offered a fabulous debate referee which was, in essence, the entire transcript of the debate with sidebars wherever facts were used and abused.

For those members of both campaigns who don't like to get ink on their hands, bloggers from all points on the ideologically continuum have been taking aim at one candidate's misstatements or another. Factcheck.org has been an invaluable resource in picking apart the claims not just from the podiums but also on stumps all across the land and the streams of misinformation spewing forth on campaign television advertisements from supporters of both candidates. So the question is -- do the candidates not know? The answer is likely that they are very conscious of what is right and wrong with their facts, and they simply don't think the audience cares or will understand the minutiae. A much more malicious possibility is that the engineers of these messages, whether the candidates or campaign consultants, are intentionally manipulating data, obfuscating important issues, and assuming the audience is just too stupid to know the difference. Naaah, that can't be.

Copyright © 2004 ABC News Internet Ventures

written: 4:17am 10/01/04
published: ABCnews.com 10/01/04
Reporter's Notebook: Worth Debating?

After-Party Prompts the Question: How Valuable Are the Debates?
Reporter's Notebook By HARI SREENIVASAN

NEW YORK, Oct. 1, 2004 — Asking who won the debates at a viewing party organized by grass-roots Democrats in the bluest of blue states was not going to get me a very diverse set of answers. So my conversations with the predominantly African-American crowd watching the whole 90-minute extravaganza turned to the value of the event itself.

Are the debates worth it? How do they weave into the fabric of this grand conversation between candidate and voter? What I found was media criticism, a layer of hope, some skepticism and fear.

We were in the VIP room of a trendy hotspot in the chic Bowery area of Manhattan. It's a neighborhood with homeless shelters adjacent to high-priced lofts. I didn't have the audience applause meter, but it was a tossup whether the cheers were louder at Kerry's consistent steps to seem, well, consistent — or at Bush's pregnant pauses which, well, didn't deliver.

At the end, by the time Teresa Heinz Kerry and first lady Laura Bush were in their awkward embrace (perhaps commenting on the similarity of their outfits), the viewing portion of the program ended and the party portion began.

Un-spun
As the sounds of the speeches were quickly replaced with thumping bass lines, Philip Mckinley, a physician, wondered with me what the talking heads on the telly, with their wraparound microphones, were saying. For him, it was the pundits' distilling process in this next half-hour of lip flap that was so crucial in shaping public opinion.

In his mind, it was a slam dunk for his candidate, but he wanted to know whether he watched the same game as those who got paid to pontificate on a Thursday night. He had reason to be concerned.

The insta-polls that media outlets release immediately after the debate play a crucial role in framing the conversation over the next few days. Friday headlines run the numbers from Thursday night's polls.

Headlines beget headlines. Momentum can strengthen in one direction or another, a moveable voter could, God forbid, move, and campaign strategies must adjust accordingly. This doesn't have much to do with a candidate's actual position on issue X or Y, but more the spin.

Speaking of spin, Beatrice Sibblies, one of the organizers of the party, half joked that she might wake up and find headlines declaring a Bush win of this debate. That all depends on what paper she reads, and which campaign surrogates the front-page reporter interviewed.

In Miami, behind most of the network reporters' live appearances, cameras revealed a room set up to deliver the quickest and most predictable pithy reaction with the least amount of effort. It was a frenzied scene of cameras and boom mics, swimming to and fro like sharks and piranhas jostling for political chum.

Insight
For both candidates this first debate was an opportunity to take the material they had been road-testing for months now and deliver it to one of the largest audiences they will ever have in this process.

Alana Thompson, an accountant, reminded me that, short of having serious cash to get into a Kerry fund-raising dinner or working the campaign phone banks for a ticket to a Bush-Cheney event, this was one of the few opportunities millions of people will ever have to see and hear the men side by side, head to head. She values the debates because, in her opinion, the media doesn't inform the viewers enough to help identify the differences.

There is some value to the mediation. Whether it's appreciated by this viewing party or others, who knows? Though none of the network television stations were bold enough to throw "fact checks" on screen while the debates were happening, bloggers were furiously submitting their versions of Internet sticky notes with factoids and sources highlighting errors by both candidates as the two gentleman uttered them.

For example, during the post-debate show, ABC News' Jake Tapper told Peter Jennings about overestimations by John Kerry on the amount of money spent on the war in Iraq (it's not $200 billion as the senator said; according to the Congressional Budget Office, it's only $120 billion) and President Bush's statement that 100,000 Iraqi security forces have been trained (according to the Department of Defense, there are only 50,000 trained and their readiness is in question).

The substance might be something Bryan Lattimore remembers, but being in the advertising world, he was as interested in strategy. In his opinion, niche audiences are the only ones likely to have their decision swayed by a candidate's posture on particular issues. For him the aggregate will sway based on which campaign is able to execute the best strategy through the debates. Similar to any sale, the campaigns have to get a gut reaction out of the voter.

Debate
There have been several conversations and articles in the past weeks about the book No Debate by George Farah, which details how staged these events have become. Farah makes a lucid case on how the process of the debates has changed from spontaneous and raw exchanges of opinions and ideas to micromanaged events in the interests of the two parties and to the exclusion of everyone else. Farah also shows how systematically the debates have become so nonconfrontational, to the point where the events might as well be called a joint news conference.

It almost seems ironic that in this world, where reality television shows rule the roost, that television networks would let such a controlled affair take place. It seems like ratings would be higher, the less predictable the event.

Window-dressing is how Alfonso Holloman sees this tradition. He'd prefer a much more open and flowing format, where the individual who has the quicker mind and clearer agenda is at an advantage. He knows that the masses will not be swayed by one debate, or two or three, that they won't likely go home remembering which candidate stood for bilateral versus multilateral talks with North Korea. He concedes that the decisions, for the most part, have already been made by most voters, and this last month is merely an opportunity to calcify a viewpoint.

As the martinis flowed past me, I realized that we aren't ever likely to value public speaking and debating as, say, the British do. We aren't going to bring "question hour" to the Senate floor once a week — unless Mark Burnett, the creator of Survivor, has something to do with it.

If the next two weeks are simply about appreciating more window dressing, then we'd better get used to the idea that this might just be, as a cardiologist from New York's Upper East Side put it, a democracy on a marionette.
Copyright © 2004 ABC News Internet Ventures