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.

Bill O'Reilly

OK so it’s not the most surprising headline and many people probably believe it could be a daily column but this is a special episode of “Bill O’Reilly is Allergic to Facts.” Today’s episode: Newspaper circulation.

O’Reilly’s syndicated column is essentially a hearty har-har-har over the troubles at the New York Times which is, of course, a favorite topic among the legions of Americans who hate the “paper of record.” There’s certainly plenty to write about on that score but Bill takes the super lazy way out insists the paper’s problems are because it’s “the nation’s largest left-wing newspaper.”

The New York Times is most definitely a committed left-wing concern that is openly contemptuous of the conservative, traditional point-of-view. That is the primary reason the paper may soon dissolve.

O’Reilly supports his argument by noting that recent newspaper closings have all been at similarly “lefty” publications.

Over the past few months, newspapers in Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis and Denver have either folded or filed for bankruptcy. With the exception of The Rocky Mountain News, all the papers were committed left-wing enterprises. The truth is that most Americans are traditional-minded folks; they believe their country is noble, they want respectful discourse. Fanaticism of any kind is not the American way.

Neither is making sh*t up and that’s what BillO’s up to today. First off when did the Chicago Tribune become a “committed left-wing enterprise”? When they backed George W Bush over Al Gore in 2000 or when they backed George W Bush over John Kerry in 2004? Supporting Obama in 2008 was as much of a surprise as the fact that no major Texas newspaper failed to endorse their home-state guy in 2000.

Then, even if you accept that those other closed papers were super liberal, is that really the reason they folded? After all the survivors in Denver and Seattle are certainly no more conservative than their fallen brethren. The Denver Post endorsed Gore in 2000 while the Rocky Mountain News went with Bush. And both supported Bush over Kerry in 2004. Commies indeed!

The truth (Bill loves that word — too bad he doesn’t practice what he so pompously preaches) is that newspapers across the country are in dire straights and it has nothing to do with their editorial pages. Look at what’s happened to the circulation at the top 10 “conservative” papers from 2007 to 2008 (new figures are out on Monday) [see below for update]:

WSJ                                                  0.0%
NY Post                                           -6.3%
Chicago Trib                                   -7.8%
Dallas Morning News                     -9.3%
Boston Herald                                -9.9%
San Diego Union Tribune               -3.0%
Tampa Tribune                               -2.4%
AZ Republic                                     -5.5%
Indy Star                                          -3.3%
Columbus Dispatch                        -2.9%

And the three most prominent “lefty pinko rags”

New York Times                              -3.6%
Washington Post                             -1.9%
Newsday                                           -2.6%

Other than the Wall Street Journal which, along with America’s other national newspaper USA Today held circulation steady, every major paper left and right suffered circulation declines. If readers are abandoning the NY Times at a rate of 3.6 percent because of it’s leftward leanings then we (and Bill) have to conclude that readers are abandoning the NY Post at a rate of 6.3 percent because of it’s rightward leanings. The only logical conclusion? Right-wing rags are in bigger trouble than liberal ones.

C’mon Bill. you can do better than that!

[UPDATE] Now that the new numbers are out the news is even worse for the newspaper business and further demonstrates how far off base Bill is. The “liberal lions” are losing readers far more slowly than the biggest conservative newspapers with the exception of the Wall St. Journal. Indeed the right’s most prized paper, Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post lost more readers than almost any other paper in America. Here’s the same list as above showing the most recent circulation figures which were released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations:

WSJ                                               +0.1%
NY Post                                         -20.6%
Chicago Trib                                 -7.4%
Dallas Morning News                   -9.9%
Boston Herald                              -13.6%
San Diego Union Tribune             -9.5%
Tampa Tribune                             -11.4%
AZ Republic                                  -5.7%
Indy Star                                       -9.0%
Columbus Dispatch                     -2.0%

And the three most prominent “lefty pinko rags”

New York Times                           -3.6%
Washington Post                          -1.1%
Newsday                                        -3.0%

Keith Olbermann

Orginally posted 3/29, updated 4/11

Hey if the New York Post can write great, if somewhat misleading headlines, why can’t I?

The equation that liberal Keith and conservative Bill were essentially separated at birth may not apply in all ways but in at least one they are equal: Both are blowhards who seem almost incapable of admitting mistakes.

(Each has one major exception to this: Olbermann famously wrote the “Mea Culpa” essay for Salon in 2002 about his experience at ESPN and O’Reilly admitted in 2004 he was wrong in believing President Bush’s claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq).

The latest incident involves a bizarre Olbermann attack on a supposedly fake Twitter account set up in his name that the acerbic host claimed was set up by one of his enemies at Fox News. A week and a half ago Olbermann did is usual over-the-top routine on Twitter and made it his “Worst Person in the World” for the alleged transgression. But it turns out almost no part of the story was true and Olbermann and MSNBC refuse to respond.

Red State summarizes all this here and a post on Daily Kos confirms a key part (that NBC set up the Twitter account for Olbermann and had staffers post to it — see item #5). It seems that Olbermann went on a rhetorical rampage without doing much, if any, checking to see if his claims were true.

Olbermann apparently got almost everything wrong:

• The Countdown Twitter account was not a fake  — and in fact there were two of them. Here’s Twitter founder Biz Stone’s Tweet on the matter:

Funny story about the @keitholbermann account—MSNBC was running it and Keith didn’t know when he called us the Worst in the World (D’oh!) 5:22 PM Mar 24th from web

• The man he accused of setting it up is not a Fox News stooge but a very critical former employee who sounds much more like somone Olbermann would quote instead of slime.
• It’s hard to set up a Twitter account (“I’m not on Twitter. I tried to sign up last summer but abandoned the project.”).
• And that the “junk email” Olbermann claims tipped him off was actually junk email. It was, apparently, a invite to follow someone on Twitter which would have been familiar to any Twitter user has Olbermann actually shown it to one.

One unremarked part of this story is how little coverage it has gotten from obvious Olbermann fans like the HuffPo. After an initial report showing video of Olbermann’s rant there has been no follow up. Can you imagine what the liberal netroots would say if the shoe were on O’Reilly’s foot?

The point is not that the liberal or conservative netroots and media are one-sided and sometimes right or wrong — that goes without saying — but that partisans who believe only they speak the truth are dangerously deluded and add nothing to helping people understand what’s really going on in the country and world.

Get Real is all about casting a skeptical eye on our nation of loudmouths. This is why.

UPDATE

Well it took some time but Keith finally admitted he was wrong. Sort of. It’s obviously incredibly painful for him. Like giving birth to a hippo. Watch and see for yourself. I’m thinking this doesn’t really deserve a Mea Ciulpa….

Note: this is video contains the Olbermann “response” and was produced by Caleb Howe of the ActiCons blog.