Tomorrow Never Lies

A look around at Snopes reveals a sad truth about mankind: We love gossip. We especially love gossip presented as news, never mind the absurdity.

For example, much is still made about NASA's use of an anti-gravity pen that can write in weightlessness and the million-dollar cost of developing it, whereas the Soviet Union's cosmonauts simply used grease pencils. That NASA also started out with grease pencils, but found them too expensive (nearly $130 per unit in 1965) and insufficient for their needs, receives less discussion. NASA eventually purchased the "spacepen," developed and paid for solely by the Fisher Pen Co., for $6 per unit in 1967. Cosmonauts stopped using the pencils in favor of the American-made pens in 1969. The American and Russian space agencies continue to use the pens today.

While the "NASA wasted money on a space pen" story is untrue and can serve as an anti-American anecdote, it is frivolous. Nobody goes crazy over it. More harmful are conspiracy theories. "Healthy skepticism, it seems, has curdled into paranoia," says a recent debunking of 9/11 myths in Popular Mechanics. We see some of the same lunacy about Iraq, whether it is those Americans who believe Saddam Hussein directly aided the 9/11 attacks, or in critics of the war who insist the only justification was the "misguided concern" (if they are polite) over weapons of mass destruction. Both views have some supporting facts, but then so do many illusions.

How do we deal with misinformation? One of the reasons I started this blog was to share what I know. I like to think that helps. Another reason was to learn, because I do not know everything. We all have our biases and our blind spots, and blogging enables an open accounting of them. There is no place where such an open accounting is inappropriate. We ought to encourage it. So while suspicions that there are government plans to bar free expression on web logs may be misplaced (update: or not), I still have to worry when Massachusetts senator John Kerry sounds a similar note:

If 77 percent of the people who voted for George Bush on Election Day believed weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq--as they did--and 77 percent of the people who voted for him believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11--as they did--then something has happened in the way in which we are talking to each other and who is arbitrating the truth in American politics... When fear is dominating the discussion and when there are false choices presented and there is no arbitrator, we have a problem.

We will have a bigger problem when there is an arbitrator. Who decides what is true, and how? Who chooses this arbitrator? What standards and safeguards ensure that the arbitrator is fair, and how does the arbitrator differ from the legal standards and safeguards that already exist? The First Amendment has no requirements on facts, which actually works in your favor, Sen. Kerry. (I understand that you are still upset over the American people not rewarding you for offering such votes of confidence. Perhaps if you call Americans stupid outright, rather than dressing it up in "nuance," you might win more votes in '08. Bluntness worked for that other fella.)

We learned that the mainstream media, over the course of the last year, did a pretty good job of discerning.

You would say that. From an Associated Press report on a Project for Excellence in Journalism study: "A more limited look at campaign coverage found that 36 percent of stories on President Bush were negative, compared to 12 percent for Democrat John Kerry. Stories were positive 20 percent of the time for Bush, 30 percent for Kerry, said the project, which examined some 250 stories for tone."

But there's a subculture and a sub-media that talks and keeps things going for entertainment purposes rather than for the flow of information.

Darn you, bloggers! Darn you all to heck! You laugh at me! Do you know who I am?

And that has a profound impact and undermines what we call the mainstream media of the country.

The mainstream media deserves it. Widening personal discussion, encouraging independent research, and embracing reason are healthy steps forward in the age of globalization. On these traits, the media is slipping out of the mainstream. Another argument is that the people drive the basic dynamics of the United States of America's media; those in the American media who do not follow the changes will never rise above them.

And so the decision-making ability of the American electorate has been profoundly impacted as a consequence of that.

This cannot possibly be a good thing, because...? I'll repeat the P.J. O'Rourke summery: "American free speech needs to be submitted to arbitration because Americans aren't smart enough to have a First Amendment, and you can tell this is so, because Americans weren't smart enough to vote for John Kerry."

The question is, what are we going to do about it?

We could start by teaching you about civil liberties, you pompous censor.

Nobody can doubt that, intentionally or not, misinformation spreads far and wide. What we should doubt is that limiting free expression is wiser and more liberal than countering dishonest speech with honesty. I prefer our arrangement where a fraud is comfortable telling a lie over one where I am afraid to tell the truth.