There are two ways to approach being evenhanded: You can try to actually be evenhanded, which could mean that you find that one side is right and the other is wrong. Or you can strive for the appearance of being evenhanded, which means that you decide in advance that you're going to find that there's truth on both sides.

PolitiFact, a political factchecking project based in St. Petersburg, Florida, has been criticized for taking the latter approach. An item it posted yesterday (1/9/12) is further evidence of its preference for the appearance of evenhandedness over its reality.

The item addressed Rick Santorum's assertion in a January 4 town meeting that as a result of the 1996 welfare law, "Poverty levels went down to the lowest level ever for...one of the areas that had the highest level of poverty historically, which is African-American children." PolitiFact concluded that the statement was "Half True," since "Santorum is right that poverty rates declined after the reform’s passage. But opinions differ on the primary cause."

As evidence that "opinions differ," the factcheckers turned to Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, best known for his argument that the poor aren't really poor because they have microwave ovens and the like. Unsurprisingly, since he works for a group set up explicitly to promote conservative ideas, he does indeed have the opinion that the 1996 welfare law caused a drop in child poverty. But does this opinion have any basis in fact?

PolitiFact allows him to make his case at length, but the gist of it is this: "Since welfare reform, the poverty rate among black children has fallen at an unprecedented rate from 41.5 percent in 1995 to 32.9 percent in 2004." And PolitiFact helpfully gives you a link to a U.S. Census chart that shows that those numbers are almost accurate. But looking at the numbers for yourself, you see that there's no indication that the 1996 law had anything to do with them: Poverty among black children peaked in 1992, at 46.3 percent, and declined steadily from then until 2001, when it hit a low of 30.0 before moving upward.  1996 does not seem to have impacted the poverty trajectory at all; a naive reading of the numbers would indicate that black child poverty goes up when someone named "Bush" is in the White House.

Here's a graph of child poverty by race from Mother Jones (9/29/11--by raw numbers, not percentages) that illustrates the utter unremarkability of 1996 for black child poverty:

PolitiFact goes on to give equal space, and equal rhetorical weight, to sources who say economic growth is actually what drove child poverty down in the '90s: "While Rector maintains that the economy played only a secondary role in reducing poverty, other groups says it’s the main driver." But none of these sources directly rebut Rector's arguments, or point out how dubious it is to give a 1996 law credit for a decline that began four years earlier.

So it's true that "opinions differ" on whether the 1996 welfare lowered poverty for black children. A real factchecker would point out that the advocate for that opinion offers selective and misleading figures to back it up. But then, if you did point that out, you might look like you weren't being evenhanded.

(Thanks to Neil deMause for bringing PolitiFact's report to my attention.)

The usual criticisms of the Iowa caucuses--that the votes of a small, demographically unrepresentative slice of America gobble up too much airtime--are basically correct.

As David Sirota noted in Salon (1/3/12):

The same journalism industry that pleads poverty to justify cutting big city newspapers' editorial staffs, gutting coverage of state legislatures and city councils, and eliminating every other critical topic not related to Washington's red-versus-blue fetish from news content--as writer Joe Romero recounts, this same industry has for months devoted a massive army to cover Iowa's small contest.

Just one example of the absurdity:  At least one of Rick Santorum's final campaign stops was so mobbed by reporters that some of actual residents of Iowa he was supposed to be talking to couldn't squeeze into the meetings, as noted by the Washington Post:

The evidence of Santorum's recent surge was obvious: The overwhelming crush of media members at the Polk City stop included reporters from Italy and Australia. Dozens of voters--who two weeks ago probably could have had the candidate to themselves--were pressed out of the restaurant and stood in the cold.

"I'm actually from Polk City," one said to another as he was unable to squeeze his way inside. "Yeah, we don't count," the other responded.

Of the storylines that have emerged so far, one is that Mitt Romney has yet to dominate the competition. This has been present in the campaign coverage for months, and continued in the papers this morning.  Susan Page in USA Today wrote:

By favoring a conservative, a moderate and a libertarian in nearly equal doses, visitors to the state's 1,774 precincts did little to clear up what has been a topsy-turvy contest to choose President Obama's opponent next fall.

In the New York Times, Jeff Zeleny writes that "Mitt Romney's quest to swiftly lock down the Republican presidential nomination with a commanding finish in the Iowa caucuses was undercut on Tuesday night by the surging candidacy of Rick Santorum." And Zeleny added later,  "The Iowa caucuses did not deliver a clean answer to what type of candidate Republicans intend to rally behind to try to defeat President Obama and win back the White House."

Also in the Times, courtesy of Jim Rutenberg:

But more than anything else, the Iowa caucuses cast in electoral stone what has played out in the squishy world of polls and punditry for the last 12 months: The deep ideological divisions among Republicans continue to complicate their ability to focus wholly on defeating President Obama, and to impede Mr. Romney's efforts to overcome the internal strains and win the consent if not the heart of the party.

There is no reason in the world that voters in any state in the country should line up behind any single candidate. The fact that the voters in a particular party are split between different candidates who represent different factions of their party is a sign that people have different views about who they think should lead the country. Which is, after all, a good thing.

The alternative would be to deprive voters everywhere else a chance to have a say about who their party's nominee will be. There's a curious sort of tension at work. On the one hand, you get a sense that reporters want the primary season to continue for months, if only for the sake of giving them something to cover. On the other hand, they spend an awful lot of time puzzling over why Mitt Romney can't manage to wrap up the Republican nomination after one state has voted.

Political campaign watchers seem to agree that the election will be about the economy, and that Republicans probably won't have much to say about Obama's foreign policy (partly because it doesn't much differ from what a Republican president might be doing).

The New York  Times' Richard Oppel has a piece today headlined, "Republican Candidates Aim at Obama Foreign Policy."

So what exactly is the Republican case against Obama's foreign policy? That it's too soft on the Hezbollah menace on our southern border.
Seriously.

Oppel writes:

A small but revealing episode unfolded in the closing minutes of the last Republican presidential debate. After the candidates were asked to name the national security issue they most worry about, which had not yet been discussed, Rick Santorum cited radical Islamists in Central and South America.

Mitt Romney agreed, saying that Hezbollah, a militant Shiite group in Lebanon that is backed by Iran and Syria, was working in Mexico, Venezuela and throughout Latin America, posing an "imminent threat." Earlier in the night, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas warned that Hezbollah, as well as Hamas, the Palestinian militant organization that controls Gaza, also were working in Mexico.

That the candidates would cite the same threat--one denied by the Mexican government, and which seemed to contrast with a State Department report that there are no Hezbollah-related operational cells in this hemisphere--was not a coincidence.

Oppel adds that  "a major thrust of the Republican foreign-policy argument" will include this kind of rhetoric about Obama being "too soft" on the likes of "Iran, Hezbollah and the Palestinians."

If a journalist is looking to inform voters, it might help to give them a sense of whether what these candidates are saying is grounded in reality. PolitiFact judged  Romney's Hezbollah comments "Mostly False," pointing out that the claim appears to come from a paper by former Bush assistant secretary of state Roger Noriega--and that the paper argues that most of the activity in Latin America is related to fundraising--criminal activity that funnels money back to Lebanon.

The Times judges the accuracy of the Republican charges in passing--the candidates' claims "seemed to contrast with a State Department report." ` The piece is far more concerned with the political strategy at work, and how Republicans might be trying to appeal to some Jewish voters with a message about Obama being soft on Islamic terrorists. It's a strategy that will likely be a lot more successful if reporters aren't going to call them out.

In the New York Times corrections box (6/7/11):

An article on Monday about Rick Santorum, a former senator from Pennsylvania who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, omitted the name of one of the other declared candidates, who number six, not five. Ron Paul, a Republican congressman from Texas, is also running.

One of the main tasks the  media perform in a campaign is excluding the candidates they deem unworthy of consideration. The Times is off to an early start.

Philadelphia Weekly intern and Prometheus Radio Project volunteer Alyssa Figueroa has produced an excellent document of local media activists taking on global news coverage in her video showing how "nearly 100 people marched to the Philadelphia Inquirer's office demanding the paper publish more factual pieces about the coup in Honduras."

PW tells us (7/30/09) that

the marchers believed that the Inquirer's coverage of the coup has been dishonest and irresponsible, especially citing former Republican Sen. Rick Santorum's op-ed, which they thought to be not based in facts.

Participants marched from the Central Library to the Inquirer's office after attending an event at the library on community media and Latin America.

Adrienne Pine, an anthropologist and assistant professor at American University, was one of the event’s speakers. She spoke about how media coverage doesn't supply its audience with the truth, and yet citizens continue to rise up and fight for accuracy.

Pine, who "has lived in Honduras for several years and has written a book and essays on the country, also mentioned that she had written an op-ed for the Inquirer and it was rejected without a reason."

Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Greg Grandin on Honduras Coup" (7/3/09).

Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed columnist Harold Jackson (5/20/09) writes that most of those who have criticized his paper for hiring of pro-torture lawyer John Yoo as his colleague "have their facts wrong."
After making a gratuitous swipe at bloggers ("who never let the facts get in the way when they're trying to whip people into a frenzy to boost website hits"), Jackson gets down to specifics: "To set the record straight, no one tried to hide Yoo's becoming a regular columnist," he declares. If that's the case, why isn't Yoo listed on the Inquirer's website along with its other regular columnists?

That seems to be the one specific fact that the critics got "wrong," actually. The rest of the column is a defense of the Inquirer's judgment in hiring Yoo to "counter criticism that our editorials and columns always lean left," and to "make sure our pages present alternative points of view."

It's kind of funny, the line about countering criticism--the whole point of the column is that the paper's gotten a lot of criticism about hiring Yoo, but the response to that criticism is not to hire someone representing the critics' point of view, but to tell them to stop reading blogs.

In point of fact, the Inquirer's columnists do not all represent the left. In addition to Rick Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator who got 16 percent of the Philadelphia vote in his last election, the lineup also features Kevin Ferris, who writes his own defenses of torture and condemns Barack Obama's "Dangerous Naivete in Foreign Policy." And Michael Smerconish, a more moderate conservative who has filled in as a substitute host for Bill O'Reilly and Joe Scarborough.

There's five other columnists listed by the paper, all with backgrounds in corporate journalism. Some of them are mildly liberal; none of them are likely to be mistaken for I.F. Stone. Certainly none of them are prominent figures in progressive politics, a left-wing counterpart to Santorum.

And who would be the left-wing counterpart to Yoo, exactly? Bill Ayers? That's unfair to Ayers, whose actions, however reckless, didn't end up killing anybody.

This is the trouble with treating Yoo as someone who merely "provide[s] the catalyst for intelligent discourse": Torture is illegal under U.S. law and a violation of the U.S. Constitution. And, despite the indignation Jackson seems to feel over the "very pleasant" Yoo being called a "war criminal" by emailers, it's classified as, yes, a war crime by international law.

When influential institutions treat those responsible for such things as worthy experts, society risks losing things even more valuable than "thoughtful conversation."