I Know Nothing!

It’s nothing new. Humans seem to prefer faith to facts. And I’m not talking about religion.

Howard Kurtz got lots of (liberal) blog links early this week with an article about the health care “debate” and how facts have been relegated to the sidelines. Kurtz now reports that it was Monday’s most commented piece on the paper’s website as people poured forth their vitriol from both sides of the health care aisle.

Kurtz’s main point was pretty simple: Despite the fact that many reporters demonstrably proved that the death panels myth was indeed a myth, almost half of the Americans surveyed by NBC News believe death panels are a part of the President’s health care reform proposals. Sadly this is not surprising. Jay Leno has played the often incredible ignorance of Americans for laughs on the Tonight Show for years. Likewise Comedy Central’s The Daily Show openly laughs at ignorant Americans (especially those in the media and politics) almost nightly.

It’s all pretty funny until someone gets hurt. And that’s what’s happening. It’s not so much someone but something. America.

It’s one thing to simply decry how uninformed or ignorant people are about things in the news but that misses the point. The problem is that many Americans are eager to be misinformed and wear it as a badge of honor.

Not long ago I gave a talk about politics and media to a small group of people upstate. These were people who paid attention. They read the papers. They watched the news. They listened to the radio. But when I suggested that media hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, and Sean Hannity are not journalists and that no one should pretend otherwise, I was greeted with dismay. There was nothing I could say, no data I could cite that would convince one woman that what came out of Limbaugh’s mouth was not a stream of facts. Rush says he’s 100% correct in his assertions and this woman could not be persuaded otherwise. Others in the room were aghast until I suggested that Rachel Maddow was hardly different.

“But Rachel doesn’t make things up!” “She’s not like O’Reilly and Limbaugh because she tells the truth!” Indeed she traffics in a completely different drug. She does focus in on facts but often only those facts that support her point of view. Facts that don’t help don’t generally get a big airing on her show.

That’s all fine if people understand that prime-time cable news is not the province of journalism but of opinion. The problem is the avid fans of these shows don’t see the difference. The opinions they share with their favored hosts are the facts — according to them.

It’s easy to blame the media for all this and in some respects it’s accurate as well. In their drive to stay relevant (and alive) newspapers have been hacking away at the things that made them a critical part of American democracy. Reporting facts.

When the television networks were freed from producing newscasts and documentaries as a condition of “borrowing” the public airwaves the result was inevitable. Real journalism is expensive. Sitting two people with opposite opinions down in a TV studio is cheap.

When was the last time you saw a well-produced, thoroughly reported story told by an experienced correspondent — a journalist — on CNN, Fox, or MSNBC? Their days are filled with yakking lightweights chatting up current events with whoever will come on free. Their nights are filled with screaming sarcasm and anger from highly-paid hosts trading knowing lies with a small stable of favored “experts”. There is no news here. This is “news” as a game played with a nod and a wink.

As America’s most trusted news anchor (John Stewart) pointed out recently, Fox News hosts have made a healthy living railing against the “mainstream media” while simultaneously trumpeting the fact that Fox News is the number one rated all-news network by a very large margin. Can’t have it both ways? Sure you can in a country where huge numbers of citizens can’t even grasp the concept of cognitive dissonance.

But the media is the dealer feeding the fix. It didn’t create the addiction.

You talkin' to me?

Somewhere along the line that whole Age of Reason thing has failed to stick. Logic is the province of eggheads. Facts are ephemera. Belief is all that matters.

This is an epidemic no one will confront because it hits all the buttons Americans are afraid of: Intelligence, education, real dialogue. Thinking. The American creation myth since Andrew Jackson is built on action. Never mind that our oft-lionized Founding Fathers valued intelligence far more. We are a nation of Rambos and Dirty Harrys. Reagans and Rumsfelds. Doers not thinkers. And in that reality facts don’t really matter.

So let people point out that there are no death panels in ObamaCare. That there is no evidence whatsoever that the World Trade Center was brought down by: a) bombs; b) U.S. missiles; c) Isrealis; d) UFOs. That Iraq and Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11. For many Americans conclusive absence of evidence is no barrier to belief in a thing.

This is where our leaders fail us. Politicians refuse to tell the truth. When Iowa Republican Senator Charles Grassley (widely seen as a responsible adult) parrots the death panel fiction he aids and abets our decline. He and his ilk are cowards.

When cable news claims to be “Fair and Balanced” or “The Place for Politics” Orwell’s fictional future becomes our factual present. When being “The Coolest News on Earth” gets ratings it can’t be long before one network adopts that as it’s slogan.

And it will only get worse. As we splinter into ever smaller social networking groups, subscribing to our selected Twitterers, monitoring our selected Facebook friends, reading our selected websites, watching our selected cable shows or You Tube channels, we will become a shattered mirror. Each of us living as if the world is really just a reflection of…ourselves.

Maybe it’s inevitable. Maybe the rest of the world will follow us down this rathole. But if not, the decline of America won’t be as a result of an overextended empire, a reckless war, a bankrupt financial system, or a permissive culture. It will be because we gave up on reason.