In Praise of Fact Checkers

Twenty-four hour news channels have changed much of how we perceive the news of the day.  One not-so-good impact has been a significant reduction in serious, in-depth analysis on a daily basis.  Instead, news events tend to be presented by bringing together disparate voices on a topic and letting them go at it.  The live format provides little opportunity for the news anchor to challenge opinion and get at the real facts of the matter.   It makes one pine for the 22 minutes or so of nightly that we used to get from CBS, NBC, and ABC in pre-cable days, when reporters had to boil events down to the core facts and leave the opining to the Sunday talk shows.   The news channels have done much to bring the immediacy of world events into our homes, but they have also made it very easy for demagogues to spread mistruths, partial truths, and, occasionally, outright lies with little to check them.   With a few notable exceptions, analysis has been replaced by the simple presentation of opposing opinion, leaving it to the viewer to find the truth.

Luckily, some organizations (news and otherwise) have also developed “fact checker” services to help us sort out truth from misperception and misrepresentation.  Here are a few:

http://www.politifact.com/   Politifact.com is a service founded in 2007 by the St. Petersburg Times that quickly evaluates the accuracy of political statements.  In 2009, it won a Pulitzer Prize for “separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voters.”  It has a “truth-o-meter,” a “Flip-o-meter,” and an “Obameter.”

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/category/fact-check/   CNN provides this service mainly to allow us to keep score on political speech.

http://www.ucsusa.org/news/ucs-fact-checker.html  The Union of Concerned Scientists uses its fact checker to try to keep public officials and politicians—but also the media—honest on all sorts of science issues, especially the environment.

http://www.factcheck.org/  This service is managed by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania that focuses on research in political communication, information and society, media and children, health communication, and adolescent communication.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker  Subtitled “The Truth Behind the Rhetoric,” this fact check blog from the Washington Post is written by Glenn Kessler, a veteran diplomatic correspondent who is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and who has been with the Post since 1998.

Check these out and, if you know of other good fact checkers, please share them.

"Almost Treason?"

Texas Governor Rick Perry's recent remarks that the Obama Administration's--and, in particular, the head of the Federal Reserve's--actions on the economy amount to "almost treason" suggest that we should ask ourselves what else might constitute treason?

For instance, when a Governor of a State suggests that his state may secede from the Union, is that "almost treason?"

When a candidate for political office suggests that a public official be executed, is that "almost treason?"

Treason usually involves a conspiracy, so if the person who committed these "almost treasonous" acts gets chosen by his party to take over the government, what is that? 

I do hope, sincerely, that our politicians try their best to ignore the radical fringe at both extremes of the political spectrum and find a middle path that allows them to work together to solve our country's problems.  We have never been an "all or nothing" country.  We've always governed amid multiple ideologies, multiple strategies, multiple pressures, and multiple ideas about what constitutes service to the people.  Today, we desperately need to find the middle.  If the politicians, individually, cannot do that, then the electorate--the people that the Constitution was written to protect--needs to select politicians who can work in the messy middle of our political system in order to protect our long-term interests as a nation.

Meanwhile, people like Rick Perry should take care that their rhetoric does not cause others to ask the same questions of them.

GOP’s nasty ‘tar baby’ politics - Leonard Pitts Jr. - MiamiHerald.com

GOP’s nasty ‘tar baby’ politics - Leonard Pitts Jr. - MiamiHerald.com

Thanks to Leonard Pitts, Jr., for giving us the straight facts about the political crisis in the United States. The radicalization of American politics is as much--if not more--about our President's race than any other single factor.

A Good Example of Truth-Telling Journalism

Who's to blame for S&P's U.S. credit rating downgrade? - Political Hotsheet - CBS News

This analysis by CBS is a good example of what I called for in my previous posting.

Truth versus Power

On Friday, August 5, MSNBC had this headline in its Business section:  “No double dip, but economy stuck in low gear.”  Right next to it was this headline, “NYT analysis:  We’re probably in a double dip recession.”  Directly under that was another headline: “Why recession fears are overblown.”   And, of course, at the very top of the site was the breaking news:  “US Loses Top Credit Rating.”

So, what did we learn from MSNBC on this particular day?  Not much, it appears.  Now, I am a big fan of MSNBC.  This website is my home page on my web browser.  However, we have to question the value of their reportage on this issue, this particular day.

In a recent Rolling Stone article, former Vice President Al Gore wrote, "After World War II, a philosopher studying the impact of organized propaganda on the quality of democratic debate wrote, 'The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false'."  The task today, is to push our politicians to move past propaganda--the always evident "talking points" on each side--and to demand that they tell us what they think is true.   

The 24-hour news channels have given us a “talking-point versus talking-point” approach to the news, instead of reportage based on fact-finding and analysis.  In this radicalized political climate, it simply is not enough to invite to the table a liberal and a conservative and elicit their talking points on an issue.  Rather, we should expect the reporter to dig out the facts personally and present an analysis that they can support as the truth as they see it.   That is, we should ask journalists to pursue questions of truth rather than questions of power. Otherwise, propaganda will win out and, when that happens, a democratic society will always lose.

Jane Addams and the Tea Party

I am re-reading Jane Addams’ wonderful memoir, Twenty Years at Hull-House.  In explaining the spirit with which she founded her settlement house in 1890s Chicago, she wrote that it was driven, in part by “the conviction, in the words of Canon Barnett, that the things which make men alike are finer and better than the things that keep them apart, and that these basic likenesses, if they are properly accentuated, easily transcend the less essential differences of race, language, creed, and tradition.”  Addams, of course, was speaking about the importance of integrating into American life the millions of immigrants who had been attracted to the United States at the height of the Industrial Revolution.  However, her words also set an expectation for us today.

American-style democracy thrives on our ability to find a workable middle—a place where are “basic likenesses” outweigh the things that keep us apart enough for us to fulfill the purpose of our federal government as declared in the opening sentence of the Constitution: “. . . to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity . . .” I would like to think that I could identify some “basic likenesses” with the Tea Party members of Congress.  However, it does not come easily.

The Tea Party, which declared its purpose during the last election as being “to take back our country” (they did not say from whom), can be expected to become even more radical and less prone to compromise now that they have won a big victory.  These rightwing extremists have set themselves so arrogantly apart from the mainstream of our country, that, right now at least, I cannot find common ground with them.  They, in turn, seek no common ground with anyone who does not share their ideology.

I hope that our politicians are able to find a way to build a workable middle ground in this environment.

An Awful Week

It’s been an awful week out there in the world by most measures.  

First, of course, for some of us, there was the heat wave, which begins the list simply because of its striking immediacy.  Like most politics, it was regional in scope, but local in impact.  Few could ignore it; some died because of it. 

In Africa, where eleven million are suffering from famine, Somali militants refused to allow aid to get to the people who need it, demonstrating once again the uselessness of ideology over simple humanity. 

Here in the United States, radical conservatives are just fine with the idea of bringing on a new recession by forcing their fiscal ideology on the rest of the country, with impact on the rest of the world.  Here, too, ideology has replaced simple humanity.  One needs to be reminded that Pragmatism was an American philosophy.  Where is Dewey when you need him?

Then, very sadly, in Norway, one of the most peaceful countries, a conservative zealot—why real Christians allow these people to get away with calling themselves Christians I will never know—goes on a killing spree, murdering other Christians to make what he hoped would be an opening statement against the rising population of Islamists in Norway. 

Finally, for some perspective, on July 23, the “Writer’s Almanac” (http://www.elabs7.com/functions/message_view.html?mid=1296273&mlid=499&siteid=20130&uid=ecd2852d92)  carried this bit of trivia:

On this day in 1929, the Fascist government in Italy banned the use of foreign words. Regional dialects were still so prevalent when Mussolini came into power in 1922 that no more than 12 percent of the population of the unified state spoke straightforward Italian. The regime wanted to promote unity and a strong national identity, so anything that was seen to undermine these things was a cause for concern. French and English words and phrases were particularly popular; where possible, the government required the use of the Italian equivalent, and if one didn't exist, they made the foreign word as Italian as possible. Wine from Bordeaux became known as Barolo; a movie, formerly known as "il film," was now called "la pellicola." 

It reminded me of how short the road is from a self-governing kind of freedom to fascism, especially when one compares the 1929 event with the current discussions about immigration here in the U.S., where some want to build a great wall against our neighbors.  This short road is where American politics is currently being played out.  It is a frightening time for anyone who holds dear the American style of democracy.  We are losing the middle—the place where reasonable people can feel comfortable making a few compromises in order to live with their neighbors in a humane environment in which, even if everyone isn’t in harmony, they at least play to the same beat.  That beat is the heartbeat of our democracy.

One factor in all this may be the increasing global interconnectness that the Information Revolution has created.  Perhaps fear of losing their culture and, in the process, their identity drives people to radical cultural extremes.   The challenge we all face is how to keep our local culture—the culture that defines us to ourselves and our families and friends-- alive while we find our way—and come to feel at home—in a new, global culture.  We need to find a way to be more open about these questions, of course.  But we also need to take great care that, in the process, we do not repeat the cultural suicide that stained the 20^th century.