By Arthur Alpert

Here’s a pleasant thought – the Albuquerque Journal is an outlier, defined as “a person or thing situated away or detached from the main body or system.”

Rarely, that is, does a newspaper deliberately manipulate the news to advance management’s editorial agenda. What’s more common is tolerance for mediocre or downright poor journalism.

I suppose that’s preferable if still undesirable.

What inspired these musings was an Associated Press piece headlined “Obama, Romney Try To Shrug Off Status as Rich”, by Ken Thomas. It ran in the Journal Wednesday, April 11 on A6.

I detect no partisanship in Thomas, but his long account is chock full of journalistic “don’ts” beginning with a common conceptual error, the “false equivalence.” That’s a technique whereby journalists discern a significant identity between two individuals or two sides of an argument but it isn’t real.

Thus, Thomas opens by describing both men as very rich while saving for paragraph 11 this tidbit:

“While both Romney and Obama are millionaires, there is a huge difference in their wealth.”

Only then does he inform us that Mr. Romney has between $190 and $250 million while the President “is worth between $1.5 million and nearly $12 million.”

So we know that both men are rich and Romney is mega-rich. This could be the jumping-off point for a provocative argument, namely, that both espouse right-of-center policies. But Thomas doesn’t go there. This leaves me wondering why it’s significant.

Maybe we’ll learn from his second graph:

“Just don’t expect Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama to embrace their elite status. In a campaign year where populism sells, they are trying to stick the rich guy label on each other, making clear that being wealthy and privileged is not necessarily a political asset when you’re running for president in this uncertain economy.”

Brilliant. And that’s why Americans elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt four times, the first two when the populism tide was high.

Thomas doesn’t know that American voters distinguish between rich candidates and candidates who advocate for the rich.

Further, as Thomas himself reports, Obama is admitting to his wealth and arguing that’s why he doesn’t need a tax break. This constitutes a refusal to “embrace” his elite status?

But Thomas has much worse in store, namely his fifth paragraph:

Romney, Thomas writes, has “faced withering criticism from Democrats who try to paint him as a ruthless financier who has paid lower tax rates unavailable to middle-class families.”

Thus, he combines in one sentence the Democrats’ political rhetoric (“ruthless financier”), which may not be true and a simple statement of fact (those lower tax rates).

You may file that under “Journalistic incompetence, pure.”

Romney paid federal taxes at a rate of about 14 percent because most of his income was from investments and investment income (capital gains) is taxed at only 15 percent. Heck, Thomas says approximately that a few paragraphs later.

Later, he recounts in great detail (16 paragraphs, few of them slim) what both candidates and campaigns are arguing, mostly about taxes, and how their respective efforts are going.

He’s trying to be fair, great, but seems never to have considered testing the dueling political claims for accuracy.

It’s as if the reporter’s job begin and ends with echoing what the campaigns are saying.

Years ago, an irritated David Brinkley told me – no, he didn’t tell, he protested – that news people had to be more than “megaphones,” just relaying, uncritically, what authorities say.

Sorry, David, the megaphone business is good. And the Albuquerque Journal publishes lots of the noise.