Phone Tag Pundits Mislead Viewers

I got back to New York on Friday evening after a long week getting things set up for the MBA's upcoming coverage of the Scooter Libby Trial and could only bear to watch a few minutes of the TV news coverage of the voir dire. I had not seen any of it while in DC.

Chris Matthews aired a report from David Shuster. David sat next to me in the Media Room on Thursday so had the same vantage point for the proceedings during the voir dire. His report emphasized how many of the jurors had strongly negative feelings about Cheney, the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq. Matthews then spoke with Jonathon Alter of Newsweek and Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post (both on as part of NBC's deal with the Washington Post company). The three of them expanded on the "jurors don't like Cheney" meme from Shuster's piece and then ran with it.

Like a game of telephone tag, by the time Matthews, Alter and Cillizza (anti-Bush, anti-Cheney, anti-Iraq War pundits all) got done chattering about Shuster's report, they were putting forth what they made out to be definitive statemements as to what had happened in the courtroom over the course of this first week of jury selection and what conclusions could be drawn.

Of course, none of the three were present and so had no first hand knowledge. Matthews said he was basing his comments on David Shuster's report. Yet, Shuster himself was busy a good deal of the time running in and out of the Media Center throughout the day, presumably to do live reports for MSNBC. MSNBC had a producer in the Media Center as well as Shuster. He was generally there (not always) and when Shuster would return he would check the producer's notes. So, while David was keeping up on what was happening, his experience was not always first hand either.

With the luxury of doing my reports on a laptop, seated in the Media Room, I was able to watch a lot more of the proceedings than David. And like I said his report was not inaccurate but a bit misleading. Specifically,

- There were plenty of jurors who were excused for reasons having nothing to do with anyone in the Bush administation (financial hardship, ESL issues, previous legal issues, previous bad experiences with the police or justice system, etc.).

- There were some people who were excused largely because they were Bush supporters.

- A number of the anti-Bush/Cheney/Iraq War people went to great lengths to attempt to get themselves on the jury; the way their voir dire was dragged out meant far more time was spent on prospective jurors who were anti-Bush. For example, on Thursday morning just one, anti-Bush woman was questioned for over an hour until she finally admitted that her feelings about the Bush Administration might influence her decision on a verdict and that could not be sure she could be impartial. She was excused.

- Washington, DC is almost entirely anti-Bush; voters picked John Kerry over George Bush my a margin of nine to one.

The discussion on Hardball took Shuster's somewhat one-sided characterization of the voir dire and pushed it even further to the point of being completely one-sided with each pundit trying to top the next in extreme rhetoric. All of which I found to be hilarious because I knew that NONE of them actually knew what they were talking about; I was there and they weren't. A viewer would have to be forgiven if they came away from the segment with the (incorrect) understanding that voir dire was a parade of prospective jurors representing a cross-section of America all of whom despise Dick Cheney.

It was no small irony for me to watch this while reading some of the media coverage of the courts decision to credential bloggers to the Libby Trial. Some of the reports go to great pains to disparage bloggers for lacking journalistic standards and not having the value of editors and producers to vet stories before they are presented to the public. And yet we see it time and time again that, in the breach, the professional journalists do precisely those things for which they disparage bloggers - putting out information with out fact-checking it, not presenting both sides of a story, not going to the actual source, not correcting misinformation, and so on.

Anyone who has ever had any first-hand knowledge of a news event or been interviewed by a journalist knows what I am talking about. In just the past week alone, I have been interviewed dozens of times by various news outlets. And it is routine for me to find that the reports based on those interviews bear little resemblance to what I actually said. From time to time, I will e-mail a reporter with a correction for a story where I was the source but have only seen one actually run (a report on the MBA's BlogNashville conference in 2005, from the AP's Tennessee Bureau).

As for Hardball, I wish I had the video. I checked YouTube and had no luck. If someone had it please email me or post a comment with a link.