Media manipulations

The thing you must understand about journalists is that they can always find a way to write the story they WANT to write, the story that fits their "narrative," without absolutely telling an out-and-out lie. Tom Maguire of Just One Minute brings us just such a story today.

Say you wanted to do a quick, juicy little story to show that Rudy Giuliani's own colleagues don't like him. Not out of malice, mind you, but because it'll make for a good headline. Plus, it fits in nicely with the "NYFD against Rudy" narrative that sprang up from the unions last week. How would you get such a story?

Obviously, interviewing folks is right out. Few individuals are going to go on record speaking ill of a man who might well be the next president, and anonymous sources won't do for this kind of story. So you, an enterprising reporter, quickly decide to see who is putting their money where their mouth is... you check the FEC campaign contributions.

You're on a tight deadline, so you don't want to do too much work and you only check the contributions for the most recent quarter (at this stage of the campaign, the FEC requires quarterly reports of contributions). You search for contributions made by people employed by the rather large law firm (about 400 lawyers) which Giuliani, in part, owns.

Boom! You've got your headline. Attorneys in Rudy Firm Buck Boss. Your FEC perusal finds that only 20 gave to Giuliani, while a third of those who gave any contributions gave to non-Giuliani candidates, including 4 for Bill Richardson, 3 to Barack Obama, 1 to Chris Dodd, and 1 to Mitt Romney. What a juicy story, right? Only 20 of his 400 fellow lawyers (whose paychecks he signs) cared enough to give to his campaign. One third of contributors gave to someone else. A sure sign that the people who know him best don't like him, right?

Wrong. Tom Maguire, just a guy with a blog, no legion of fact-checking editors, working for free, took a few more minutes to dig just a wee bit deeper into those FEC reports. Did you notice in the above narrative where I slipped in a little caveat, that the reporter looked at the most recent quarter's contributions? Well, Rudy Giuliani's been running for President for more than the last three months. If you go back and check ALL the contributions to Giuliani's campaign, you find that a lot of the contributions from his fellow lawyers came much earlier in the campaign. A number gave the maximum amount, and so could not even legally contribute in the most recent quarter. When you tally up all the contributions, Maguire informs us, you get 54 for Giuliani, 1 for Romney, 3 for Richardson (he didn't try to reconcile this single discrepancy with the reporter's numbers), 3 for Obama, 1 for Dodd, 1 for Edwards, and 1 for Hillary. That's a total of 64 contributions to presidential campaigns, of which 54 (84%) were for Giuliani.

The complete numbers lead to a rather different headline. But notice how the reporter didn't tell a single lie. Everything he reported was actually factual, and he even disclosed, in passing, the limitation of his research to the most recent quarter. Did the reporter know the full data would paint a different picture, or was he just a bit too lazy to look for it? And now other blogs are already running this meme, without looking any deeper than the reporter did. Remember, there's always more to the story. Kudos to Tom, as always, for digging deeper.