Eric Alterman | The Nation

My new Think Again column is called  “The Tea Party: Struggling for Political Relevance” and it’s here.

The tsoris that forced me to write last week’s Forward column continues in lots of places, most of them foolish. What I found craziest about the Josh Block/Ben Smith accusations was the notion that there is any relationship whatever between alleged anti-Semitism and the desire to resist a potentially disastrous attack on Iran. Block was quite explicit about his desire to shut down all debate about Iran’s nuclear program with his McCarthyite accusations, even though nobody really knows, including the IAEA and the US Director of Central Intelligence.  But that’s not my point: My point is that both nations are going to be competing for the “Best Foreign Film” Oscar this year, Israel with the truly excellent Footnote, and Iran with the truly great A Separation. And the latter is going to win, despite the fact that Hollywood is approximately a billion times more Jewish than it is Iranian. So Josh Block and his friends might wish to start planning to call all of Hollywood anti-Semitic in preparation.

Now here’s Reed:


The 27 Percenters
by Reed Richardson
Much has been made in the past few months—and rightly so—about how our nation’s political system all too often operates merely as a lever that the 1 percent use to control the other 99. But what’s just as important to understand is that there’s another minority cohort out there exerting an out-sized influence on our democracy. And though this subset of our citizenry can be reliably counted on to be either spectacularly misinformed or willfully ignorant on any particular issue, their opinions are nonetheless being allowed to shift the center of gravity of our country’s discourse. 

Now the notion that some number of Americans will always fail to exercise any intellectual capacity beyond that of a sea cucumber when it comes to politics is admittedly not a new one. “Some of the people,” as Abraham Lincoln famously noted more than 150 years ago, can be fooled “all of the time.” But it wasn’t until six years ago, in an insightful post by blogger John Rogers, that someone finally put an exact figure to this phenomenon. During a discussion of, coincidentally, Barack Obama’s campaign for the U.S. Senate the year before, Rogers notes that Obama’s opponent, the self-immolating, out-of-state, unstable candidate Alan Keyes, was still able to attract 27 percent of the electorate:

They put party identification, personal prejudice, whatever ahead of rational judgement. Hell, even like 5% of Democrats voted for him. That’s crazy behaviour. I think you have to assume a 27% Crazification Factor in any population.

Of course, picking a rather random data point and bestowing upon it such broad political significance sounds very much like the kind of irrational, conspiratorial behavior that Rogers himself is trying to quantify. Except that, like a bad penny, this 27 percent figure stubbornly shows up in our recent political discourse again and again. 

- Remember the level at which President Bush’s free-falling job approval ratings finally had their hard landing in the summer of 2008 and roughly remained through Obama’s election?

- Or how about the number of people who, fully a year into Obama’s presidency, still thought ACORN stole the election for him, despite a victory margin of more than 9.5 million votes?

- Halfway into Obama’s term, that same percentage of people remained stubbornly in the thrall of the “Birther” crowd.

- On the eve of the 2010 midterm elections, there was the number cropping up in a poll that asked registered voters if political quitter and intellectual paperweight Sarah Palin was “qualified” to be president.

- Last month, it was the ratio of Americans who characterized themselves as supporters of the Tea Party.

- Earlier this week, it was the percentage of respondents saying Obama has accomplished “little or nothing” during his term so far.

- And just this past Wednesday, guess how many Americans thought Republicans in Congress were genuinely trying to “work with Obama”, despite countless examples of legislative brinksmanship to the contrary?

Now, it’s not fair to say that all these surveys and polls are capturing the same set of people time after time. But while the demographic composition of all the 27 percenters listed above no doubt varies from issue to issue, the thinking that informs those arguments is very much the same.

Are these people really ‘crazy’ as Rogers asserts? Probably not. But his broader, rhetorical point is made—they are likely to be ‘dead-enders’ and ‘true believers,’ people who simply have no capacity to endure cognitive dissonance or curiosity in learning basic facts. The implication being that if you peel away the rational pulp of our body politic, the one quarter or so that’s left represents the hard, unthinking pit of the American psyche.

In our country’s defense, this ratio of is likely the same all around the world. What’s unique and unfortunate about our situation, however, is that, increasingly, one of our two political parties has decided it is in their and our nation’s best interests to tailor public policies around this irrational, unyielding worldview. Crackpots and conspiracy theorists get to enjoy the same freedoms as the rest of us, but that doesn’t mean they should be afforded the responsibility of crafting legislation and reshaping the whole of society in their image.

Nevertheless, that is exactly the strategy the modern Republican Party is engaging in. What other conclusion can one draw when, for every example from above, there’s a corresponding effort from within the highest ranks of the GOP to embrace it and enact it?

- Re ACORN: The Republicans openly kill the organization in 2010 through intense Congressional bullying, despite no proof of actual voter fraud.

- Re Birthers: Republican lawmakers in more than a dozen states and the U.S. Congress introduce birth certificate-verification legislation since Obama’s inauguration.

- Re Palin: Despite a large majority of the public doubting her fitness as a politician, GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich announces this week that she would play a ‘major role’ in his administration.

- Re Tea Party: Republican lawmakers kowtow to its extreme ideology in this past summer’s debt ceiling fight, pushing the economy to the brink of disaster.

- Re “little or nothing” accomplished: The Republican presidential candidates manipulate this displeasure with Obama among primary voters by counter-intuitively feeding them an apocalyptic taleof a tyrannical second term.

- Re “work with Obama”: The Republican Senate Minority Leader publicly states that making Obama a one-term president is “my single most important political goal along with every active Republican in the country.”

These are but a few of the most notable examples of ‘27-percenter’ thinking driving Republican policy, of course. The ongoing Republican presidential primary can provide almost daily examples of this same phenomenon. And while catering to one’s hardcore political base is part and parcel of a primary campaign, the remaining candidates, including frontrunner Mitt Romney, show little appetite for tacking back to the center policy-wise once the general election begins in earnest later in the spring.

Indeed, just as the Republican-dominated 112^thCongress demonstrated yesterday and nearly every other day it has been in session, the extreme goals and detached-from-reality ideals of those hardcore constituents now dominate the party’s orthodoxy. Compromise is simply no longer a part of the current Republican Party’s lexicon because the GOP has thoroughly abandoned its moderate base.

All too often, however, the press and the punditocracy don’t recognize the reality of the GOP’s recent rightward lurch. Consequently, they increasingly accept as reasonable the party’s embrace of the ‘27 percenters,’ which unwittingly pushes the nation rightward as well. But this slow drifting into reactionary seas presents a perilous dilemma for our democracy, because it only further emboldens the entrenched powers that enforce one set of rules for the rich and another for the rest of us. In other words, in this political calculation, taking 27 percent away from the 99 leaves only the 1 percent in charge.  

Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com.  

Editor’s Note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.

My new Think Again column is called “Conservatives Prefer Reagan Fantasies to Reality (And So Did Reagan)” and it’s here.

I did a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review called “The Girl Who Loved Journalists” about the Stieg Larsson trilogy, which I very much enjoyed, and that’s here.

I did an interview with a German newspaper on the future of media and it’s called “Blood on the Newsroom Floor: The video” here.

And for the Daily Beast, I wrote up “What Liberals Want From Iowa's Caucuses” here, which you can still read, if you want to, but it’s ok if you don’t.

My friends Steve Earle and Allison Moorer are doing a five-week residence at City Winery (with friends) and the Wall Street Journal was nice enough to say “he's part of a lineage of country songwriters who, like Townes Van Zandt and Johnny Cash, never could toe the line.” I went to the Winery twice in the past couple weeks. Most recently I caught up with Little Feat, whom I’d not seen since the passing of Lowell George back in 1979. Now led by Paul Barrére and Billy Payne, they’ve reformed and play Dead-like, well actually, Furthur-like shows (sans drummer Richie Hayward who died of penumonia in 2010), including some of the same songs, like “The Weight” and “Long Black Veil,” which makes them, like the Allmans, a roots/blues/jazz/traditional Americana outfit. Larry Campbell sat in on fiddle the night I saw them and nobody was sorry to be there. They played three sold out nights.

A week or so earlier, I was quite happy to be there for one of the four sold out nights by the Fab Faux, who are pretty much a guaranteed good time as well as musically ambitious without being pretentious. It’s a long way from seeing McCartney at Yankee Stadium and this is mostly a good thing. The songs are played more inventively and the stage patter is less annoying. Of course there are no voices like Paul’s or George’s or John’s, but it’s a pretty damn good cure for a bad mood. You can watch them play “Hey Bulldog,” something I’m pretty sure the Beatles would not be playing if they were all alive and together today, here.

In between those two shows, I caught the first night Gov’t Mule’s two night annual trip to the Beacon for New Year’s Eve. I was not there the night they played “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” which strikes me as a truly inspired choice. But I did see them open with a Parliament/Funkadelic song with the horrible title of “Maggot Brain,” which was pretty crazy, and it segued into Pink Floyd’s “One Of These Days” and “Fearless.” Funnily enough, they were joined by the Fab Faux guitarist Jimmy Vivino and did a really sweet “Working Class Hero,” which the great and deeply underrated Mr. Haynes has recently convinced the mighty Allman Brothers Band to play as well. Next, Los Lobos guitarist David Hidalgo, who was also in town for a City Winery gig, came on for from “Smokestack Lightning” into “John The Revelator.” Both guitarists stuck around for the encores of “Politician” and “Dear Mr. Fantasy” into “For What It’s Worth.” Again, this music is, like Duke Ellington, “beyond category,” a bastardized, mongrelized American invention shared by the Dead, the Allman Brothers, late Miles, Hot Tuna, Little Feat, David Bromberg, and the spinnoff bands of each of these. It deserves to be celebrated, but not so much that the celebration detracts from the unpretentiousness of the music. The Mule site is here. Get Warren’s album if you don’t already have it.

And meanwhile, the Allmans are coming back to the Beacon for ten shows and Furthur for eight, both in March. You know where to find me

Now here’s Reed:

Why the Iowa Caucuses Are Bad for Journalism
by Reed Richardson
Let me say this up front. I was born and bred in a state that neighbors Iowa (Go Unicameral!), so I take no small amount of oblique umbrage at anyone who dismisses the voters there through snide, corn-shucking, country-bumpkin, tent-revival stereotypes. This is intellectual laziness at its worst and any broad-brush presumptions about how “all Iowans think this” or “all Iowans do that” shouldn’t be tolerated. (Sorry, Meredith Wilson.)

That said, I don’t buy this stubborn notion that voters in Iowa and a few other arbitrarily chosen states are somehow especially worthy of one-of-a-kind quadrennial access to presidential candidates and concomitant amount of media saturation that comes with them. This is, to paraphrase one of Wilson’s most famous lyrics, “Trouble with a capital T.”

True, these routine candidate pilgrimages to Iowa and New Hampshire allow for retail politics at their most elemental. But, by the same token, this hidebound early-primary rota enables candidates who would prefer to overlook or downright ignore the actual crises facing the country as a whole and instead focus their undue attention on more provincial concerns. As far as democratic processes go, the current presidential primary system is inherently flawed and, as we saw these past few weeks, ripe for outside manipulation. But there’s one other strike against it that is rarely mentioned, it’s bad for journalism as well.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for healthy doses of old-fashioned, shoe-leather reporting and hearing the real-life stories of Iowans can provide invaluable context. But all too often what goes on in the run-up to the Iowa caucuses involves the media merely trading one journalistic cocoon for another. Saturating just a few critical locations with reporting assets is a necessary evil when trying to, say, cover an imminent war in a foreign land that has little concern for freedom of the press. But when the high concentration of journalists populating the Des Moines Marriott Downtown brings to mind Baghdad’s Al-Rashid Hotel just before the kickoff of Desert Storm 21 years ago, one has to wonder if news consumers aren’t being served up a product that is similarly narrow and subject to pack journalism groupthink.

Even when not congregating cheek by jowl in the Des Moines Marriott’s bar, which turns into something like the media equivalent of a Great Rift Valley watering hole during the African dry season, there’s a strong possibility of treading the same, well-worn journalistic ground. For a snapshot of how this plays out along the Iowa caucus campaign trail, check out this surreal experience documented by a reporter from The American Prospect this past Monday:

In Marshalltown the previous night, I watched as The Washington Post's Jason Horowitz rushed to intercept The Atlantic's Molly Ball as she turned her tape recorder on a voter he had already selected for a profile. After a Mitt Romney event Thursday in Mason City, a reporter friend and I noted that we had both previously interviewed Beth, a high-school teacher from Clear Lake. We watched as yet another writer thrust a notepad forward to document how she was a committed Santorum voter while remaining intrigued by Romney.

These episodes might be laughable if it they weren’t easily trumped by even more ridiculous examples. And in some respects, this really isn’t surprising, since, based on Tuesday night’s vote count, there ended up being only 80 or so actual caucus voters for every member of the media in Iowa in recent weeks. (For the New Hampshire primary next Tuesday the voter-to-journalist ratio will only be roughly double that.) And during many small town campaign stops, this already low ratio shrinks down to the point where inverts, and the media actually outnumber everyone else.

The stilted nature of these moments, when candidates make small talk with a few Iowans primarily to be seen by the media making small talk with a few Iowans rather than to have actual conversations, fool few with regard to their authenticity. Iowans, are genuinely knowledgeable and quite able to ask insightful questions, but all too often both candidates and journalists essentially treat them as props or proxies. Constrained within the norms of this traveling Kabuki show, the media can easily fall into the trap of playing along, needing as it does a constant stream of pixels and video content.

Jay Rosen, over at his PressThink blog, makes several astute observations regarding this contrived aspect of the Iowa caucuses. Particularly how the media now plays a critical role in not merely covering the caucuses but in perpetuating and validating their importance in our political infrastructure:

The Iowa Caucuses are presented as a news event, a mini-election with an informational outcome, a winner. But what they really are is a ritual, the gathering of a professional tribe, which affirms itself and its place in our political system by staging this thing every four years…Yeah, [the press] created this thing but we bring it to you as if it would happen without us. (emphasis original)

Even more problematic, the press increasingly focuses on a disconnected, meta-analysis of its own caucus coverage (or lack thereof), spinning untold stories, video packages, blog posts, and Tweets out of the gossamer of what others in the media are (or aren’t) saying. It creates an endless feedback loop, one that obsesses over who’s up and who’s down according to the conventional wisdom (manufactured again, mostly by the media) and emphasizes expectations over actual results.

Reuters media critic Jack Shafer sees in the political press’ preoccupation with score-keepingmany similarities to sports reporting. And because the Iowa caucuses enjoy much of the same, year-long buildup as the Super Bowl, it’s telling that the respective press corps tend to cover acandidate’s campaign trail visit and the big game’s annual Media Day—both manufactured events of dubious news value—in much the same manner. And though Shafer is drawing a different analogy here, he arrives at much the same conclusion about the Iowa caucuses’ true value as Rosen:

The reason we hear so much about the caucus is because it matters a lot to the press corps, which should—but doesn’t—downplay the event into something less meaningful than a coin toss.

At least the Super Bowl changes locations every year, whereas our presidential campaigns are stuck in the same old rut. The media’s willingness to revisit Iowa and New Hampshire again and again is understandable, however. In much the same way that sports has become fascinated with statistics, the temptation of all that election data going back for decades is almost too much for political reporters to gainsay. That returning to Iowa again and again also makes the historical parallels that much easier to draw doesn’t hurt. That these comparisons rarely hold up under scrutiny doesn’t matter.

This was much in evidence this past Tuesday night. As CNN’s John King constantly toggled back and forth between the 2008 and 2012 county-by-county results on his “Magic Wall”—with the help of a telestrator, naturally. Watching it for awhile I got the same distinct sense of can’t-help-ourselves statistical gorging that often accompanies sports broadcasts. That Romney eked out a victory, but didn’t do any better than he did four years ago was treated as big deal by much of the media—a “devastating blow” according to one hyperventilating Fox News columnist. And Santorum’s close second has already earned him plenty of credulous coverage and talk of ‘momentum.’ And what feeds these tenuous memes? Assumptions within the media that the voters’ calculus hasn’t changed much because their location hasn’t either.

The reality of what happened or, more accurately, didn’t happen in Iowa Tuesday night is both less and more complicated than this, however. First off, for all the allegedly dramatic twists and turns along the way to Tuesday night, the best funded, most disciplined GOP presidential campaign still claimed victory, albeit a narrow one. The frontrunner remains the frontrunner—especially, it’s worth nothing, among those willing to put money on it. On the other hand, Romney’s closest opponents—Santorum and Paul—continue to lack either the finances and personnel or a broad enough ideological base within the party to mount a serious, long-term campaign. And hyping inherently flawed candidates as legitimate contenders based on one or two unique electoral contests only weakens the press’s standing in the long run.

Foregone conclusions rarely sell newspapers and attract eyeballs, though. Making the results in Iowa matter matters most to the media, even if history demonstrates the state has a decidedly mixed record in predicting the eventual nominee. So, moving the first test of our presidential nomination process out from between Sioux City and Davenport and into a wider rotation of states would do more than just encourage debate on a larger set of issues. It would also force our political press to work outside of its comfort zone and help to avoid the trap of the media having a vested interest in promoting an event it is covering.

In other words, we really did give Iowa a try, to paraphrase "The Music Man" one last time. But now it’s time for our democracy and our media to try somewhere else.

Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com.

The mail:
Diane Lake
Rockford
Mr Alterman,
I missed the link to write you so I wrote the editor. In case you don't see that I will tell you directly. I feel real reason for Politifact naming Lie of the Year over observing Ryan's bill as ending Medicare is not due to rightwing pressure.

Everyone saw the 'journalists' swoon like pre teen girls over the bill and Ryan himself. Ryan, to them, was almost at Chris Christie status in their eyes. A hero and an awesome guy. They deride the president for his intellect and sneer professor about him. Not a real guy. But, they insist that Ryan is a true intellect and in this case, being smart (as they see it) is okay.

Jouralists got laughed at and made fun of for their collective swoon and insistence that Ryan was an intellectual over the kill Medicare bill. They refused to accept that the bill was an ode to Ayn Rand. That Ryan was not brave and smart and true but, an Ayn Rand zombie and his bills are odes to her cult of crazy.

Politifact is, afterall, written by Journalists. The pressure was from fellow journalists who want to save Ryan's reputation. To discredit the left, as they always are doing. They needed ammo to use as the reason to discredit the left and to save Ryan as a hero and so brave.

Robert Humphries
Estero, FL
Iraq lessons
Thank you for reminding us of some of the reasons we went to war in Iraq.

Two items I would add to the discussion:

1) Bush pushed the war path during an election time so Democrats had to fall into a 'patriotic' mode or be crushed by the shameless chicken-hawk Republicans.
2) The press LOVED the war idea since it would mean great TV and print media viewership. I suggest you research the "Bloom Mobile" that ABC or NBC, I believe, built to cover the war first hand, utilizing the genius of the Pentagon's embed program.

Keep hitting the war motif that the U.S. seems to love—Vietnam should have been recent enough to have given us second thoughts about going into Iraq. Senator Byrd gave a great speech just before the war on many of the points you are making.

David Drasin
West Lafayette IN
You do the best job I know on the press, so I send you these items! Thanks for your work and Happy 2012.

I thought I would paste the letter I sent to the NY Times public editor yesterday concerning their reporting on the push in Indiana for a `right to work' law. But then a friend sent me a quote from Martin Luther King relevant to this. So I paste this first:

This is cut and pasted from the AFT page of MLK's statements on labor and unions here:

"In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as 'right to work.' It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights. It is supported by Southern segregationists who are trying to keep us from achieving our civil rights and our right of equal job opportunity. Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped. Our weapon is our vote."
—Speaking on right-to-work laws in 1961

*****

Now here is my email to the public editor:

I live in Indiana, so was delighted (at first) to see that you had a major article today on Indiana (front page of Business section) on the issue of the Indiana legislature considering passing a right-to-work law.

This is an important issue that is arising throughout the country, and having prominent space devoted to the topic in fact seems of national importance.

Unfortunately, the reporter only interviewed people whose opinions were not only predictable, but managed to avoid giving information that might help a Times reader come to an evaluation of the merits of the issue. Just because the Republican speaker calls having the possibility of a union shop `the last barrier to job creation in Indiana' or asserting [with no documentation] that `those charged with bringing new jobs to Indiana have given us very specific evidence that at least a third to a half of businesses looking for where to move take Indiana off the table because we’re not a right-to-work state' does not mean he is telling the truth (see, for example, the misinformation during the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003!). And the article stops on quoting such comments.

In fact, one Indiana newspaper (and, as far as I know only one) decided to do some reporting on this matter--and to be fair, they did find one example (although even there the executive was never asked point-blank whether they would definitely build in Indiana once this bill were passed).

On the other hand, it is no surprise that the AFL-CIO leader would say that this bill would have a harmful effect.

By now the Times should know better than to accept or disseminate predictable quotations and consider that a news article. Upon reading the article, I felt I had learned nothing new.

P. S. The article recalls that one of governor Daniels' first actions on assuming his office was to eliminate collective bargaining for state employees (which is indirectly related to the right-to-work issue). I would have been interested in being given information on how this has affected state employees, especially whether there were any willing to criticize the governor's actions and give their names.

But that was not there either.

Editor’s Note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.

On this sad day, my Dissent essay on Christopher’s memoir is here and here we argued about the Iraq war on Charlie Rose and here we argued about it again, though as I recall, I didn’t do a very good job and Christopher did, weak as his position may have been. (It’s a small irony that Christopher died on the day the war officially ended.)

My new Think Again column is called “Is Inequality Over? News That’s Not Fit To Print” and it’s here. 

My Forward Column on the drift toward Israeli theocracy is here.

Unsurprisingly, that column generated some criticism; some of which I might share were it not for the fact that people don’t understand that when you have a strictly limited amount of space, it’s impossible to do justice to specific, even important nuances in any given issue. Still there’s this:  

Israel earns another failing score on freedom of religion index CIRI ranks Israel on par with Afghanistan, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia; indicates severe and widespread governmental restrictions on religious freedom.

And this: "This is an ideological wave that wishes to institute a different country here with a world view that forces something that is unrelated to a Jewish tradition on a secular majority," Livni said, adding: "This is nothing less than a struggle for the nation's character sponsored by [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu's silence."

George Whitman also died this week. I lived in the “Writer’s Room” over Shakespeare and Company for five weeks in 1984 and wrote a piece for the Boston Globe about him called "Feasting on Literary Intrigue by the Seine" in The Boston Globe in June of 1985, but I can’t find it. George claimed to be the illegitimate son of  Walt Whitman, but  he was  born in 1913, and the poet died in 1892.

I went to Hot Tuna at the Beacon last Friday night. In case you are unfamiliar with them Hot Tuna is Jack Casady (Bass) and Jorma Kaukonen (Guitar and Vocals), both originally in Jefferson Airplane, with the rest of the band filled out by Barry Mitterhoff (Mandolin and Tenor Guitar) and Skoota Warner (Drums).  I was looking forward to seeing them not only with G.E. Smith and Larry Campbell, both great, but especially with David Bromberg, whom I love and whom I’ve seen with Jorma as a duo. But nobody told me that Bromberg would only be there Saturday night, so, as dependable as these guys are, I was still disappointed to learn that I was there on the wrong night. Steve Kimock also only showed Saturday night. Still, Steady As She Goes is a pretty excellent album, and these boys just don’t know how to put on a bad show 

Seven years ago, I saw the opening night engagement of Steve Tyrell at the Café Carlyle a big move uptown for a guy I was used to seeing at the Blue Note and other um, jazzier places. Steve is terrific entertainer and his voice is a weird a wonderful thing. In the olden days it sounded like a cross between Tom Waits and Dr. John. Now he’s much more a crooner, but a deeply charming and engaging entertainer. Nobody could have replaced Bobby Short, but Steve does a nice, respectful job.

The one thing that pisses me off about the guy is how he won’t shut up about the Yankees.  Seven years ago George Steinbrenner was the audience and Steve acted like this was a good thing. Wednesday night, there was another Steinbrenner in the audience-- “Jenny”—and I had to hear about it all over again.

Steve’s proud to be making a career, as he puts it as “America’s Wedding Singer,” which, together with his entire career as a singer, as opposed to a producer, grew out of his version of “The Way You Look Tonight” in the remake of the movie “Father of the Bride” Bill Clinton told him one night at the Carlyle that he should record a wedding album and now he has, which is a kind of genius, and it will be released before Valentine’s Day. My guess is that it will become so ubiquitous as to begin driving us crazy.  Hd has an awesom band, featuring the pianist Quinn Johnson, the guitarist Bob Mann and the saxophonist Dave Mann  and the sound in that small room is just wonderful. He’ll be there through New Year’s Eve and it ain’t cheap, but it’s an extragance that like Bobby Short, helps make New York, New York.

Now here’s Reed.

Too Little, Too Late—Too Long, Too Much, Too Many
by Reed Richardson
After 3,192 days, finally, the war is over. (Well, at least one of them.)

But not really.

For, even on the very day the U.S officially declared the end of the conflict in Iraq, we learned something else that makes it all too clear the past sins and permanent scars we inflicted upon that nation as well as our own will live on.

And on. And on. And on. And on.

Rehashing the previous administration’s countless lies, many strategic blunders, and untold political smears that, respectively, justified, magnified, and fortified this terrible war is, by now, sadly unnecessary for most of us. Still, as we suffer through the inevitable retrospective video packages and ‘by-the-numbers’ summary boxes that our national media will doubtless offer up, it’s important not to overlook the key role its credulous reporting played in igniting and then enabling the Iraq war’s prosecution.

Sure, some media organizations, like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The New Republic, have long ago written mea culpas about their flawed coverage. (Although TNR’s actual apologia has conveniently gone missing from its website.) Many of the stars in our nation’s punditocracy firmament likewise changed their tune about the war in the intervening years as well. And now that a black Democrat is in the White House, it’s perhaps not surprising to find Fox News suddenly quite comfortable airing terms like“big, big failure” and “strategic tragedy” in discussions about the war’s end. But if you step back, it’s hard to see what real lessons the press or the commentators learned from their abject failure in the run up to and early years of the Iraq war.

Indeed, re-reading all those detailed journalistic confessions one starts to see a theme. Yes, there’s contrition, but also an underlying sense that the whole sorry saga was just a one-off, a mistake of weird, cosmic alignment or incredibly bad execution that is unlikely to ever happen again. (And often there’s more than a whiff of the tried-and-true excuse: ‘Everybody was doing it.’) Noticeably absent is any talk of what intellectual safeguards or new editorial procedures needed to be put in place to prevent the next Judy Miller from being manipulated by a compromised source or the next Andrew Sullivan from effectively slandering war dissenters as a ‘fifth column.’

And speaking of folks like Miller and Sullivan, what reputational price did they or, for that matter, anyone in the media who so vociferously supported the Iraq war (or who so viciously maligned those who didn’t) pay for their massive errors in judgment? I’m trying hard to think of someone and I’m drawing a blank. OK, maybe Miller’s having fallen from reporting for the Times to plying her pundit trade at a right-wing propaganda nuthouse does count for something. But not much. And when you stack Miller’s relatively unscathed post-Curveball media career up against someone like MSNBC’s Ashleigh Banfield, who spent nearly six years in media exile after offering up just one minute of analysis on the inherent biases in war coverage, it pales in comparison.

This concept of reputational cost is of particular interest because of something I wrote in this space two weeks ago. There, in a discussion about the fact-checking frenzy now gripping political journalism, I noted results from a recent Univ. of Michigan study that found the practice usually backfires with the public. Many of them are going to believe what they want to believe, facts be damned.

So, rather than continue to pursue a demonstrably counterproductive relationship with the public, the study’s authors instead suggested the media use fact-checking as more of a self-diagnostic tool. By tracking which of its sources and commentators were most accurate and forthright, reporters, op-ed page editors, and cable TV news producers could then reward the ‘good’ with more coverage, column-inches, and airtime. By contrast, they could punish the ‘bad’ with less access and exposure. Over time, the thinking goes, this process would heighten the intellectual discourse by marginalizing those who traffic mostly in erroneous invective or vague, unfounded hearsay.

This got me to thinking about a serious question: If today’s more robust fact-checking infrastructure had existed nine years ago, could it have prevented the Iraq War?

Honestly, it’s hard to see how it could. The Bush White House, we now know, was intent on invading regardless of events on the ground or dramatic revelations in the press. And in fact, in the months leading up to the war’s start there was plenty of accurate reporting—Knight Ridder, the Post’s Walter Pincus to cite two examples—that investigated the Bush administration’s WMD and Iraq-Al Qaeda link claims and found them wanting.

The facts, as they stood, were checked time and again and found to conflict with the prevailing political wisdom. And so rather than change our politics to fit the facts, many in the press began to succumb to this pressure—either consciously or subconsciously—and skewed the facts to fit the politics. The fundamental failure of the press, in other words, wasn’t an inability to find the truth about Iraq; it was lacking the courage to stand behind it when it did.

This timidity remains one of journalism’s core weaknesses. The strongest fact-checking operation ever conceived is helpless if the news organizations behind it fear openly challenging authority and holding politicians or others in the media accountable for their words and deeds. Case in point, this enlightening survey of every fact-check done by PolitiFact in 2010. The results, which covered a roughly equal breakdown of 370 statements by Republican and Democratic politicians, might not come as much of a surprise for readers of this blog:

Republican statements were graded in the dreaded "false" and "pants on fire" categories 39 percent of the time, compared to just 12 percent for statements made by Democrats. (emphasis original) That means a supermajority of falsehoods documented by PolitiFact over the last year--76 percent--were attributed to Republicans, with just 22 percent of such statements coming from Democrats. 

Now, as I illustrated two weeks ago, individual fact checks can easily fall victim to semantic hair-splitting and obtuse logic. But a year-long meta-analysis that focuses on those statements rated as most extreme has the effect of canceling out that signal noise. So, if you want solid proof that Republican politicians lied more often than Democrats in 2010, well, here you go.

Nevertheless, the academic who conducted the survey inexplicably ignores this obvious conclusion and instead suggests, absent any evidence, that selection bias must be at work. All politicians lie in equal amounts all the time goes the conventional wisdom, so if the data shows otherwise, then it’s the data that’s wrong somehow, not the politicians. It’s the same old fit-the-facts-to-the-meme shuffle from the Iraq War.

 Yes, PolitiFact and a few other fact-check platforms let you see the historical track records of some public figures. However, all this data, when it does exist, is too granular and compartmentalized to be useful in any larger context beyond figuring out that Michele Bachmann’s serial falsehoods should disqualify her from selling used cars, let alone serving in Congress.

But by refusing to draw larger conclusions from the fact-checks they conduct, these sites are, in effect, pulling their journalistic punches. Rather than trumpet an attention-getting headline like “Results show: Republicans Lying Three Times More Often Than Democrats!” Politifact is content to churn out small bore, PR-gimmick type items like its annual “Lie of the Year.”

That is to say, I’ve no doubt fact-checking sites like PolitiFact would have labeled the WMD claims that Bush used to justify the disastrous Iraq War as a “Lie of the Year” at some point, had they existed years ago. But by the time they did, of course, it would have been too little, too late.
Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com.

The mail:
Tom Cleaver

Los Angeles

Mr. Alterman:

 I read you pretty regularly, but I just wanted to say I particularly liked your Pearl Harbor column on presidential lying, since I have personal experience in the making of one presidential lie in particular, the Tonkin Gulf (never happened) "Incident."  I was "present at the creation" as a low-ranking enlisted member of the staff of the Admiral in command of the two destroyers.

As you're no doubt aware (since you certainly read the Pentagon Papers), the Maddox and Turner Joy were actually supporting a South Vietnamese commando raid on the (recognized internationally) North Vietnamese island of Hon Me.  According to the Chief Sonarman of the Maddox, there were never any North Vietnamese torpedo boats anywhere in the vicinity either night, and for sure there were no torpedos in the water (a sound unlike anything else).  What you probably don't know is that a large war was prevented the second night when a good friend of mine from Navy boot camp, by then a Third Class Fire Control Technician and the petty officer in charge of fire control on the Maddox refused three times the order to "open fire", telling his captain that the only target out there was the Turner Joy.  For this, he was court-martialed for "disobedience of a direct order" and busted in rank back to Seaman.  I found this out a month after the event when I ran into him in a bar in Olongapo outside Subic Bay Naval Station.

The event was pretty much what turned me around politically. We had been planning a "limited series of air strikes" against four North Vietnamese ports "upon suitable provocation" since the previous June, and this was the "suitable provocation."  It was all done to prove that Lyndon Bastard Johnson was "tough" in his campaign against the "war monger" Barry Goldwater.

Another interesting bit of history:  my old friend the late Dick Best, the man who won the Battle of Midway by single-handedly sinking the third Japanese carrier, the "Akagi", always said that he considered his greatest service to his country to have been the fact that when he was Librarian at the RAND Corporation, he "turned a blind eye" to Daniel Ellsberg taking the Pentagon Papers out and copying them.

And since you like rock and roll as much as you do (from your reviews) you'll find it interesting to know that the Admiral I was working for then was George Morrison, father of Jim Morrison of the Doors.

Anyway, I always date August 4, 1964, as the day I stopped believing in the goodness of the American government and the trustworthiness of American politicians, and my involvement ever since in trying to change that.



Cliff Flyum
San Luis Obispo, CA
Sorry Eric, Matt Gelfand's right. Except for Mick's voice, the Stones are tight on the 78 SNL show. Correct, its just my opinion, but SUCK it surely doesn't. Still a big fan of your blog and your thoughts on all subjects. --Cliff

Editor’s Note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.

My New Think Again column is called "Why Do the Mainstream Media Like the Tea Party More Than Occupy Wall Street?" and it’s here.

So the Grammys are out, and not that I care, but  I would just like to point out on behalf of my argument that the Allman Brothers Band are the best collection of musicians playing togther regularly, anywhere, that in the blues category, three of the five nominees are in the band. I’ll bet that never happened before. I would also like to say that while I love Derek Trucks, he is crazily overrated in the new Rolling Stone poll of the 100 best guitarists, while it is criminal that Warren Haynes would be left off all together. Also, being dead is not a good idea if you want to be high on this list (unless your name is “Hendrix, of course.”) My guess is that if Jann had to worry about getting hassled by Jerry Garcia, he would have been in the top fifteen, rather than way down, I can’t even remember where he is. There’s a bunch more about which to complain: (Lou Reed? Are you serious?) But I agree with the top five.

Chick Corea celebrated his 70^th birthday with a month of shows at the Blue Note in Manhattan where he was joined by more musicians echoing more styles than I care to enumerate here. I’m not sure there has ever been a more eclectic composer and performer than Corea. And the weird thing about him is that he is not a jack-of-all trades, but actually a master of them. Part of the secret, apart from obviously, talent and longevity, appear to be egolessness. Corea throws himself into combinations with different kinds of musicians and then becomes just a member of the band. This works better with different combinations depending both on the combination in question as well as the taste of the listener.

The night I went was a flamenco night (and I believe it was Corea’s actual birthday). Since “My Spanish Heart” is perhaps my favorite of Corea’s albums, I was pretty excited about this. So too were a lot of other people as I’ve never been in a more tightly packed room in my life. I got to see some of the most renowned flamenco musicians in the world, many of whom could fill large halls elsewhere in the world (and one of whom, Concha Buika can apparently fill Carnegie Hall on her own today). It was a quite exciting night for all concerned, though alas, perhaps overly authentic for your relatively philistine blogger (in matters flamenco) than for many others in the audience, who acted as if they were witnessing their own private little miracle. I’m sure I would have felt the same way had I gone on the nights he played with the Miles alumni, or with Herbie Hancock, or Gary Burton, or the acoustic RTF, etc. In any case, if you are new to Chick’s incredible legacy, there’s a fine two-cd collection out on Concord to get you started, called the The Definitive Chick Corea on Stretch and Concord, but only as long as you promise not to stop there.

Continuing in the jazz vein, and just in time for holiday gift-giving, is the fifth collection in the “Jazz Icons” DVD series, from Mosaic Records and produced by Reelin’ In The Years Productions. This one is six discs and filmed in France from the late 1950s through the early 1970s, features performances from John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Freddie Hubbard, Johnny Griffin, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and Rahsaan Roland Kirk. The highlights in this one, if you ask me, are:

John Coltrane—Live In France 1965, filmed at the Antibes Jazz Festival that summer. It’s the great quartet with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones and they performed “A Love Supreme” at the show. I believe it’s the only time they ever did. I also really like the solo Monk show, which is from 1965 and filmed in a studio without an audience and the show by Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers from 1959 in which we get to see a young Wayne Shorter on tenor, Walter Davis Jr. and the great Lee Morgan on trumpet. The Johnny Griffin—Live In France 1971 has two songs with Dizzy Gillespie and the Freddie Hubbard—Live In France 1973 and the Rahsaan Roland Kirk—Live In France 1972 will no doubt excite their fans more than they did me. The series also deserves kudos for the fine, informative uniform booklets that come with the DVDS. You can fine more info here.

I’ll be spending a great deal of my winter months watching dvds and blurays, alas, beginning with the newly released versions of the terrific Le Carre/BBC miniseries, "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,” which some people think is the best miniseries ever, and its sequel, "Smiley’s People." Both are Cold War masterpieces, both in print (where you should really start, people) and on screen. Alex Guinness plays George Smiley to perfection. These new, improved transfers include a few extras, like an interview with the author and production notes and so forth but it is the dramas that are the, um, star.

More elaborate, expensive and worth it, is the Criterion Collection Blu-ray edition of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s”Three Colors: Blue, White, Red.” The transfers are beautiful and the movies all justify repeated viewings. A better match between director, actor, and cinematic moment would be hard to find. (This is true of all of them, but particularly so of “Blue” which stars Juliette Binoche.) This being a Criterion Collection, it has an insane amount of extras including three cinema lessons with director, interviews with composer Zbigniew Preisner; writer Krzysztof Piesiewicz; and actors Julie Delpy, Zbigniew Zamachowski, and Irène Jacob. Selected-scene commentary for Blue with Ms. Binoche.

Three new video essays, by film writers Annette Insdorf, Tony Rayns, and Dennis Lim as well as Kieślowski’s student short The Tram (1966) and his fellow student’s short from the same year The Face, which features Kieślowski in a solo performance, two short documentaries by Kieślowski: Seven Women of Different Ages (1978) and Talking Heads (1980), Krzysztof Kieślowski: I’m So-So . . . (1995), a feature-length documentary in which the filmmaker discusses his life and work, and two multi-interview programs, Reflections on “Blue” and Kieślowski: The Early Years, with film critic Geoff Andrew, Binoche, filmmaker Agnieszka Holland, cinematographer Sławomir Idziak, Insdorf, Jacob, and editor Jacques Witta. The booklet has essays by Colin MacCabe, Nick James, Stuart Klawans, and Georgina Evans, an excerpt from Kieślowski on Kieślowski, and believe me, more than that.

For classicists, there’s a fancy-new bluray of “West Side Story” 50th Anniversary Edition which comes with hundreds of hours of restoration, new 7.1 digital audio, and a collection of bonus features It will be available in a Limited Edition 4-Disc Boxed Set featuring 2 disc Blu-ray, newly-restored DVD, Tribute CD and collectible memorabilia, as well as a 2-disc Collector’s Edition Blu-ray with extras to numerous to list, but you can find them here. See if you can keep from tearing up during “There’s a Place for Us.”

On the music front, there’s a fine new Stones DVD from their 1978 “Some Girls” tour. It was the last time they had really great new material to tour behind and you can tell they were excited to play it. It’s a show in a stadium in Fort Worth and it’s well shot. Since I have the DVD, I can’t tell you how great the sound on the Bluray is, but I’m sure it’s way better. The extras include the Stones’ absolutely awful performance on SNL that year, which I remember watching and thinking that they should have rehearsed instead of doing all those drugs with John Belushi. There’s also a few interviews.

Speaking of those days when I was young and adventurous, my backpack and I made it to the Montreux Jazz Festival in the summer of 1980 and I got to see, among other things, Nick Lowe, Dave Edmunds and Rockpile do a show with Elvis Costello. Thanks to the magic of cd release, that show is available and you can relive my life. The rest of the evening was spent in the train station with, as I recall, a Swiss fellow who like to pretend he was a Hollywood-style cowboy. I thought I remembered Nick’s then-wife, Carlene Carter, singing with the band that night but I remember a lot of things from those days that never happened. Great band, though. Lowe and Edmunds could have been a mini-Lennon/McCartney if they could have gotten along better. You can read about it here.

On the book-giving front, I can get behind The Radical Camera: New York's Photo League, 1936-1951, published by Yale, which is based on the exhibition now at the Jewish Museum and features photos 1936 to 1951, designed to stimulate a Communist revolution. It features photos by Margaret Bourke-White, Sid Grossman, Morris Engel, Lisette Model, Ruth Orkin, Walter Rosenblum, Aaron Siskind, W. Eugene Smith, and Weegee, among many others. Also from Yale, I am loving Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence. This is not hard to do, when you a) love Vermeer, and b) love women. Since Vermeer is my favorite artist, no contest, and women, my favorite sex, also no contest, this would be a great gift for me if I didn’t already have it. Perhaps you know someone for whom it might be. More here.

And if you’re buying a graduation gift for someone you don’t know that well, well, then, lucky you, you’ve got three perfect choices, depending on price points.

If you’re feeling really generous, for $200 there’s the new deluxe, boxed, break-your-back eighteenth edition of the Oxford ATLAS OF THE WORLD, which comes in a non-deluxe edition for a great deal less. (I see Amazon has it for just about fifty bucks) and you know, they’re great things to have, especially since the world is what it is. (Need a map of South Sudan, for instance?) And if you like words better than pictures, there’s a new, fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, which is my favorite dictionary, in part, ironically, because of the pictures, and in part because I’m on the usage panel and I get to help decide what’s kosher and what’s not. This being 2011, it comes with a passkey code for a free download of a smartphone app that works with the iPad/iPhone/iPod or Android platform. Look up “punditocracy.”

Finally, for Hannukah gift-giving only, I just discovered “Songs of the Jewish-American Jet Set” a collection from the catalog of Tikva Records, which apparently was “the flagship independent Jewish record label of 20th century America.” 
Founded in 1947, it ranged from Israeli folk songs to Jewish-American swing, from klezmer pop to cantorial singing, from Catskills comedy to key political speeches 
of Jewish leaders. I would not go so far as the PR material, which calls it “something of a Jewish Motown” but it’s pretty great and this collection is really well done with an informative, well-produced booklet and nice packaging and some really good music. Seriously, I bought a bunch of them. More here.

Now here (finally) is Reed:

Fact-chucking
by Reed Richardson
Renowned Greek statesmen and philosopher Demosthenes once famously said: “The facts speak for themselves.” But in our modern political media environment, one saturated by vacuous cable news punditry, minutiae-obsessed media Tweets, and quick-reaction campaign spin, it’s not unreasonable to worry that whatever the facts are really saying increasingly gets drowned out.

The antidote to this incessant bloviating and partisan background noise, some now believe, is to unleash roving bands of rhetorical truth squads. With this new legion of fact checkers at its command, journalism might once again command respect from a skeptical public, now that it is so nobly documenting every prevarication, exaggeration, and outright fabrication on the campaign trail and op-ed page. Also, there will be cake for (almost) everyone.

OK, maybe that last bit wouldn’t pass for the truth. Still, it’s hard to underestimate the fact-checking fervor—dare I say, bubble?—sweeping through journalism today. (And with unrepentant know-nothing presidential candidates like Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann to follow around every day, it's no wonder.) Beyond the big three—Factcheck.org, PolitiFact, and the Washington Post’s “The Fact Checker”—there are now a number of state and local fact-check media initiatives underway as well as several non-profit/private citizen hybrids partnering to vet political speech. Even Craig Newmark, perhaps fearful that, as the founder of craigslist, he will go down in history as the man most responsible for the economic demise of newspapers, has enthusiastically jumped on board what he calls “Bigtime Fact-checking” as one way to revive a financially moribund industry.

Forgive me, however, for not having as much faith as folks like Newmark and media guru Jeff Jarvis in the idea that a fact-checking renaissance would rehabilitate journalism and reinvigorate our democracy. More accurate reporting, I’m all for, of course, and any effort at actually holding politicians and pundits accountable for their words and deeds has my deepest sympathies. But I see several problems with all this fact-checking evangelism, the first of which is a subtle, structural dilemma.

Listen to Jarvis and other fact-checking evangelists for a little while and you’ll start to notice a sort of backwards mission creep. They say they want to “restore fact-checking to the news business” but then they invariably discuss fact-checking as if it was more than just a different angle on a topic or an intrinsic part of a journalist’s daily routine. More and more, it’s clear that they envision it as a separate, standalone form of journalism, if not civic activity, one that necessitates creating a whole separate network of independent entities and/or databases. But this outsourcing of a critical function of journalism sets up a potential moral hazard within the profession.

Here’s a thought experiment:

Say the media scrum covering a Republican presidential debate hears a candidate make an obviously untrue statement, something like, oh, I don't know, the HPV vaccine can cause mental retardation. That’s certainly newsworthy and worth covering in the recap. But if those same reporters implicitly know that someone else is charged with assessing the truth (or, in this case, the total lack thereof) of that candidate’s comment, how much effort should we really expect them to put into debunking such a claim? Probably not much if this kind of journalistic abdication is already happening now.

Isn’t it plausible that the existence of an even more comprehensive and compartmentalized network of fact-checkers could push regular beat reporters to be even less discerning when it comes to including dubious or false claims by politicians or pundits in their reporting? In other words, aren’t we at risk of fostering a feckless media mentality of, to paraphrase an old Army T-shirt: Print it all, let the fact-checkers sort it out?

This question is especially germane since, as recent research on the Obamacare “death panels” lie clearly demonstrated, publishing factually untrue statements in news reports without including an immediate and adjacent debunking each and every time is how myths are born and propagated among the public. So, institutionalizing a kind of bifurcated media coverage—with one group focused mainly on verifying facts and the other obsessed with "he said, she said," horserace coverage—could actually provide more rather than less fertile ground for future false memes to arise.

Perhaps sensitive to this troubling contradiction, one grad student at the MIT Media Lab is working on a technological solution that would more easily combine the two. . As detailed in a Nieman Journalism Lab story from last week, his idea is to create a kind of journalism X-ray specs, which would provide instantaneous, real-time fact-checking of individual assertions in any media story.

Schultz is building what he calls truth goggles—not actual magical eyewear, alas, but software that flags suspicious claims in news articles and helps readers determine their truthiness…If you had the truth goggles installed and came across Bachmann’s debate claim [about the HPV vaccine], the suspicious sentence might be highlighted.

Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, it is, because as any high school-level programmer can tell you, software is only as good as its source code.

His software is not designed to determine lies from truth on its own. That remains primarily the province of real humans…“It’s not just deciding what’s bullshit. It’s deciding what has been judged,” [creator Dan Schultz] said. “In other words, it’s picking out things that somebody identified as being potentially dubious.”

The somebody in this case being PolitiFact, the news project of the St. Petersburg Times that notably won a Pulitzer for its 2008 presidential campaign coverage. Linking with Schultz’s venture may be a natural next step for the site, since it has already debuted the inevitable mobile app, where for two bucks you can track PolitiFact’s true/false rating of prominent politicians just in time for the heat of the 2012 presidential race.

But since we are also talking about real humans here, it shouldn’t be surprising to find that the PolitiFact occasionally propagates some ‘potentially dubious’ reasoning of its own. Like, for example, this past Tuesday, when the site trotted out not one but two disingenuous verdicts on Mitt Romney’s political contortions over mandated-coverage health careand the federal assault weapons ban. Regarding the latter issue, I offer up PolitiFact’s alternately incoherent and conflicted conclusion as testimony to the type of fact assessment that Schultz’s ‘truth goggles’ might one day rely upon:

The difficulty of analyzing this charge is that Romney’s position on an assault-weapons ban in the 2008 debate was so muddled that it’s hard to pin down whether he actually flip-flopped. It’s more an example of an internal inconsistency than a flip-flop per se.

Sure, and the horrific act of executing someone in an electric chair might likewise be more delicately described as an example of internal inconsistency—thanks to 2,000 volts burning one’s vital organs—than getting fried, but I think the larger point is taken. This semantic parsing on the part of PolitiFact leaves the reader just as muddled as the candidate they’re trying to learn about.

Surely the proliferation of other fact-check sites would naturally correct for these occasional oversights or skewed interpretations, you might argue. That’s a fair point, but it also begs the question: Which one should the public listen to on which issue? Precisely because sussing out the truth of complex policy issues is and probably always should be a task for the human mind and not a computer algorithm, the notion that all these fact-check sites will consistently and objectively agree on the truthiness of a pundit’s statement or a politician’s policy is chimerical. And if one can easily go fact-check shopping, as it were, to find an independent stamp of approval for most arguments, then what’s the real, lasting value of all this vetting and verifying?

Even if, in some grand, future moment, we could somehow resolve all these structural, technological, and philosophical impediments, the value of all this fact-checking would still have to overcome its biggest obstacle—the irrational human psyche.

Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger. (italics original)

The above comes from this thoroughly engaging Boston Globe essay, which I highly recommend reading in its entirety even though it’s from last year. In it, you’ll learn about the critical importance played by the first few facts (or non-facts) the public learns about a topic or story. Once these points become internalized, like concrete, they quickly set, to the point where they become stubbornly impervious to cracking, even under the likes of PolitiFact’s “Pants on Fire” rating.

But before ye abandon all hope for the fact-checkers of the world, there might yet be a worthwhile, albeit difficult, role for them to play. Instead of an after-the-fact palliative remedy, why not employ them as preventive medicine?

Instead of focusing on citizens and consumers of misinformation, [researcher Brendan Nyhan] suggests looking at the sources. If you increase the “reputational costs” of peddling bad info, he suggests, you might discourage people from doing it so often. “So if you go on ‘Meet the Press’ and you get hammered for saying something misleading,” he says, “you’d think twice before you go and do it again.”

This more hierarchical fact-checking approach would no doubt prove harder to implement in today’s personality-obsessed media. Indeed, some pundits and politicians appear to have been inoculated against ever having to answer for their specious claims and intellectually dishonest arguments (especially, for some, when it comes to ‘Meet the Press’). But imagine a world in which an op-ed columnist’s continued worth to a media organization wasn’t just measured in clicks or books written but in lies told as well, or if a cable news talk show made it a policy to only invite guests whose past arguments went beyond mere bombast and withstood factual scrutiny.

Yes, these pundits and politicians would also be at the mercy of the same systemic complications and biases of fact checking that I mention above. But, unlike the public at large, they are professionals in their field, and should presumably know better. Overall, this use of fact checking to better price out the ideas in the marketplace and hold accountable the news organizations that allow them to propagate in the marketplace, I believe, would not only heighten our political discourse but help to broaden it as well. Likewise, it would rightly place more of the onus of news judgment back on those whose job it is to produce it, rather than just swamp an already inundated public with more data to slog through.

“Keeping atop the news takes time and effort,” one of the Michigan researchers pointed out. “And relentless self-questioning, as centuries of philosophers have shown, can be exhausting.” Demosthenes certainly understood this, since more than 2,300 years ago he offered up an observation that the fact checkers of today would be wise to heed: "The easiest thing of all is to deceive one's self; for what a man wishes he generally believes to be true."

The mail:
John D'Alessandro

Crestwood, NY

Thanks for reinforcing my determination, not yet acted upon, to see John Fogerty as soon as I can. If I had been deserving of a soundtrack for my formative years, it was all the songs that he wrote. I especially love the fact that he never saw the Bayou until years after he wrote the Credence classics, although he has said that he spent summers as a kid 'up in Cody's camp' in a swampy region of California that undoubtedly provided the inspiration for those amazing songs.
Meanwhile, this depressing story: my brother in law asked his sister, who had attended a Fogerty show in Florida, if during "Bad Moon" he sang the line "There's a Bathroom on the Right" [sic], which he has been doing in recent years, to which she replied, "It looked more like a Depends crowd."

Paul Greengross

Granada Hills
So glad you mentioned "Keith and Donna". How many brilliant versions of "Playin' in the Band" were ruined by her insufferable caterwauling? I saw them in the early 70s when she was much more restrained.

Editor’s Note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.