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August 01, 2012 5:39 PM The False Equivalency of “Gaffes”

By Ed Kilgore

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Most political junkies get a big kick out of candidate “gaffes”—so long as they are made by candidates they don’t like—and most of us are capable of distinguishing between an inadvertent slip of the tongue and a “Kinsley gaffe” wherein a candidate discloses something about his or her beliefs that is credible and very unpopular.

But putting all that aside, everyone with a brain can distinguish between any kind of “gaffe” and simply an utterance that opponents can turn into what appears to be a “gaffe” via heavy-handed editing, the removal of context or simply loud lies about it. The exploitation of the “you didn’t build that” remark by Obama involves all three of these opposition techniques, elevated by the repeated claim that this remark more than anything else reveals the president’s true essence, no matter how often he has contradicted the imputed meaning.

We are reaching a point in the presidential campaign, however, where some pundits are getting tired of trying to make such distinctions, and are simply denouncing any use of a candidate’s words by his opponents. Indeed, the normally quite insightful Sam Stein of HuffPost is suggesting that coverage of “gaffes” is killing the spontaneity and authenticity of all candidates:

Whether at home or abroad, presidential candidates’ so-called gaffes — and the media’s preoccupation with each inartfully phrased or impolitic remark — have defined the 2012 election. Gaffes get tweeted, blogged, and reported. Cable pundits declare them game-changers. And rival campaigns amplify them through any means possible. When that’s done, the story becomes whether the campaign gaffed in cleaning up its gaffe.
Reporters complain that Romney’s too robotic and Obama’s too detached. But given that media’s extensive coverage of gaffes so far, including at The Huffington Post, the chances of unscripted moments or off-the-cuff question-and-answer sessions seem likely to grow more remote from now until November. Reporters, in short, may be facilitating the very reality they detest.

That may well be true. But like every “even-handed” effort to generalize about candidates and campaigns and their treatment by the media, there’s a danger involved in throwing up one’s hands and refusing to make distinctions. Perhaps refusing to write about “gaffes” would reduce the temptation of campaigns to exploit, exaggerate, or even invent them, but it would also eliminate any effort to call out blatant lies and distortions as distinctive and deplorable events. And who, BTW, is going to referee coverage of “gaffes”? Fox News is going to use whatever ammunition it has been given by the Romney campaign and its supporters. More honest observers can try to tell the truth—difficult as it is sometimes—or just let the lies and spin take over. Before you know it, we could reach a juncture where “liberal media” are afraid to report a startling admission by Mitt Romney about the contents of the Ryan Budget—because no candidate in his right mind would do that! Better to hash it all out in the context of what the two candidates actually seem to stand for.

Ed Kilgore is a contributing writer to the Washington Monthly. He is managing editor for The Democratic Strategist and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute. Find him on Twitter: @ed_kilgore.
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Comments

  • golack on August 01, 2012 5:49 PM:

    Did you see the CNN opinion piece, "When did the GOP become whiners"???

  • Mitch on August 01, 2012 6:55 PM:

    The Gaffe issue is just a symptom of the larger problem: the shallow, pathetic trash that counts as journalism. This is a direct result of mass media being dominated by merely a handful of giant corporations, instead of being ran by people whose first love is journalism itself.

    The media is not in the business of journalism; their business is the selling of advertising space. To do that, you need to attract eyeballs. Well, sensationalism, sound bites and tabloid-quality obsessing over the personal lives of celebrities all attract eyeballs.

    Detailed analysis does not appeal to your average person. Making sensational claims about public figures, does. Making "smart people" seem like fools due to the fallibility of human speech does as well. The "horse race" style of campaigning does. Same with hyping he-said-she-said in any situation.

    I used to be disappointed by journalism, but then I realized this simple truth. They exist to sell ad space. That is it. Expecting anything else is a waste of energy.

    The gaffe-fest will continue. He-said-she-said will continue. Unless some unlikely event destroys modern media monopolies, this will continue.

    Or, as I often say, "This world doesn't need Superman. It needs Perry White."

  • Doug on August 01, 2012 7:43 PM:

    "Gaffes" are just the latest form of the "he said/he replied" type of reporting (it's certainly NOT journalism) so beloved by the lazy stenographers aka the MSM. Were the cable and network news shows possessed of actual journalists, the story would be "Why is this ovbiously faked meme being pushed?"

  • Sharksbreath on August 01, 2012 8:47 PM:

    I have been saying that Republicans are lucky this campaign season isn't talking about policies.

    If you talk policies you would have to be a bigot, stupid or an idiot to vote republican.

    Bigger tax cuts and less regulations is all they got.

    FYI. You guys need to change your comment section to Discuss. They have the best comment app on the web.

  • T2 on August 01, 2012 10:32 PM:

    @Doug.....you nailed it