The Mustache of Understanding has a good piece up today at the New York Times that examines the viral lie that the president’s trip to Asia cost the taxpayers $200 million a day (or, about $2 billion total). He rightly praises CNN‘s Anderson Cooper for running down the origin of the story (an unnamed Indian provincial official) and debunking its accuracy. Cooper, of course, was motivated to investigate because Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-LoonyToonsVille) made the assertion on his television program.
Friedman commends Cooper for providing the “antidote to malicious journalism,” which is “good journalism,” and then concludes with this:
When widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, we have a problem. It becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues — deficit reduction, health care, taxes, energy/climate — let alone act on them. Facts, opinions and fabrications just blend together. But the carnival barkers that so dominate our public debate today are not going away — and neither is the Internet. All you can hope is that more people will do what Cooper did — so when the next crazy lie races around the world, people’s first instinct will be to doubt it, not repeat it.
But, is good journalism really an antidote? When Bloomberg News polled Americans just prior to the midterm elections, they discovered that two-thirds of them were simply wrong about whether income taxes had gone up or down, whether the bank bailout money would be recovered, and on whether or not the economy had grown under Obama’s administration. If Friedman is correct that a Democracy that cannot think intelligently cannot tackle big problems, then it seems like we’re still in need of an antidote.
We here in the progressive blogosphere endeavor to be that antidote, but after seeing the way the people went to the polls completely unarmed with the facts, I feel like we are no more than a sterilized length of gauze papering over a sucking chest wound.
We’re not healing anything. And the country is not having a debate. We have one side that tries to deal with numbers, such as those provided by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, and another side that just makes shit up. The side which just makes shit up has the highest-rated cable news network, many newspapers (including the Wall Street Journal), and total domination of the radio waves. Malicious journalism is totally dominant, and good journalism is rare and ineffectual in producing an informed electorate. Taken as a whole, the news media is actually making people less informed or causing them to be misinformed. To me, that’s the story. That Michele Bachmann repeats fever-brained lies is not the problem. The problem is that more people hear her lies than the corrections to those lies.
Maybe the Mustache can ruminate on this problem and let us know how we can do more than merely hope that there is a cure.
