This is web version of a letter I just sent to cjr.org.
In his piece Tsunami, Bryan Keefer (of spinsanity.org) accused Senator Kerry (as well as President Bush) of
deliberately using a cynical combination of calculated deception, speed, and volume to exploit the press's reluctance to call a lie a lie.
That is a rather harsh accusation. Later, Mr. Keefer repeats the accusation that Kerry is as bad as Bush by saying,
If Bush is the master [of deceiving the press], Kerry is proving to be an adept pupil.
So what were the examples Mr. Keefer cited of Senator Kerry cynically deceiving the the press? The one example was that the Kerry campaign
launched a "middle-class misery index"
that was consisted of a set of "cherry-picked" statistics. This new index showed that
that Bush has the "worst record of any president" since 1976.
Mr. Keefer failed to mention what the statistics are or that on one of the seven statistics, the economy actually improved under President Bush. The article is not clear on how accurately reporting what a set of statistics showed is cynically deceptive, but my impression is that Mr. Keefer's only complaint is that the Kerry campaign should have reported to the press President Bush's performance under the traditional misery index.
Did stories in the press on the "middle-class misery index" contain misleading information? Mr. Keefer cited two stores in his article, one in the
Boston Globe and one in the
LA Times. The Boston Globe story mentioned 5 of the 7 factors and discussed in detail how different elements of the index has performed under Bush's stewardship. The article then uncritically reported the response from the Bush campaign:
Kerry had voted for higher taxes 350 times, promised to increase federal spending by $2 trillion so far in the presidential election campaign and warned that a massive tax increase was "looming over the heads of the middle class"
The response is typical of the Bush campaign's cynical lies that the press uncritically repeats.
The LA Times that Mr. Keefer cites is in no way deceptive but instead provides an excellent context for the Kerry campaign's middle-class misery index:
A misery index became well-known during the Carter administration as an economic measurement used to express the combined effect of unemployment and inflation. Since then, it has taken on a broader meaning as a measurement of economic suffering. By invoking the phrase, Kerry is attempting to underscore one of his ongoing messages: that Bush's policies have made life harder for average Americans.
Summing up, Mr. Keefer accuses Senator Kerry of "deliberately using a cynical combination of calculated deception, speed, and volume to exploit the press's reluctance to call a lie a lie," but one of the two article he cites contains deceptive spin from the Bush campaign, not the Kerry campaign and the other provides an excellent context for the
Kerry press release. If Mr. Keefer is going to ringingly denounce someone, he should have some facts to back it up or someone might think he is "deliberately using a cynical combination of calculated deception, speed, and volume to exploit the press's reluctance to call a lie a lie."