September 19, 2008

Sins of Omission

It's a bit of a twist on the game of "Name That Party" over at NashvillePost.com, which in its reporting on the CEO of a troubled restaurant chain made prominent mention of the man's political contributions. "Name That Party," for those of you who don't know, is a fun online game of spotting news stories in which the mainstream media neglects to mention, or buries the mention, of the party affiliation of Democrat lawmakers caught in various scandals, crimes or malfeasance, but puts the party affiliation prominently in the headline, lead or first few paragraphs when the corrupt or ne'er do well pol is a Republican. It's a well-documented common occurrence in the mainstream media.

NashvillePost.com is playing the game a little differently. They describe the executive and his wife thusly:

He has a house on Belle Meade Boulevard ... and enough spare change to make (along with his wife) nearly $30,000 in donations to Republican electoral candidates and committees in the past four years.

Why mention only the donations to Republicans? If the writer had said "...in donations mostly to Republicans..." there would have been no problem. But the way the sentence is written, while technically accurate, conveys only a half-truth and leaves the reader with the impression - false - that the business exec supported only Republicans.

I emailed the writer and got his explanation for the omission of the exec's contributions to Democrats. He says he looked through the Federal Election Commission's online databases, which date back to 1999, and found the executive has given $33,600 to various candidates since 1999, including his contribution to Cooper. But the contribution to a Democrat gets omitted from the story because the writer chose to omit it, saying, "I tallied his contributions since 2004 because they increased dramatically starting that year and the next, at about the same time his company's tax filing lapses began."

It seems an arbitrary choice given that the man's political contributions were mentioned in the story merely as "color," and having nothing to do with the main thrust of the story. I'll leave it to you, the readers, to decide if that arbitrary choice was a fair one.