Last week I used a clip from the AMC series "Rubicon"¹ (re-posted after the jump) to illustrate what I felt could be interpreted as a parable about film criticism. Since then, it has come to my attention that "President Obama is a secret Muslim" and somebody is planning to build a "terror mosque" at Ground Zero. OK, those notions have been floating about for a while, but people have very, very strong opinions about them. I haven't seen any evidence that the president is a Muslim, secret or otherwise, and I'm not sure what a "terror mosque" is, but I know that the proposed Park51 Islamic cultural center (at the site of a defunct Burlington Coat Factory outlet) isn't at Ground Zero because I used Google Maps to look it up. The Pussycat Lounge, a strip club one block south, is closer, but people aren't expressing their opinions about it, maybe because it's been there for many years, like some of the other mosques in the neighborhood. So, I'm wondering: Where are all these opinions coming from and what are they grounded in? Mostly, it turns out, they have sprung from other opinions. Which are, in turn, based on disinformation or just something somebody heard somebody else say they heard from somewhere.
Fortunately, facts do exist independent of anyone's opinion about them. They are verifiable. Once you know what they are, you might be able to form some opinions. But, to return to the parable, until you know what the tie actually looks like, your position regarding it (whether you approve or disapprove, like or dislike) is worth, as Edwin Starr once said of war, absolutely nothin'.
Here's something from an Opinionator column by Timothy Egan, a National Book Award-winning nonfiction author, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and writer for the New York Times (and a former colleague of mine at the University of Washington Daily!) called "Building a Nation of Know-Nothings" that ought to be read by anyone who thinks they have an opinion about something.
Egan begins by remembering that moment at a McCain rally in 2008 when the candidate corrected the confused woman who said she'd "read about" Obama and that he was "an Arab."
That ill-informed woman -- her head stuffed with fabrications that could be disproved by a pre-schooler -- now makes up a representative third or more of the Republican party. It's not just that 46 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.
Take a look at Tuesday night's box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate.
Yet a president's birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama's life. What's more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies.
The Democrats may deserve to lose in November. They have been terrible at trying to explain who they stand for and the larger goal of their governance. But if they lose, it should be because their policies are unpopular or ill-conceived -- not because millions of people believe a lie.
In the much-discussed Pew poll reporting the spike in ignorance, those who believe Obama to be Muslim say they got their information from the media. But no reputable news agency -- that is, fact-based, one that corrects its errors quickly -- has spread such inaccuracies.
I wish I could find a way to distill the essence of those five paragraphs (and there are plenty more) into a simple, memorable slogan that could be inscribed on all public buildings; announced before all press conferences, newscasts and talk shows; printed as an epigram in all works of nonfiction (reminder: if it doesn't have source notes and an index, it's not nonfiction); emblazoned on bumperstickers; and tattooed on the foreheads of anyone who appears in public to offer an opinion on something without acknowledging the basic facts. (I have a UPC tattooed on my leg to remind me of my insignificant place in the marketplace of disposable commodities.)
But what could that condensed nugget of wisdom be? "If you don't know what you're talking about, only people dumber than you will pay attention"? Too long. "Know your facts before you yap"? Too colloquial. How about just "Don't Be Stupid"? Maybe that's too obvious...
Anyway, Dr. Laura Schlesinger (whoever you were), what I mean is that you are allowed to completely misunderstand what First Amendment says, and even to assert, as you did, that it applies only to you and not to anybody else. It also means we are all allowed -- nay, compelled -- to laugh at your ignorance and hold you accountable for it. Personal responsibility. Take it, own it, live it.
Could any talk show on television, radio or podcast stay on the air if it had an independent panel of judges, like the ones on "Jeopardy," to buzz in and correct basic factual errors each time a host or guest made them? I mean the whole spectrum, from "Meet the Press" to "Rush Limbaugh." And Charo... wait, compared to talk shows (and I mean all talk shows, given what people are allowed to get away with saying on them), Charo deserves respect. At least "cuchi-cuchi!"² is an opinion (I think it's an opinion) that does not require factual verification.
But back to the Islamic community center with a prayer room (technically, that makes it a "mosque") a few minutes away from the cleared site known as "ground zero" from which no construction has risen in nine years (which, if you ask me, is the real outrage). It is a mosque roughly in the sense that 30 Rockefeller Center is a Magnolia Bakery. It is located at Ground Zero in roughly the same way that the Museum of Modern Art is at Rockefeller Plaza.
Frank Rich in the New York Times offers more than an opinion. He includes links (as does FactCheck.com) to original reporting, public records and maps:
We owe thanks to Justin Elliott of Salon for the single most revealing account of this controversy's evolution. He reports that there was zero reaction to the "ground zero mosque" from the front-line right or anyone else except marginal bloggers when The Times first reported on the Park51 plans in a lengthy front-page article on Dec. 9, 2009. The sole exception came some two weeks later at Fox News, where Laura Ingraham, filling in on "The O'Reilly Factor," interviewed Daisy Khan, the wife of the project's organizer, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. Ingraham gave the plans her blessing. "I can't find many people who really have a problem with it," she said. "I like what you're trying to do."
As well Ingraham might. Rauf is no terrorist. He has been repeatedly sent on speaking tours by the Bush and Obama State Departments alike to promote tolerance in Arab and Muslim nations. As Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic reported last week, Rauf gave a moving eulogy at a memorial service for Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan, at the Manhattan synagogue B'nai Jeshurun. Pearl's father was in attendance. The Park51 board is chock-full of Christians and Jews. Perhaps the most threatening thing about this fledgling multi-use community center, an unabashed imitator of the venerable (and Jewish) 92nd Street Y uptown, is its potential to spawn yet another coveted, impossible-to-get-into Manhattan private preschool.
In the five months after The Times's initial account there were no newspaper articles on the project at all. It was only in May of this year that the Rupert Murdoch axis of demagoguery revved up, jettisoning Ingraham's benign take for a New York Post jihad. The paper's inspiration was a rabidly anti-Islam blogger best known for claiming that Obama was Malcolm X's illegitimate son. Soon the rest of the Murdoch empire and its political allies piled on, promoting the incendiary libel that the "radical Islamists" behind the "ground zero mosque" were tantamount either to neo-Nazis in Skokie (according to a Wall Street Journal columnist) or actual Nazis (per Newt Gingrich).
These patriots have never attacked the routine Muslim worship services at another site of the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon. Their sudden concern for ground zero is suspect to those of us who actually live in New York. All but 12 Republicans in the House voted against health benefits for 9/11 responders just last month. Though many of these ground-zero watchdogs partied at the 2004 G.O.P. convention in New York exploiting 9/11, none of them protested that a fellow Republican, the former New York governor George Pataki, so bollixed up the management of the World Trade Center site that nine years on it still lacks any finished buildings, let alone a permanent memorial.
It is so easy to spread rumors on the Internet, and that meme always gets a lot of play, but it's not as significant as how much easier it now is to absolutely, definitively, incontestably prove when information is false or someone is just plain wrong. In 2002 and 2003, I single-handedly published a site called Phantom of Liberty (then at phantomofliberty.com) devoted to debunking most mainstream media reporting about 9/11 and the circumstances surrounding the Invasion of Iraq (before and after) with links to source documents, transcripts, and other declassified material that was already available on the web. So, while Judith Miller was reporting about WMD in the New York Times, official reports from intelligence agencies, the State Department and the Department of Defense already showed that these reports had been disproved or were so old that they were no longer of any use.
That happened over and over again. Soon, it got even easier to disprove what you read in the Times or saw on TV newscasts (NPR, Knight-Ridder and PBS's "Frontline," history has shown, were perhaps the only consistently reliable sources of information -- and Paul Krugman was the only one fact-checking the Times -- right there in the Times!) because George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condaleeza Rice, Colin Powell all contradicted themselves from day to day and maintained "opinions" that their own sources had long since discredited. All you had to do was know where to look on the .gov web sites. It was there.
Which, at long last, leads me back to "Rubicon." What happened on September 11, 2001, was indeed a conspiracy -- by the people who flew the planes and carried the box-cutters, and the people who funded them and their training and research (for a few thousands of dollars -- not a financially significant operation). It's so easy, and so tempting (especially for those who consider themselves "anti-government" or "libertarian") to believe, without any solid evidence, that everything is an intricate conspiracy put together by people you are predisposed to dislike. None of that matters at all. Prove it.
Look at the tie. Accurately describe the tie. Then explain what it is you like or don't like about it and why.
Besides, you know what it says in the bible: If you build your opinion on sand, it's just going to crumble and blow away. But if you build it on a rock-solid foundation of fact, it will stand up to scrutiny, criticism, just about anything. You remember that part in the bible, right?
- - - - -
¹ Five episodes in, it's still early, but I'm becoming more and more interested in how "Rubicon" is using the long-form series format to explore "connect-the-dots" conspiracy questions, and the psychologies of those whose jobs are to find and make those connections. Just about everybody on this show is looney tunes, either because their work has driven them bonkers or because you have to be crazy in order to see the world in the ways they need to, day in and day out. Stephen King gives the show his endorsement in the latest Entertainment Weekly:
Not as luxuriously nutzoid as "Persons Unknown" [which King describes as "'Twin Peaks' meets 'The Prisoner'"] but James Badge Dale is a magnetic leading man, and, well... we know they're out there, don't we? Watching us. Let's all put on our tinfoil hats.
And did I mention the whole thing starts with Harris Yulin? Anything with Harris Yulin is already exponentially greater than even the same thing without Harris Yulin. AND somebody on this show has a love for Bill Evans, who is my god. At least two or three shows have featured Evans' trio as "background music" -- which, of course, it isn't because the fact that it's Bill Evans, one of the greatest pianists in recorded history, at the keyboard.
² I just want to say that I have great respect for Charo's persistence, ambition and longevity. And she means to be funny.
18 Comments
The Robert Taft republican lives! Ron Paul has stood on principals on a position vehemently hated by Far-Righters. Critical thinking will survive any evil man/woman does through misinformation.
Good luck on your efforts to bring this to attentiion.
Below is a footnote about how search engines and news organizations get sucked into validating lies. Once a label like "Ground Zero Mosque" exists for a "story" like this, it's incredibly sticky and hard to get rid of, if only as a search engine term. Apparently the AP won't tag to this inaccurate label and so their more objectively and accurately labeled news suffers in the search engine rankings. So even if the substance of any given story refutes this completely inaccurate label point by point, people are less likely to find and read it on the Internet unless it's labeled with a lie. And on the Internet search engine terms almost take on the status of newspaper headlines.
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=136&aid=189467
Now about RUBICON: Anyone else out there a big fan of thrillers in general, conspiracy thrillers, spy thrillers and the like and loves RUBICON? I'd love to hear from someone who reads serious spy fiction like Littell and Le Carre and can't wait for the next episode of RUBICON. I'm willing to eat crow and try it again if it's all becoming so good now. But I'm still pretty reluctant because I've never seen a good show recover from such a lame pilot.
"The score and temperature are not subject to debate."
But aren't they? ;) And I mean at its source, not only after it has been stated.
Great article, Jim, and I couldn't agree more, but one minor, minor quibble:
"a few minutes away from the cleared site known as "ground zero" from which no construction has risen in nine years (which, if you ask me, is the real outrage)"
Not quite true. One World Trade Center is well above street level and has been for some time. Currently, it's framework is constructed above the sixth floor and the overall shape it will eventually take is already evident.
Should more be finished? Of course. After all, what work is done represents only an iota of the four skyscrapers, memorial site and transit hub which will eventually occupy the site. It's not entirely accurate to say that nothing at all is there at the moment, though.
Thanks for that clarification, Zac. I meant "risen" as in completed construction, but I can see how my language leaves room for other interpretations. Many felt the most important thing we could do at the time was to rebuild right away. Some were estimating that in three to five years it would be good as new. It didn't turn out that way...
Here's a photo of the site taken July 28, 2010: http://j.mp/c2S5Vr
I couldn't agree more with everything you've written in this post. However, here's the problem with how easy it is to use stone-cold facts to disprove wildly inaccurate claims: facts inexplicably backfire.
Perhaps you may have read this article when it made the Internet rounds last month: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/11/how_facts_backfire/
"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."
In other words, to quote the maniac Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, "Relax, Luther, it's much worse than you think." This eye-opening and, really, pretty depressing article does more to explain the resilience of bulls*** paranoia like "Obama is a secret Muslim" and "George Bush is behind 9/11" than anything else I've read in the last nine years.
It almost describes the human mind as best as anything I've ever read, too: an organism capable of the greatest, deepest thoughts in known creation, able to question the very meaning of existence, and yet apparently couldn't be better designed for being misled. Hooray!
Amazing article, Kris. Thanks. I think the Bush administration was ahead of the curve on this, when officials denigrated the "reality-based community":
Part of what they were saying, I think, is that first impressions stick and are hard to correct. It's just that the media and politicians are getting more devious about creating first mis-impressions, knowing they'll never go away.
Great article, I couldn't agree more with all of your points except for one, which I find very irritating:
"It's so easy, and so tempting (especially for those who consider themselves "anti-government" or "libertarian") to believe, without any solid evidence, that everything is an intricate conspiracy put together by people you are predisposed to dislike."
I'm not really sure why you're so down on Libertarians, but this above statement is an opinion based on... what? All of your data is about Republicans, not Libertarians, so why bring them into the argument?
I'm a Libertarian and know a lot of other Libertarians, and from my experience we all started as Republicans or Democrats and moved toward Libertarianism because facts on issues we found important were not properly addressed in our current party. I was a liberal who after studying economics was disturbed by the unintended negative outcomes that government policies can create. This doesn't mean that I'm an anarchist or that I don't believe in any social welfare programs, etc, and it certainly doesn't mean I am easily swayed by any theory that accuses the government of evil conspiracies. I think politics are a bit like religion; there are Christians who believe in the general message of the religion and those who interpret every line of their bible literally.
I just think if you're going to write about facts vs. opinion, you shouldn't give an unsupported opinion. Don't do anything that weakens your argument because it's an argument we need to be hearing more.
Opinions cannot change the truth. There you go.
There is an important case to make about some Americans' compulsive need to bully other people. They willfully ignore the truth because they want an excuse to bully people around. Why do they hate Obama? Because his presence meant Sarah Palin could not become Vice President. These people believe strongly in her message of intolerance, bigotry, and black-and-white politics. Obama does not bring this message of neo-con intolerance. That's why they hate him. See how much pro-Gay Rights legislation is coming into law under him? They can't allow it! They must, MUST bully these homosexuals around! And what of Palin's rallying cries against Socialism? Who cares what the word "socialism" means? It gives these people just what they want: another enemy to persecute. Why won't Obama follow these politics of persecution? And the mosque! What about the mosque? The fact that all Arabs are terrorists is just one strike against them. The other important strike is that they're ugly sand ni**ers who speak an ugly foreign language. How can Obama just leave them alone? If Sarah Palin were in office, we'd send those filthy sand ni**ers to a nice torture camp and make them tell us what they know! And we'd get rid of those ugly Mexicans, too! And then the Liberals! We've got guns! There's not a rock big enough for those liberals to hide behind! And when we're done with them, we'll pick off those False Christians who don't believe in the transubstantiation of the Eucharist.
"Opinions cannot change the truth. There you go."
You obviously haven't seen Inception!
Yeah, how about all those damn black and white evildoers opposing the president and his allys on his crusade of goodness. How about all them non-fact checkers not backing all his non-existent gay rights legislation. Those people must be real hypocrites.
You can try, Jim, but it's pointless. Let me just give an example. A friend of mine came back from Iraq a couple of years ago, and was aghast at the media coverage. It was all Cindy Sheehan and body counts. My friend said, "But we're winning! Why won't anyone report it?"
Was he right? How would I know? How could I possibly verify it? What "facts" am I going to find one way or the other? I'm sure I can gather tons of them, pointing in all directions. But the causes of the war, whether we were winning at any one point or not, big questions like those take decades for historians to decide - and even then not everyone will agree with them. You mentioned declassified documents. Anyone who disagrees with you can just figure the "truth" is still classified. Who knows?
You have to find all the facts, which is impossible, and then analyze them, which brings in personal biases and such anyway.
Another example: all the anger at Muslims. Unfair, right? Most of them are good, solid folks who are as horrified by what's called jihad as anyone else. Right? But, again, take your pick of some facts. Who's fighting the extremists? Who's dying? The USA, Britain, France, Germany...at least their casualties get all the press. Where's Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world? Doesn't Indonesia oppose Islamic extremism? See where I'm going with this?
Journalists call it the angle, or slant. Pick whatever angle you like on any story. There will be "facts" available to back it up.
I've given up on having opinions, myself.
I'm about to give up opinions, too. It seems like everything I've been writing about in the new millennium has been going in that direction, as I see how arbitrary and limited other people's opinions are. But I think there's a difference between verifiable facts and answers to questions like "Are we winning?" I remember there was a big discussion over whether American body counts and casualties should be considered relevant to calculating "mission success" in Iraq. Some argued that the high casualties indicated the insurgency was gaining strength; others that troops were being ordered to more actively engage the insurgents. So, yes, even after we've determined what certain facts are, we can differ in how we interpret their meaning. But we have to start somewhere...
The perception that the media was overwhelmingly devoted to "Cindy Sheehan and body counts" is an interesting one, too. For so long there was virtually no coverage in mainstream media (from the New York Times to network TV news) that fact-checked the "War on Terror" announcements coming from the administration. Maybe when no WMD were found in Iraq and Cindy Sheehan came along and it became obvious that combat operations were NOT over, the scale tipped in the other direction for a while -- or maybe it just seemed that way, compared to the uncritical (and by that I mean, unquestioning) reporting that people were used to. I'm wondering where your friend was looking for news at the time. Fox probably devoted more attention to Cindy Sheehan than anybody -- but it certainly wasn't positive attention. (I agree her moves were over-reported, though; for lazy news organizations she made it easy to follow a figurehead who was supposed to represent the "other side" and give the illusion of fairness and balance to their superficial coverage...)
Agreed. And I think the end of your comment pointed out where the problem is: "lazy" reporting giving an illusion of fairness. A bunch of facts thrown at readers or viewers isn't news, it's a barrage of information. So the media *have* to filter it, they have to be selective. But there's the devil of it: how do they decide what to leave in, what to leave out, what angle they want to take.
All reporters are human, so there will always be some amount of bias in the news. But since there's no consensus anymore on how to do so. Was JFK Captain Camelot, or a sleazeball messing with bimbos? Was FDR the president who got us through the Depression and WWII, or the only president who thought he should get more terms than Washington or Lincoln had? Should we remember Jefferson in terms of the Declaration of Independence or Sally Hemings?
The answer, of course, is "both," but that's a complex answer, and neither the media nor the political parties wants that. The media wants sound bites, and the parties want their side portrayed as the only right one. Is industry the good guys, or the unions? Is the war justified or wrong? Abortion, affirmative action, you name it - if these were issues with easy answers, we wouldn't be talking about them anymore!!
Sigh.
Jim, you've probably seen this already, but in timely fashion, The Onion nailed it again:
http://www.theonion.com/articles/man-already-knows-everything-he-needs-to-know-abou,17990/
Actually, that was the rare Onion article that didn't make me laugh. Remember when mentions of the Catholic Church would draw comments like, "Buncha child molesters"? Islam did this to itself just as Catholicism shot itself in the foot.
It remains to be seen whether Islam will take any steps against its own undesirable elements as Catholicism did. Until then, a lot of people *will* figure they know all they need to know.
I don't care about this issue one way or the other, but it is disingenuous to claim not to know what a "terror mosque" is.
Really? What is it? And what does it have to do with this project?
Leave a comment