FACTS ARE DEAD
May. 2nd, 2012 12:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogNo, really.
Rex Huppke has written up the obituary in the Chicago Tribune:
It’s satire, of course.
But it’s fair comment, although we could easily derail the whole issue by sliding into a pointless tangent about whether it’s a fact that facts no longer exist.
Conundrum!
Of course facts still do and will continue to exist, just as many people have always and will continue to believe in superstitions, old wives tales and the apocryphal in general.
But as the obit points out, the problem isn’t so much the facts are dead so much as they matter less and less, thanks to a growing inability of people to accept that a given fact can contradict what they think they already know (as well as the rise of media sources that not only reinforce non-factual information, but in many cases are the source of it).
That, and politicians and other opinion leaders caught in blatantly obvious factual errors tend to stick to their guns, either via clumsy batshit semantical wordplay (i.e. Allen West’s assertion that his statement that there are up to 81 members of the Communist Party in Congress is true if you know that by “Communist Party” he means “Congressional Progressive Caucus”, which is the exact same thing, even though they’re two completely different organizations) or by blaming the media for assuming that they intended what they said to be a factual statement.
Even the rise of fact-checking groups like PolitiFact and FactCheck doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. I know Republicans who swear blind that both of them are liberally biased. And as NPR points out, it’s gone from the equivalent of sports fans accusing referees of bias when they make a call against their team to accusing the ref of lying his ass off.
(True story: a Republican friend of mine says he doesn’t trust FactCheck because it’s run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which was founded by the Annenberg Foundation, which also started the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which Obama was once involved with. Therefore, FactCheck is obviously biased towards Obama. The fact that they’ve shot down many of Obama’s own claims doesn’t seem to alter his opinion, to say nothing of the fact that Walter Annenberg was a lifelong Republican – which I think illustrates the problem perfectly.)
Again, none of this is particularly new. Facts have always been the first casualty of politics, and I think a fair amount of the electorate understands that to a degree. The difference now, I think, is the growing pervasiveness of political biases to the point where almost anything can be turned into a partisan political issue, which is extending the problem into non-political arenas.
So all of this can’t be pointed out often enough, for my money.
Would I lie to you,
This is dF
Rex Huppke has written up the obituary in the Chicago Tribune:
Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of the U.S. House of Representatives are communists.
It’s satire, of course.
But it’s fair comment, although we could easily derail the whole issue by sliding into a pointless tangent about whether it’s a fact that facts no longer exist.
Conundrum!
Of course facts still do and will continue to exist, just as many people have always and will continue to believe in superstitions, old wives tales and the apocryphal in general.
But as the obit points out, the problem isn’t so much the facts are dead so much as they matter less and less, thanks to a growing inability of people to accept that a given fact can contradict what they think they already know (as well as the rise of media sources that not only reinforce non-factual information, but in many cases are the source of it).
That, and politicians and other opinion leaders caught in blatantly obvious factual errors tend to stick to their guns, either via clumsy batshit semantical wordplay (i.e. Allen West’s assertion that his statement that there are up to 81 members of the Communist Party in Congress is true if you know that by “Communist Party” he means “Congressional Progressive Caucus”, which is the exact same thing, even though they’re two completely different organizations) or by blaming the media for assuming that they intended what they said to be a factual statement.
Even the rise of fact-checking groups like PolitiFact and FactCheck doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. I know Republicans who swear blind that both of them are liberally biased. And as NPR points out, it’s gone from the equivalent of sports fans accusing referees of bias when they make a call against their team to accusing the ref of lying his ass off.
(True story: a Republican friend of mine says he doesn’t trust FactCheck because it’s run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which was founded by the Annenberg Foundation, which also started the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which Obama was once involved with. Therefore, FactCheck is obviously biased towards Obama. The fact that they’ve shot down many of Obama’s own claims doesn’t seem to alter his opinion, to say nothing of the fact that Walter Annenberg was a lifelong Republican – which I think illustrates the problem perfectly.)
Again, none of this is particularly new. Facts have always been the first casualty of politics, and I think a fair amount of the electorate understands that to a degree. The difference now, I think, is the growing pervasiveness of political biases to the point where almost anything can be turned into a partisan political issue, which is extending the problem into non-political arenas.
So all of this can’t be pointed out often enough, for my money.
Would I lie to you,
This is dF
