Barber-Kelly article in the Star: Textbook false equivalence
by David Safier
Before carefully and accurately taking apart Brady McCombs' front page article in the Sunday Star, "Seniors' benefits dominate CD 8 race" (print edition only), AZ Blue Meanie accuses me of being a soft old teacher, always looking for the good in people. Guilty as charged. See, the high school English teacher in me saw a marked improvement in McCombs' article on the Kelly press conference in the print edition over the earlier online version. It went from a C- online to a B+ in print. But then he didn't write a similar article, online or in the print edition, covering the Barber press conference the next week even though he was there taking notes. That's a double F for failure to turn in required work. And as the Meanie demonstrates in detail, today's article creates a false equivalence between the truth and falsehood of a number of assertions made by the Barber and Kelly campaigns.
Grading today's article is bit of a stumper for this old teacher. I'll have give it a B+ for style and readability over a D for giving readers the information they need to separate fact from fiction. Since I prize content over style, the overall grade is a C-.
Eight paragraphs into the article, there's nothing but a simplistic "He said, He said" recitation of the way the two sides portray each other on Social Security and Medicare. Since most readers won't get much farther than that, the takeaway is: Both sides are spinning equally, so when you vote, choose the guy whose looks you like the best.
[Note: I understand this is how articles are structured, moving from the general to the specific. But instead of wasting the sidebar with a list of mind-numbing figures, the space could have been used to summarize the arguments on both sides and to rate their validity.]