Romney, Obama and… Pinocchio

On Aug. 8, Glenn Kessler, the lie detector of the Washington Post, awarded a maximum of four Pinocchios to an advertisement from Mitt Romney’s camp accusing Barack Obama of having “eviscerated” the welfare reform promulgated by Bill Clinton in 1992.

Did this scathing verdict, upheld by several other “fact checkers” of American journalism, encourage the Republican candidate’s team to withdraw their advertisement? Of course not.

“Our most effective ad is our welfare ad,” declared Ashley O’Connor, one of Romney’s strategists on the occasion of a meeting organized yesterday morning in Tampa by ABC News and Yahoo! News. “It’s new information.”

But don’t the four Pinocchios of the Washington Post prove that it’s first and foremost about misleading information? Neil Newhouse, the pollster for Mitt Romney, offered a response to this question that created controversy on the Internet. “Fact checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs, and we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers,” he declared.

Racial Tensions

Romney’s advertisement on welfare is not only criticized for its misleading or deceptive nature. It is also denounced by Democrats and commentators who see in it a strategy well ordered by the Republican camp to fan the resentment of whites toward blacks.

One thing is indisputable: Mitt Romney must refuel on white votes to overcome his enormous lag behind Barack Obama with the black and Latino votes — and the effectiveness of the welfare ad might help.

But Romney is not the only one to reap the Pinocchios. Obama recently has been found to be at fault by the fact-checkers, accuses Romney in an ad that seeks to outlaw abortion in all circumstances.

In this case as in the other, the tactic is the same, according to Bill Adair, creator and editor of PoltiFact, the Tampa Bay Times website for fact checking, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009.

“[T]hey take one small truth, if it’s a truth, or at least one thing and then they draw sweeping conclusions from it,” said Adair yesterday in a meeting with foreign press journalists. “[T]hat’s the most common thing we see.”

Adair is proud of the work that he and the other American “fact checkers” have accomplished within the framework of this presidential campaign. But the growing number of information sources and methods of communication do not make their task easy.

“There was an old Mark Twain line when Mark Twain was alive at the turn of the century in 1900 that a falsehood can go all around the world before the truth gets its shoes on, and that is so much more true today. And so I think that’s the biggest thing,” said the lie detector of the Tampa Bay Times.