Most every Sunday morning, I listen to NPR’s “On The Media.” I originally thought it would be a program about “the media looks at the media,” as journalists turn their skeptical eyes on their colleagues, and thought it would be a good listen.
I was half right. It is, indeed, journalists looking at journalists, but those skeptical eyes are actually rather starry. Indeed, the most common theme seems to be “we’re wonderful, we’re hard-working, we’re honest, we’re honorable, and gosh darn it, why don’t you trust us any more?”
Last Sunday they had two segments back-to-back that nearly made me throw my radio out the window.
The first one was entitled “The Convenient Untruths.” They brought in an author whose latest book is about how people tend to believe things that reinforce their prejudices rather than actual facts.
This is a good starting point. I have often noted that, when one is making an argument, one should be most suspicious of things that tend to reinforce your own beliefs. “Too good to check” has replaced “too good to be true,” and it’s a very human failing. I can think of one example right off the top of my head that burned me — the London subway shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes by police back in 2005.
So, where does Farhad Manjoo, author of “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society,” go off the tracks? When he decides to cite his favorite example.
Here’s a section of the transcript:
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And you give a couple of great examples of how this plays out in the modern media world – the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which worked very hard to change the nation’s understanding of John Kerry’s war record.
FARHAD MANJOO: Right. They went through this very circuitous path. They held a press conference. Big newspapers and big network news outlets came. And everyone ignored what they had to say because it was apparent to these journalists that the evidence that this group had didn’t really stand up.
So they went to basically every talk radio outlet in the country and they popularized their message on the Web. And they started to attract donors, which was pivotal for them because then they could run TV ads and those TV ads then sort of got amplified through the cable news and then eventually made it to, you know, network news.
And lots of newspapers and legitimate journalistic outfits ran dozens of pieces basically debunking the Swift Boat Veterans, but the people on the right, and, to some extent, people in the center who listen to people on the right, didn’t have much exposure to those facts.
It’s become the new, hip thing to refer to “Swiftboating” as a new form of smear, but here are a few facts about the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth and their efforts that their detractors don’t like to recall — in perfect accord with Mr. Manjoo’s book:
1) the Vets got John Kerry to admit that at least a part of his Viet Nam hagiography was a crock of shit — the “Christmas in Cambodia” story.
2) The Vets and their backers repeatedly challenged Kerry to either sue them for defamation or in some other way prove their allegations false, to the point of offering him his choice of venues fro a lawsuit and a multi-million-dollar reward (payable to him or any charity) if he could show where they were lying. Kerry, instead, being the cowardly sack he has repeatedly proven himself since he left active duty, chose instead to whine and attempt to rewrite history yet again. (Kind of like when you ask him “whose medals did you throw over the White House fence back in 1971. Kerry publicly took part in a stunt where veterans contemptuously returned their decorations to the Nixon White House. Then, years later, a reporter noticed Kerry had his medals proudly on display in his Senate office. When asked about the protest, he said the medals he threw belonged to “a friend” who couldn’t make it.)
The discussion continues:
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, you show how false facts on both the right and the left make their way through partisan echo chambers, but you do suggest that conservatives have a different relationship with their media.
FARHAD MANJOO: Right. People have studied how conservative blogs, for instance, link to each other and how liberal blogs link to each other, and they found that the people on the right generally have a tighter network and are more likely to indulge in only those sources.
And this has been a longstanding pattern where psychologists have noticed that people on the right are more efficient at filtering out things that kind of don’t really support their views.
Of course, the left is far more immune to this kind of thing. Another chorus of “Bush lied, people died,” folks? Just go ahead and ask them to quote the specific lie that has them so bent ouf of shape, giving time and date and place, and watch them dig up all sorts of quotations from lesser officials that might have been proven wrong in the course of events, but a provable lie — as in, knowing it was false at the moment of uttering, like “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky,” or “I landed in Tuzla under sniper fire” or “John McCain wants us to wage a 100-year-war in Iraq,” and they can’t do it.
Finally, there’s this doozy:
BROOKE GLADSTONE: We all know it’s really easy to manipulate audio, video, and especially with Photoshop and digital images. But it was interesting – you said that the biggest effect of the Photoshopification of our society is not that it’s easier to fool people but that now they have even more reason not to believe the evidence of their eyes and ears if they don’t want to.
FARHAD MANJOO: If you live in a world where everything is possibly fake, where every photo you see could have been Photoshopped, it gives you license to dismiss that photo. This is true not only of photos but of basically all kind of documentary evidence that comes at us these days. We can always assume that there’s been some digital foul play there and that it’s possibly not a truth.
Of course, this would be a perfect opportunity to mention how we all know how easy it is to manipulate digital images, with mentions of how Reuters, the AP, and numerous other outlets have been caught faking “news” photos — especially out of the Middle East. The general skepticism the folks here are decrying was earned the hard way. How many faked photos were exposed just during the brief Israeli attack on Hezbollah back in 2006? There was the “smoke over burning Beirut” photo, the “Israeli plane crash site” photo, the “Israeli F-16 firing missiles” photo — Zombie has a whole page dedicated to faked or staged photos from just that brief conflict.
The crux of the piece seems to be this: “please, come back to trusting us blindly. Stop looking so carefully at our lies and history of lies, just please give us your blind trust again. And for god’s sake, stop thinking for yourselves and stop listening to those who think for themselves.”
A good first step in winning our trust back would be to stop dismissing their past lies as aberrations and innocent errors. Hell, some of us would settle for them to just stop lying.
But that’s apparently too much to ask.
