Searching for truth in all the right places
by Steve Weinberg Posted Sat, Mar 31 2007
Every journalist knows that her ears and eyes will be assaulted every day with lies —from advertisers of commercial products, from spokesmen for the military, from elected politicians, from entrepreneurs pushing get-rich-quick schemes. The lies emanate from spin doctors around the globe.
Yet those same journalists fall for the lies all too often as they spread information about products that fail to improve health or physical appearance, as they report without comment phony rationales for killing other human beings under the guise of war, as they unwittingly help re-elect incumbents who vote against local interests after moving to Washington, as they see the hard-earned savings of the audience members dwindle due to institutionally entrenched naiveté and greed.
Brooks Jackson and Kathleen Hall Jamieson serve as guides to seekers of truth and accuracy. They produce a Web site, www.FactCheck.org, that aims to help. Jackson is a veteran investigative journalist. The site is hosted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, where Jamieson serves as director.
One of many fascinating but disturbing case studies offered by Jackson and Jamieson involves an anonymous September 2001 e-mail that claimed to offer “stunning” information to a wide distribution list. The sender said that Oliver North, former military aide to President Reagan, commented as early as 1987 that Osama bin Laden qualified as “the most evil man alive,” then recommended “an assassin team be formed to eliminate him and his men from the face of the earth.” Albert Gore, U.S. senator from Tennessee and eventual vice president of the U.S., allegedly set the stage for North’s pronouncement during a hearing on Capital Hill. Then, the e-mail suggested, Gore failed to listen carefully to the important early warning from North, essentially allowing bin Laden to build up a terrorist network that could have been halted before airplanes flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The detailed online character assassination of Gore looked and sounded persuasive, at first. At FactCheck.org, however, the staff debunked the e-mail without much difficulty. After all, bin Laden did not form al-Qaida until 1988. In 1987, bin Laden was fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Gore could not have questioned North about bin Laden during the 1987 Senate hearing because Gore never attended the hearing. That Senate committee did not include Gore. The committee’s lawyer, John Nields, conducted the questioning.
Despite the debunking of the lie-riddled e-mail, it continues to circulate. The authors say that the inbox at FactCheck.org “contains messages from dozens of people who have received the hoax, asking us whether there is anything to it.” A political motivation almost certainly led to the hoax, which made the Republican North look like a wise man and liberal Democrats look like idiots.
Despite all the misinformation on the Internet, the authors offer it as the main solution to misinformation, with a vital caveat: “if you use it very carefully.” Before presenting the solution phase, which comes in chapter seven, Jackson and Jamieson explain the tactics of liars, describe the psychological traps that too many journalists fall into so that they believe the lies and offer an approachable lecture about how to distinguish credible evidence from misleading random anecdotes.
Among the tips about using online information:
• Assume that anonymous or untraceable claims are false until proven otherwise.
• Seek out more or less objective federal government Web sites (such as those that list census data and offer accurate transcripts of speeches).
• Rely on organizations such as Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, that are not tied to advertisers or special interests.
Other favorite Web sites listed by FactCheck.org include the Centers for Disease Control, a federal health agency (www.cdc.gov); the Congressional Budget Office, for its sophisticated, even-handed analyses of federal government spending and income (www.cbo.gov); the Government Accountability Office (www.gao.gov) for its painstakingly researched reports about waste, fraud and abuse within the government; the Center for Responsive Politics’ data about politicians who appear to accept special-interest money in exchange for votes on issues vital to those special interests (www.opensecrets.org); and the Kaiser Family Foundation’s non-partisan information about illness and wellness (www.kff.org).
Proving the falsity of the Oliver North-Osama bin Laden colloquy can be accomplished on the Web, underscoring the Jackson-Jamieson lesson. The first page of search results bring up a link to the U.S. Senate, which “devoted a brief article to exposing this very hoax. Better yet, the Senate staff has posted a copy of the actual transcript of the 1987 hearings.” Further verification is found on North’s own Web site, where he labeled the original e-mail about bin Laden and Gore “simply inaccurate.”
Separating truth from falsity on matters of life and death, peace and war, should be simple. But it rarely is.
Steve Weinberg
Steve Weinberg reviews books regularly for Global Journalist, concentrating on journalistic technique rather than summaries of content.