Objectivity: Ur doin it wrong

OK, two things. First, pay attention: Don't let the deck say the candidate is going to "host a rally" Friday when the main hed says it's been, erm, postponed.

Second, and more to the point: If you're going to provide "context," in line with the Hutchins Commission's 7-decade-old request that people who provide facts also provide some truth about their facts, try not to screw it up completely:

Trump's campaign focuses largely on job creation and finances.

I'm trying to think of some circumstance under which a grownup, air-breathing observer of the past few months' events would consider that an appropriate summary, rather than an exceptionally courteous and stupid fiction. I'd be much more inclined to place some credence in a reporter who observed that Trump's campaign to date has focused largely on race-baiting and elaborate attributions of all the world's ills to failures in dealmaking. You may like my observation or not, but I find it hard to see how it's a less impartial, let alone less closely observed, rendering of the evidence.

Stenography isn't journalism, but every now and then it's a start -- CNN's fairly capable recital on Thursday of Trump's fondness for inciting violence, for example. In light of that, is it too much to ask for the provincial media to pull the thumb out?

Those late-breaking quotation marks

At top is the Fair 'n' Balanced Network's No, 2 story from Saturday night; below, with quotes around "false," the version from Sunday morning.

That's a slip; even Fox usually follows the rules about using quotes to displace opinion from yourself to someone else. The revised version is a legitimate shortening* of "viciously negative and false ads" in the text, even though the quote doesn't specify which of the "ads" are false and which are just "viciously negative." But slip or not, the story's a fun illustration of how the party press negotiates the rules of objective journalism.
Read more »

That pesky Constitution!

OK, admit it. Ideologues come and ideologues go, but it'd be fun to sit down and have a drink with Bill Buckley -- if only because anyone who would say "Cancel your own goddamn subscription" would be fun to have on the desk when the bar-bet drunks started calling in around second-edition time on Saturday night.

In that spirit, we can only hope old Bill was tied down, or wired to the generator or something, when his heirs and assigns produced this:

By and large, Romney’s stump speech has been the same throughout these state contests, little changing but what lines of America the Beautiful he quotes as he goes from state to state. But this speech shows he – and his team – were capable of producing better rhetoric.

And an example would be ... ?

“For 25 years, I lived and breathed jobs, business, and the economy,” he said. “I had successes and failures but each step of the way, I learned a little more about what it is that makes our American system so powerful.”

“You can’t learn that teaching Constitutional law,” he added.

Uh, guess not. Back to you, Bill!

Blame game: From man to pig ...

We spend a lot of time around here picking on the Fair 'n' Balanced Network, so let's take a brief glance at how the world looks from a fresh, distinct, radically different angle:

(CNN) -- When signs of a severe economic downfall emerged more than two years ago, then-candidate Barack Obama was quick to point a finger at the man he hoped to replace.

Seventeen months into his administration, the message is often the same, and Republicans say it's time for him to drop the Bush bashing and take ownership of the problem.

"Nothing makes a president look weaker than pointing the finger at past administrations," said Republican strategist Ron Bonjean. "By blaming somebody, it looks like you are playing politics and people just want jobs. They don't care about whose fault it is. Playing the blame game only boomerangs on yourself."

Sound familiar? It should. It's been a running theme for many months over at ... wait, what's that other network? The one that everybody's always holding up as the anti-CNN? Here's Sean Hannity from a year ago:

President Obama claims that he wants the American people to hold him accountable for his decisions, but as Peter Baker of The New York Times points out, since taking office the president has dodged responsibility for any of our nation's problems.

Instead he's been engaging in one of the liberal left's favorite pastimes: blame Bush, blame Bush, blame Bush.

Let's take a look:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIPS)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, 2/9/2009: We also inherited the most profound economic emergency since the Great Depression.
OBAMA, 2/24/2009: With the deficit we inherited.
OBAMA, 3/6/2009: We inherited a big mess.
OBAMA, 3/12/2009: Because of the deficits we inherited.
OBAMA, 3/18/2009: Because of the massive deficit we inherited.
OBAMA, 3/19/2009: Because of the massive debts that we've inherited.
OBAMA, 3/20/2009: Because of the massive deficits we inherited.
OBAMA, 3/25/2009: And because we've inherited a historic fiscal mess.
OBAMA, 6/1/2009: We inherited a financial crisis unlike any that we've seen in our time.
OBAMA, 6/9/2009: The financial crisis this administration inherited is still creating painful challenges for businesses and families alike.
(END VIDEO CLIPS)

This is a broken record. Isn't it time for the president to retire that line and maybe start to take some responsibility for his own?

Amazing coincidence! That's the takeaway message CNN has too!

The White House needs to go on a confidence campaign and perhaps take a page from President Reagan's playbook, Epstein said.

Let's do just that. Here's Reagan from 1982:*

Sept. 16, 1982: ",,, if we had not brought inflation down as far as we have from the double-digit rates we inherited."
July 1, 1982: "A year and a half ago, we inherited 21.5 percent interest rates, double-digit inflation and a trillion-dollar debt, the worst economic mess in post-war history."
June 16, 1982: ''Some diehards are now declaring the present recession was caused by our program,'' Mr. Reagan said in a speech at the Albert Thomas Convention Center here tonight. ''May I just point out - we had the recession before we got the program.''
April 30, 1982: "And they have every reason to because that 12.4 percent inflation rate we inherited has been running at only 3.2 percent for the last six months."
March 19, 1982: "Our Administration has been reminding the American people that the economic mess we inherited last year - and the recession we're in now - is the legacy of years of misguided policy. ... Well, we inherited many mistakes by others - but we're not going to just bemoan the past."
Feb. 19, 1982: "A year ago, I went before the American people to say that we'd inherited the worst economic mess in half a century."

Nothing makes a president look weaker, huh? Good thing Reagan had gotten out of the habit by the time he ran for re-election:

Oct. 2, 1984: Mr. Reagan told the business group that his Administration ''inherited the legacy of 42 unbalanced budgets in the last 50 years.''
Aug. 24, 1984: "The Census Bureau confirms that, because of the tax laws we inherited, the number of households at or below the poverty level paying Federal income tax more than doubled between 1980 and 1982."
Feb. 23, 1984: "May I give two examples? We've not only cut down the rate of increase in spending that we inherited and that we found when we came here, but no one has added up the proposed spending increases that we have denied. "
Feb. 1, 1984:In an address to executives of the concrete and gravel industries, Mr. Reagan cited a dozen different aspects of the economic recovery, saying, "We inherited despair and turned it into hope."

The right time to drop the bashing and take ownership, in other words, seems to be sometime toward the end of Year 4. Unless you're a major cable network trying to build a bogus politics story around a fictional talking point about one party passed along by a strategist for the opposition, that is.

The point is not that CNN and Fox are the same thing. They aren't, though when it comes to buying this handful of magic beans from this huckster, it's hard to tell. But it's equally important to note that they aren't polar opposites or left-right anchors on a Likert-type scale of ideology in journalism or anything like that.

CNN is building a story in a very old-fashioned way: some people in the pundit class are saying X, here's an expert saying Y about that, here's another expert saying sort-of-Y, and here's an opposition expert saying not-Y. The gatekeeping fail comes at the outset. As when it buys into, say, Paul Payack's loopy assertions about presidential speech, CNN isn't bothering to ask what properties would have to be in place for X to be worth talking about. And as with other such pseudo-quantitative assertions, the first thing to do is -- ready for this? look around a little and see what the terrain looks like. If the pundit class is chattering about some phenomenon that amounts to Water Flows Downhill or Sun Rises in East, that's a sign that you don't have a story and should tell the strategist to bugger quietly off into that good night. CNN evidently doesn't make a habit of that sort of reflection, but if we ask nicely, there's always a chance that it might.

Fox is a different creature. It can turn out stories built exactly along this pattern (claim, support, contradiction, coinclusion), but it only does them for some political actors. Fox would never run an assertion that George W. Bush was a girly speaker because of his use of the passive voice, or that his use of the first-person singular pronoun marked him as a blithe narcissist unfit for leadership in times of crisis. Fox is a propaganda organization, and propaganda organizations don't buy magic beans from the enemy. That's why CNN is easy to game and Fox isn't.

Takeaway point for editors? If the reporter can't tell you what a "blame game" would look like and how this alleged instance compares to your good old null hypothesis, you don't have a story. You don't have to show it's false. The reporter has to show it's true.


* Not what you'd call a thorough content analysis, but a ranging shot; it's what you get by searching the NYT archive for "reagan" and "inherited."

Objectivity prize

By the sound of it, things out at the far end of New York Avenue NE have ranged of late from awful to dismal to genuinely wackoid, so let's all give the WashTimes rim a hand for doing some objectivity right.

Objectivity, you'll recall, isn't a function of how quickly you can get a reaction from the Moon Is Green Cheese camp to an assertion that the moon is actually an airless rock. In a nicer sense, it means (a) deciding in advance that some outcome is worth reporting, (b) agreeing on an appropriate metric for that outcome, (c) measuring it, and (d) reporting the results. And, though wailing and gnashing of teeth on the mezzanine* might have greeted it, there's the result at the top of the front page. This is a way of telling the Washington Times from the Fair 'n' Balanced Network. One hopes it remains so, at least every now and then.

* Disclosure-wise, Your Editor was a foreign-desk hand at the WaTms late in the Reagan years. Some (ahem) other visitors here have similar tales.

Editing fail

What we have here is not a bad story -- at least, not necessarily a bad story. But because it's in the lead position on the front page, it needs to be a little more than not necessarily bad. That's where the editing breakdown comes in. At least three editors -- line, rim and slot (a fourth if the Obs is still using a "1A captain") -- could have pulled the story over for some mandatory reworking. Let's have a look at what ails the poor thing and then speculate about why it wasn't fixed.

In a new study on social ties in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, more residents report having friends from diverse backgrounds, but they still lack trust of other races.

Sound sort of like an ad so far? As in, people are saying things that sound like they ought to be important but not giving you any tools to judge those things by?

... The 2008 Crossroads Charlotte Social Capital Benchmark Community Survey is to be released today. It is a locally produced update of a similar 2001 Harvard study of 40 communities that ranked Charlotte-Mecklenburg next-to-lowest in inter-racial trust.

The Charlotte survey of 856 residents – 49 percent men and 51 percent women – measured community friendships, civic involvement and trust of police, among other categories.

And this is all the data we get on the bones of the survey, which means at a minimum that the story isn't ready to run. You can calculate the margin of sampling error from the sample size, but it's sort of a minimum courtesy to provide it anyway (you don't make readers figure out ERAs for themselves, do you?). When was the survey in the field? Who was sampled? Where -- Charlotte or Charlotte-Mecklenburg? Why do we get the one subgroup breakdown -- men and women -- that has nothing to do with the story, while the ones that might make for some relevant comparisons (white, black, Latino, Asian) are ignored?

Since the 2001 survey, the community appears to have made the greatest strides in diversity of relationships. (Whose opinion is this, and what does "diversity of relationships" mean?)

More than 50 percent of respondents reported having friends from diverse backgrounds, compared with 23 percent in 2001. Yet the numbers show no significant gains in trust between races. Fewer than one-fourth of respondents reported high levels of trust toward other races – the same as in 2001.

That's the second time in six grafs that "friends from diverse backgrounds" is mentioned, but we still have no idea what it means. Here's the explanation for "diversity of friendships" from the executive summary for the 2001 survey (if you think it's the reporter's job to have read this and explained the current survey's version in the story, it is -- but an editor should have raised that point before the story got to the top of the front):

The survey asked whether the respondent had a personal friend who is a business owner, was on welfare, owned a vacation home, is gay, is a manual worker, is White, is Black, is Hispanic, is Asian, is a community leader, and was of a different faith. Then the number of categories each respondent mentioned were added together, and this summed score became the index.

Are you wondering why the only bit of expounding on "trust toward other races" is that it's the same as in 2001? Here's where those subgroup comparisons would come in really handy. At least we'd have some idea of what we were measuring.

But researchers say the new findings show progress.

“It means that perhaps the relationships are beginning to develop across races,” said Jeff Michael, director of UNC Charlotte's Urban Institute, which conducted the survey. “It's a step in the right direction, but perhaps they haven't translated into greater levels of trust yet.”

Well, it might or it might not. Given that one of the "friendships" areas in which the region was well above the national average in 2001 was knowing people who own vacation homes, I'd be wary of generalizing to relationships "across races" (again, a stable figure in the whole sample could be masking notable changes in subgroups).

And then we have ... five grafs of what newspapers always do with survey stories, which is introducing some Real People (a black woman and a white woman who are friends) to illustrate the social conditions the survey addresses. Which is about as illuminating as it is during campaign season. There follow a few random bullet points from the survey and an indication that we can expect a repeat in three years.

On the whole, it's hard to see why this story is worth anything near the front page -- unless you're actively interested in Robert Putnam's theory of social capital, which the story almost entirely ignores (odd, given that Putnam was the PI on the 2001 survey), or you think interracial trust is important (in which case you have reason to be baffled). So why didn't some editor pull the story off for revising? Here are some ideas.

There's the standard economic explanation: Fewer staffers but more stuff to do. Buyouts and layoffs tend to weed out the more experienced (alas, often the more skeptical as well). If it isn't going to get you sued, put a hed on it and hit the button. And yes, journalism as a whole has trouble playing by the rules of social science research. But I think there's something else in play as well. "Diversity" is a God word for journalism. Once it's invoked, there's no room for criticism -- even the constructive sort that tries to patch up holes in stories before they run.

That's especially unfortunate because it goes directly against any real idea of "objectivity." The point of being objective isn't to look for any occurrence of sentiment A and provide equal space for sentiment not-A; it's to make sure all news stories in any particular category play by the rules of that category. In surveys, that means telling people exactly what was measured and how, along with the appropriate ways in which those results can be compared to similar surveys.

If the people who take diversity seriously can't or won't enforce the applicable standards, they're leaving the field of criticism open to the wingnuts, who are quite eager to paint the whole enterprise as so much Kool-aid and Kum-ba-ya. Please don't feed them. They're eating quite well as it is.

Lying with (other people's) numbers

Surveys and their illegitimate cousins show up distorted in the press for a lot of reasons. One is game-frame bias: If something looks like a contest, it's told like one, even if the data don't support all the clawing, eking, inching and scrapping in the hed. Another is confirmation bias: If something purports to show that the world is either on or off track (church makes you healthy, Those Kids are Destroying the Language, whatever), it gets emphasized. And there's lab-coat bias, or the tendency to assign extra credibility to whoever is standing in front of the whiteboard and sounding scientific.*

Then there's out-and-out lying, or ignoring the data and inventing conclusions to support your ideological or political stance. That can be hard to tell from confirmation bias, but the little cousins at Fox are sometimes pretty blatant about it, as they are here.

For the record, no. We have no idea whether "troops wary about Obama" is true, because this survey doesn't address the issue. Generalizations about what "more than half of U.S. service members think" are fabricated. As it has done before with this particular instrument, Fox is lying because it has a chance to sow doubt about its political enemies:

Six out of 10 Americans in uniform are concerned about Obama's lack of military experience and their perceived difference in his mission and values from that of Bush.

Military Times is a little less blunt this time about the limitations of its survey, but the information is there if you want it. This is a self-selecting poll, meaning the results can't be generalized to the population sampled.** The "characteristics of Military Times readers" are also mentioned. The explanation a few months ago was pretty specific about this: "The group surveyed is older, more senior in rank and less ethnically diverse than the overall armed services." In short, we don't even know much about what this unrepresentative slice of the military thinks.

Genuine, deliberate lying in the news is a bad idea, owing to the unpleasant consequences of being caught. Fox is lucky here because it picks up some camouflage from the pack; even the big kids are sloppy, gullible or both when it comes to survey data. But there's always a chance that if someone at the Times or the Post or McClatchy complains loudly enough, a burst of bogus statisticking can be stopped in its tracks. That's unlikely to happen at Fox, because Fox is fundamentally dishonest in ways that professional news organizations aren't.

These are rough times for journalism. Remember not to get the real kind mixed up with the Fox kind.

* If somebody out there can explain why the NYT is so goo-goo about FiveThirtyEight.com, please do. I completely don't get that.
** Whenever you see a phrase like "that means it is impossible to calculate statistical margins of error commonly reported in opinion surveys," you should feel free to reach for the firearm of your choice.

Reporters without clues (or editors)

How kind of the local fishwrap to continue running exercises for editing class under the guise of local news stories:

Odds stacked against suspect in slayings after DNA test
To convince a jury he's innocent, murder suspect Xavier Chase faces tough odds: 1 in 55 quadrillion, to be exact.

Never, ever play fast and loose in court coverage. Jury trials are as literal a case as possible of we report, someone else -- that'll be the "jury" -- decides. (By the way? Suspects don't have to convince juries they're innocent. Prosecutors have to convince juries that suspects are guilty. That's -- all rise, please -- the American Way.)

That's the statistical likelihood that the DNA recovered from inside a Halloween mask found near the scene of a double homicide -- and smattered with a victim's blood -- was from Chase, 40, of Sterling Heights.

So if there's one chance in eighty bazillion that the DNA is from the suspect, what exactly is the problem again? (It's worth noting here that the reporter has no way of knowing whether the conclusions in the first two grafs are true or not. What the reporter knows ... well, let's look at the next graf and see!)

Bart Naugle, a DNA analyst with Virginia-based Bodie Technologies, testified Tuesday that Chase's DNA also was inside gloves found with the mask, which had been tossed about a block and a half north of the Warren apartment building where Chase's ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend were fatally shot last November.

Halfway through the story, some indication that something actually happened on Tuesday: A DNA expert testified about some DNA stuff. (Which is what the reporter should have noted in the first two grafs: This is stuff somebody said in testimony, not something independently known to be true. That's inexcusable deck-stacking.)

Rema Reed, 32, and Terry Buchanan, 36, were ambushed after they left Reed's apartment. Spots of Buchanan's blood were found on the Michael Myers-style Halloween mask, the outside of the gloves and the instep of Chase's shoes, Naugle testified.

Another sentence of background (which we can only hope is confirmed), another sentence of testimony, and a horror movie reference. Why bother to watch the trial?

Chase's lawyer, Tim Barkovic, has said that because the mask and gloves were put into a bag with Chase's other belongings when he was arrested, his DNA could have been transferred to the items.

So the odds aren't twelvety-zillion to one? Because the defense doesn't acknowledge (it'd be nice to know what "has said" means; doesn't sound like Tuesday) that the DNA evidence constitutes guilt? Well, that takes the fun out of things.

The trial is set to continue today.

And some more news. So strip away the attempts to play Junior G-Man and you're left with a graf of news, a graf of background, and a reminder that things would continue. In other words, a brief -- which some alert editor should have brought into being, rather than amplifying the cluelessness with the "Odds stacked against suspect" hed.

Hard to imagine doing worse in six grafs, but ... no doubt someone will try.

Making stuff up: Don't do it

Q: Is it still making stuff up when your motives are pure and your cause is just?
A: Why -- was some part of "don't make stuff up" not clear in the instructions?

Here's the case in point:
The U.S. Army promoted the first female to four-star general in its history Friday in an emotion-laden ceremony that sparked hopes among women that the role for female troops will continue to expand.

A question like "how do you know that?" involves a stack of questions:
*Are you asserting something that can be known?
*What sort of knowing does it involve?
*What steps do you have to take to know it?
*Have you taken any of those steps?
*Guess not, huh?

That's not to say the assertion is wrong (accepting the null hypothesis would be the same mistake as rejecting it, only in reverse). It's to suggest that whatever we're claiming isn't something we can know under any conditions the writer presents or implies. It's a statement about what ought to be true, which makes it very hard to distinguish from the product on offer over at the Fair 'n' Balanced Network. When Fox tells you that Concerns Are Growing about the socialist bent of certain presidential candidates, or that hanging around with Unrepentant Terrorists is a major policy issue, it isn't stating anything that's observed "objectively"; it's talking about what it thinks should be the case if only people would get the wax out and start thinking correctly. It's hard to think of some way in which that's substantively different from what McClatchy is doing here.

The conjecture in the McClatchy piece might indeed be true, and I'd certainly be happy if it was true, but news isn't supposed to be about stuff that ought to be true. News organizations that don't want to be mistaken for Fox need to demonstrate that difference in method as well as in topic.

RTFP: Crunchy frog at the NYT

Has it really been just a month since the NYT joined BusinessWeek (dutifully reported, once again, at Romenesko, and echoed meanwhile at Conde Nast Portfolio) in publicizing the handful of magic beans known as SpinSpotter? Well, who would know?

Online watchdog sniffs for media bias
If you don’t trust the news media, what are your options? You can fume about bias, wonder what you’re missing and suppress the urge to throw things. Or ignore some sources and turn to those whose slant you like. (NYT, 10/15)

Start-Up Attacks Media Bias, One Phrase at a Time
SpinSpotter, a new start-up, could send shivers across many a newsroom. The Web tool, which went live Monday at the DEMO technology conference in San Diego, scans news stories for signs of spin. (NYT, 9/8)

You can't expect even the argus-eyed Times reporting corps to read everything, but the point of the RTFP rule is that at least you read your own paper. That should mean, minimally, that you don't swallow the same implausible claims whole:

But what if there were a device that objectively flagged questionable elements in online news articles, poking and parsing words and phrases, and letting you contribute your own critiques? Well, a Seattle company called SpinSpotter has produced a piece of software — a free download that works within a Web browser — that tries to do just that.

More broadly, it should mean that you think twice about whether to write about the thing at all. (One way of phrasing this is: How are you going to write the SpinSpotter lede next month?) But SpinSpotter has apparently been busy refining its algorithms and advisory panels (and explaining its earnest good intentions at SpinSpotterBlog), so it seems to have earned another plug in the eyes of the Times.

Have things gotten any better? Well, not really. The Times's second iteration is a little more open in admitting that the thing doesn't really work and that there's no indication of when or whether it will. We learn a bit more about the human side of things. (Missouri journalism grad students will critique the critiques, o joy!) And the Times manages not only to correctly identify the passive voice -- "four people were killed in an accident" -- but to note that it has no consistent correlation with "spin."

Which -- where's the dead horse graphic when you need it? -- underscores the essential futility of the project. There's a "spin" case to be made around the morning fishwrap's treatment of the ACORN story ("Obama's ties to voter registration group questioned") and the treatment offered yesterday by McClatchy ("Fox News alone has mentioned Acorn stories 342 times in recent days"). One's passive, one's active; both are a form of "spin," but one of them is the form of spin that actually contributes to a better understanding of how the political world works. Guess which?

And it would be self-defeating for SpinSpotter to point out how much free publicity it's getting from the inherent biases of news routines. News likes stuff that claims to be new (and deeply fears being last with the story about the Next Big Thing). News is biased toward conflict. By defining the novel (in the man-bites-dog sense), news helps create a narrow definition of what's "normal" -- which is why some armed robberies are serious and some are just a laugh a minute. No wonder the founders say they don't intend to purge the news of spin entirely. So far, it's their best resource.

So the real burden here isn't on SpinSpotter; it's on the Times, which needs to start (a) reading its own product more consistently and (b) doing a better job on the Truth In Packaging front. At some point, when you're peddling chockies, "crunchy frog" just doesn't cut it anymore. Next time the Times writes about SpinSpotter, we need to see some mention that it the product contains crunchy raw unboned real dead frog. Garnished with larks' vomit.

Heds, stories, events

A couple of steps seem to be falling out of the journalistic process here, and it'd be sort of nice if editors stepped up and started enforcing things a bit:

McCain talks policy at rally
Candidate turns away from attacks that were met by shouts of ‘terrorist' from crowd
DAVENPORT, Iowa -- Republican John McCain, the clock ticking down on a chance to narrow Democrat Barack Obama's lead in polls, turned away Saturday from visceral attacks on his rival to pivot back toward policy differences.

McCain kept his speech in this Iowa river town focused on the economy and other policies, a striking change from just days ago when his campaign redoubled its challenge to Obama over his association with a former '60s radical.

You can see where the hed writer was working from in the lede: "pivot back toward policy differences." But getting to "talks policy" from there takes some inferring, and it needs to be backed up in the story. Is it?

When an anti-war protester interrupted him, McCain nervously watched what the crowd would do. The protester was hoisted on shoulders and McCain's supporters chanted “We want John.”

“You know, my friends, there's a perfect example of some people who just don't get it,” McCain said to applause.

“As people are trying to stay in their homes, keep their jobs and afford health care, is what they want for us, to yell at each other?” he asked. “No. They want us to sit down together, Republican and Democrat, to work through this terrible time of crisis.”

I can see how some coders can have a close call with that last one, but I can't call it a policy statement, because I can't call "work through this terrible time" a policy. (Nor is this graf, which the paper cut: "Which candidate's experience in government and in life makes him a more reliable leader for our country and commander in chief for our troops?" McCain asked. "In short: Who's ready to lead?")

You could skip the next three grafs (on grounds that prayer -- even the "millions of people around this world praying to their god, whether it's Hindu, Buddha, Allah, that his opponent wins, for a variety of reasons" -- isn't policy either), except that they set up the conclusion:

“While we understand the important role that faith plays in informing the votes of Iowans, questions about the religious background of the candidates only serve to distract from the real questions in this race about Barack Obama's judgment, policies and readiness to lead as commander in chief,” Wendy Riemann said.

OK, got it now: "Policy" means putting aside attacks on your opponent's character so you can concentrate on important stuff, like -- your opponent's bad judgment! You can see how people have trouble in content analysis class until they get their codebooks straight.

Blame this one partly on the AP, but mostly on the copydesk. There are two assertions in the lede -- that McCain is turning away from "visceral attacks," and that he's turning toward "policy" -- and the desk chose the one that isn't supported to put in the hed.

Here's one from the local paper (since Charlotte didn't seem to think the Alaska abuse-of-power tale was worth much -- certainly not as much as Cindy McCain's visit to the speedway -- and the Freep at least had the vestigial good judgment to front it):

ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin unlawfully abused her power as governor by trying to have her former brother-in-law fired as a state trooper, the chief investigator of an Alaska legislative panel concluded Friday. The politically charged inquiry imperiled her reputation as a reformer on John McCain's ticket.

Um, implicationally, for this to be true, doesn't Palin have to actually be a reformer? (Much as Your Editor's "reputation as a power forward" would entail his actually having been one?*) Pinning this assertion to the "team of mavericks" itself seems the way to go here.

The "objective" turn in journalism isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's historically been an easy thing to game. An election is a nice time to keep people from gaming the system.

* The Central Ohio bureau can stop giggling any second now.

No, my dear, he's "last"

Since we seem to be settling into something like Spin Week, let's enjoy another entry from the Fair 'n' Balanced Gang.

Back story: My first actual exposure to "media framing" probably came in a Tom Slick cartoon back in the 1840s or whenever Tom Slick was on the black-and-white teevees. In the one I'm remembering,* our hero is in a two-car race with some typical villain and his typical villain girlfriend. Villain is trailing, and girlfriend wails: "We're last!"

"No, my dear," the villain says. "We're 'second.'"

Villain overtakes Tom, and girlfriend is delighted: "Now Tom Slick is second!"

"No, my dear," the villain says. "He's 'last.'"

Which is an appropriate way of reading Fox's framing of these results from its regular poll (August results at top, September below them). In both cases, it's Opinion Dynamics surveying 900 RVs over two consecutive nights; the "held today" question is in almost exactly the same place, and the only difference in wording is that VP candidates are included in the September poll. (Comparing polls is always risky, but if you have to do it, that's the way to go.) In each case, the result is a three-point difference between the major candidates. This, friends and neighbors, is framing with a capital F.**

What does the poll mean? Support for McCain/Palin in this poll is significantly higher -- we're 95% sure there's an actual difference in the population -- than support for McCain was last month (before the conventions, and before the selection of running mates). Obama's support is unchanged. That's interesting, but not nearly as interesting as the framing.

How about it there, SpinSpotter?

* If you are the keeper of the Complete Tom Slick Screenplay Archive, now's the time to stand up and be counted.
** And some asterisks.