Check Those Facts (Editorial)

Holding politicians accountable for their public statements seemed to go out of fashion for awhile in an era of scrupulously balanced “he-said, he-said” journalism. But the journalistic Wild West of the Internet has also spawned some new sheriffs, notably FactCheck.org and PolitiFact.com.

ArkansasBusiness.com Editor Lance Turner took it upon himself to get to the bottom of what seemed to be a 180-degree disagreement between two political advertisements, one by Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s campaign for re-election and one by a union group seeking her ouster.

Unless you’ve been under a rock, you know which ads Turner dissected: one in which Lincoln claims to have helped save jobs for 1,700 Cooper Tire employees in Texarkana and one in which a Cooper worker insists that the workers saved their own jobs by accepting big pay cuts – cuts that wouldn’t have been necessary if Lincoln hadn’t voted for various free-trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA.

Turner peeled the ads apart and came to this unsurprising conclusion: “… there are varying shades of truth in both spots.”

In the case of Lincoln v. the Service Employees International Union, Turner explained the ads weren’t even talking about the same thing. Lincoln’s ad claimed credit for saving “1,700 Cooper Tire employees from losing their jobs to Chinese imports,” a reference to her successful effort in the summer of 2009 to get President Obama to impose tougher tariffs on cheap Chinese tires flooding the U.S. market.

But in disputing her ad, the SEIU ignored Lincoln’s reference to Chinese imports and referred back to late 2008, when the management of Cooper tire essentially asked employees at four plants to underbid each other.

In the end, state and local economic development efforts, combined with big pay concessions by the United Steelworkers, kept the Texarkana plant running. Turner wasn’t able to get a straight answer on whether Sen. Lincoln played any role in saving the plant then – but since she never claimed to, the SEIU ad was more than a little disingenuous.

But Turner also suggested Lincoln left herself open to the attack. The cost-cutting concessions made in 2008 got a lot more attention than the Chinese tariff six months later, so her ad’s reference to saving 1,700 jobs would naturally invoke that episode in the minds of viewers. Lincoln, Turner wrote, could have made her point by saying, “My hard work pushing for trade relief leveled the playing field for the Cooper Tire plant in Texarkana, ensuring a strong future for its 1,700 workers there.”

Similarly the SEIU could have been more accurate and up-front without wrongly accusing Lincoln of lying.

But being accurate and up-front is not the goal of political advertising. The political advertising season is producing more headaches and almost as much slime as the pollen season Arkansans recently endured, and without the eventual payoff.