COMM 337: How much extra credit ... ?

... should I give you if you cite the article linked below in your final exam for COMM 337?

Email me and let me know what you think. That way I'll know you visited the website during final exam week, even if you don't quote the article linked below in your essay on truth, facts and the responsiblities of a journalist.

But I think you'll find something to think about.

It's an opinion piece in today's New York Times by Clark Hoyt, the "readers' representative" columnist for The Times. Headline is "Fact and Fiction on the Campaign Trail." Interested yet? Facts.

Well, try this. Hoyt's lede:

LAST Monday’s Times reported that Rudolph Giuliani had accused Mitt Romney of having a bad record on crime while governor of Massachusetts.

“Violent crime and murder went up when he was governor,” Giuliani said of his Republican rival.

In time-honored journalistic fashion, the newspaper noted the Romney campaign’s response: No, violent crime, which includes murder, actually went down during Romney’s tenure.

If you were like me, you wondered, impatiently, why the newspaper didn’t answer a simple question: who is telling the truth? I wanted the facts, and, not for the first time, The Times let me down.

OK, OK, a couple of political candidates trashing each other. Happens all the time. But I columnist for The New York Times saying his paper let him down? Now that is news.

No. It's not news, it's ethics.

So who's telling the truth? Says Hoyt:

My colleague Michael McElroy came up with the facts that morning after a 10-minute check of F.B.I. statistics readily available on the Internet. Murder in Massachusetts did go up in the four years Romney was governor, from 173 in 2002, the year before he took office, to 186 in 2006, the last full year of his term. An increase of 13 murders may not seem like a crime wave in a state with a population of 6.4 million, but an increase is an increase, so Giuliani was right on that point.

But violent crime, a broader category made up of murder, rape, robbery and assault, went down in the Romney era, from 31,137 to 28,775, so Giuliani was wrong on that score and the Romney campaign was right, though it failed to mention that robberies had also increased.

Both of them. Neither one of them.

Getting the facts in context is a little harder. Ten minutes harder, to be precise. How difficult can that be?

Something else. Hoyt quotes people who say fact-checking can have a good effect on the political process, and several news organizations in fact (there's that word again) do a lot of it:

Fact-checking the candidates has long been an important part of campaign coverage. When news organizations blow the whistle on false statements by candidates, it tends to have an impact, said Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political scientist. “I think it’s an extremely valuable role, keeping the players honest.”

Is that worth 10 minutes of a reporter's time?