Up is Down: How Stating the False Hides the True (Aaron Swartz: The Weblog)

One of the more interesting Republican strategies is saying things whose opposite is true. They say that the Democratic nominee is bought off by special interests, the Democrats are outspending them, the Democrats are playing dirty, the Democrats don’t care about homeland security, the Democrats hate America, all when this is far more true of the Republicans. They say Joseph McCarthy was a noble man, the media has a liberal bias, affirmative action is bad for equality, Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and Ronald Reagan was our greatest President, all when the opposite is far more true.

At first glance this seems bizarre — why draw attention to your weaknesses? But it’s actually a very clever use of the media. The media tries hard to be “fair and balanced”, and it generally believes the best way to do this is to present the opinions from both sides and make as few judgement calls as possible (to avoid introducing their own bias). And if there’s a debate on some issue, taking a side is seen as a judgement call.

On an issue for which there’s little or no disagreement (say, the color of the sky) reporters see no problem with treating this as fact. They’ll happily slip it into the relevant articles: “President Bush, standing against a backdrop of the blue-colored sky, announced his new plan for the environment.” But if Republicans begin insisting that the sky is purple, the issue becomes less clear. At first, of course, the idea will seem ludicrous. But the Republicans will find experts to swear up and down that the sky is purple, and funny anecdotes about purple-colored skies, and have the Weekly Standard and Fox News repeatedly note that the sky is purple until it becomes an issue of debate. And soon enough the journalists begin writing “President Bush announced his new plan for the environment. ‘The sky was blue,’ claimed DNC chairman Terry McAulife, but prominent scientists repeatedly insisted that the sky was, in fact, purple.”

Now this seems a bit silly in the case of the color of the sky, but take something like “global warming”. Most journalists don’t know enough to evaluate whether global warming exists or not, and I haven’t spent the time to do so either. But I’ve heard that among the serious scientific community, global warming’s existence is simply a fact. Yet Republicans have spent a lot of money and time bringing this fact into question, so that no reporter can safely state that global warming exists, without covering the other side.

And once the reporters begin showing both sides, the populace begins getting confused too. “Who knows,” they think, “the sky may really be purple.” And so they begin believing the line of their affiliated party. Democrats start insisting that the sky is blue, and Republicans strongly believe that it is purple. And those in the middle just assume that the truth is “somewhere in the middle”, even when it most assuredly is not.

So this is the Republican strategy: to neutralize their weaknesses by making them seem like matters of public debate. You can’t come out and say the Republicans are bought and paid for by the special interests, because the Republicans swear up and down that the Democrats are! Just imagine if Ed Gillespie, the RNC Chairman who’s often saying these absurd things, was around in the days of the Civil War:

Abraham Lincoln wants to throw the American people into slavery. By taking away our hard-earned property, he takes away our basic human rights. Why does Abraham Lincoln hate America? Why does he want to destroy our great nation by taking away our right to own slaves — a right enshrined in that most American of documents, the Constitution?

The Constitution says we are all made equal. That we should all be given an equal chance to make the best of our lives. But Abraham Lincoln wants to raise some Americans — those stupid, illiterate, negroes — above everyone else, by handing out their freedom to them. Since the founding of our country, slaves could buy their freedom, earning it through hard work, but now Lincoln wants to bypass all that and give it to slaves for nothing!

You get the idea. Now few would readily claim that ending slavery took away human rights and equality, but through this bizarro-world reasoning — the same reasoning that makes affirmative action bad for equality, and liberals hate America — it’s easy to make it seem like these are still issues of debate. And as long as a thinking press believes that fairness means repeating everyones lies equally, this nonsense will continue to be spread.

So here’s my question: how do you stop this stuff?

posted February 17, 2004 07:22 PM (Politics) (21 comments) #

Up is Down: How Stating the False Hides the True

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