January 25, 2010
The Value of Good Research
It is the final week before the Illinois primary, a time when ads tend to be strong on hyperbole and weak on facts. This is the time when researchers earn our paychecks, either by fact-checking ads our clients produce or by refuting those of our opponents.
With that in mind, let's consider the research behind Senate candidate David Hoffman's latest ad:
Voiceover: "[Alexi Giannoulias] was chief loan officer when his family's bank gave a million dollars to Blagojevich crony and convicted felon Tony Rezko, then let Rezko bounce a half million in checks."
Text: "The Giannoulias Record: $1 million in loans to felon Tony Rezko" -Chicago Sun-Times, 10/13/06
"Allowing $500K in bounced checks." -Daily Herald, 5/5/08
There are many problems with the claim about bouncing checks. First, the citation is wrong: the Daily Herald article referencing the bad checks was published on May 30, 2008, not May 5. Even worse, the criminal complaint the article discusses was filed on May 16, after the date in the ad's citation. The citation is undoubtedly a typo referring to a June 5, article; however, this article does not even refer to Broadway Bank. ("Rezko faces an arrest warrant in Las Vegas for writing $450,000 in bad checks for gambling debt on the Strip in 2006." -Daily Herald, 6/5/08)
If we look at the article that should have been sourced, we see that "According to the May 16 criminal complaint, Rezko bounced $250,000 over five checks at Caesars between March 24 and July 15 of 2006. He also is accused of bouncing four checks on July 13, 2006, at Bally's totaling 200,000. All nine checks, according to the complaint, were drawn on Rezko's account at Chicago's Broadway Bank, which is owned by the family of Illinois Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias." (Daily Herald, 5/30/08)
This is a sign of lazy research: the ad could have sourced the primary documents instead of the reporter's summary (every researcher has at one point faced the unpleasant discovery that reporters get things wrong). The criminal complaint could have any number of details: Did Broadway Bank pre-approve the checks before they bounced? Was the account open at the time? Was there any correspondence at all between Broadway and the casinos?
These are questions any researcher should ask, and should have resolved before the ad was made. Instead, the ad states that an article that does not exist made a claim that is intuitively absurd: that Broadway Bank "allowed" bad checks to be written by Tony Rezko.
This blog post was not paid for or authorized by any client of Third Coast Research.
Posted on January 25 at 04:29 PM