Following President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday, many major media groups chose to focus on the optics and politics of the event, while at least one newsroom focused on the facts of the speech.
In a front page splash on its website, USA Today led its coverage with a factcheck.org report, titled “Fact check: Obama’s State of the Union,” that began: “President Obama largely stuck to the facts in his State of the Union address, although he did cherry-pick data and exaggerate at times to put the best spin on his accomplishments.”
The factcheck.org article weighed the accuracy, often critically, of the various claims made by Obama. It is unusual for a daily newspaper to top its coverage of a major event like a presidential address to Congress with the work on employees of an outside group instead of its own reporters.
Separately, in an article titled “Reality check: The state of the union is … partisan,” which was written by USA Today’s Erin Kelly, Fredreka Schouten and Tom Vanden Brook, the Virginia-based newspaper dissected the president’s speech, making sure to add the necessary context to their examination of his claims.
Editors took different approaches at the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal — the president’s speech was not so much dissected for accuracy as it was looked at in terms of optics and politics.
In a Wall Street Journal article, titled “In State of the Union, Obama Makes Middle-Class Pitch,” the report reads: “Laying out a broad vision for his last two years in office, Mr. Obama asked lawmakers of both parties to ‘commit ourselves to an economy that generates rising incomes and chances for everyone who makes the effort.’”
The article described the many possible political battles to come, with far less attention paid to the fact-checking the president’s actual speech.
Likewise, in an article titled “Bold Call to Action in Obama’s State of the Union, Even if No Action Is Likely,” the New York Times’s assessment of the speech was almost entirely laudatory.
“Watching an emboldened Mr. Obama, it would have been easy to forget that he was standing there just two months after the biggest electoral repudiation of his presidency,” the article reads. “Indeed, with economic indicators on the rise and his own poll numbers rebounding slightly, he made no reference at all to the midterm elections, offered no concessions about his own leadership and proposed no compromises to accommodate the political reality.”
Readers of the Washington Post encountered similarly positive analyses of the Obama address.
“Emboldened by a stronger economy and a series of recent policy initiatives, President Obama on Tuesday night made clear that he is committed to cementing a liberal legacy and aimed to reframe the broader debate on what constitutes American success,” the Post’s Juliet Eilperin wrote in an article titled “President Obama, with two years to go, commits to cementing a liberal legacy.”
Media critics are far from unanimous on which approach better serves readers, with some saying readers benefit from a “multiplicity of approaches,” while another claims newsroom bias and the tendency to characterize the president’s annual address in broad, thematic terms robs the public of important facts.
“All journalism is influenced by writers’ [and] outlets’ political perspectives and biases — and when bias is allowed to hold sway with coverage, gullibility for empty rhetoric becomes prominent,” media critic and the founder of Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting Jeff Cohen told the Washington Examiner Wednesday.
“For liberal outlets talking up Obama’s ‘bold call to action,’ there is a gullibility that allows them to omit or minimize the obvious fact that if Obama really wanted to implement these tax-the-rich/help-the-middle-class tax schemes, he would have introduced them when Democrats controlled Congress.
“That same fact is similarly omitted or minimized by some conservative outlets that want to stick to their script of Obama as radical or socialist,” Cohen added.
Asked which approach he thinks is most beneficial to curious readers, Politico’s media and politics reporter Jack Shafer said events like the president’s State of the Union address provide reporters with a “multiplicity of approaches.”
“There is no ‘one true path’ in journalism,” he said.
