So we all lose?
October 21, 2004 8:24 PM   Subscribe

Lying liars want their lies reported? --There's a bigger problem, the most sobering lesson of this campaign. It's that lies, even when exposed, work. Indeed, we're seeing a diabolical paradox: That exposing the lie enables it to work. Ethics anyone?
posted by amberglow (15 comments total)
 
liar.
posted by quonsar at 8:34 PM on October 21, 2004


But does anybody really believe that the Bushes were so corrupted by their business ties to the Saudis that the president redeployed military from Afghanistan to Iraq to avoid harming a personal benefactor named Osama bin Laden?

It has been a while since I saw F 9/11, but I don't remember that accusation at all.
posted by birdherder at 8:39 PM on October 21, 2004


What he talks about with Fahrenheit 9/11 isn't a lie, particularly, but a slanted viewpoint - and one more hinted at than actually outright said. (That was my main criticism of the movie. He sets all this info out, then never says what he thinks it all means. Then he goes back to Flint.) There's a difference. And the author mentions no Bush lies whatsoever. Hello? Politicians mislead people all the time - they often don't lie so much as fail to tell the whole truth, in Huckleberry Finn fashion. But if voted all the liars out of office, you'd be left with very few officials still in office. But yeah, newspapers could challenge or refuse to give them any further publicity. Did he just not want to give the Bush ones any more publicity here, or what?
posted by raysmj at 8:45 PM on October 21, 2004


That was an awful article. Did you read it, amberglow, or just assume it was about Bush because he's talking about liars? haha. His farenheit 9.11 strawman is neat though.
posted by The God Complex at 8:58 PM on October 21, 2004


"So we're left concluding that the zeal of the media in trying to referee fact-based debate has been turned into a practice that is more likely to reward deceit than to deter it." - Ah, the media zeal to referee the facts.....

The facts of the 2000 election in Florida so zealously reported by....... Greg Palast, for the BBC ? The facts of Diebold's rigged voting machines reported by......... independent journalists ?....... Facts concerning the Bush Administration' pre Iraq invasion WMD claims refereed so flabbily by the Washington Post or the NYT ?


Ahhhh....such zeal ! Deeply do I sleep, untroubled, without a care.

The media is watching.
posted by troutfishing at 9:01 PM on October 21, 2004


I agree that this article is not headed for any journalism awards (and thus perhaps makes its point more forcefully). Nevertheless, this is a campaign where both sides, but especially Bush, have employed the tactic of if you say it often enough it becomes reality. With their continued pounding on the issue even the exposure of its lack of factual underpinning not only fails to reduce its impact but is just one more bit of exposure for the idea. Even bad press is better than no press, eh? The base suspect the lie's exposure and those on the other side always suspected a lie. With the electorate as polarized as it is facts seem to matter less than exposure. Trust of the press is low. Fox news is blatantly GOP and Dan Rather got caught up in an apparent Dem con job. Jon Stewart said it so well that so much of what is portrayed as journalism is nothing more than theater put at the disposal of the political players. It is time for the media to get some balls and do a better job of exposing the hypocrisy, not for ratings, but for democracy.
posted by caddis at 9:23 PM on October 21, 2004


caddis - I agree, and I think Ed Wasserman is feebly waving at that concept - which you just laid out fairly succinctly.
posted by troutfishing at 9:45 PM on October 21, 2004


Oh, I fully agree that it's an interesting subject, but this article itself was weak, particularly its reliance on an incredibly overzealous strawman in regards to Farenheit 9/11.

Speaking of Jon Stewart, the guy who was on his show last night (from Newsweek I think) is pretty solid from the few times I've seen him.
posted by The God Complex at 10:10 PM on October 21, 2004


The article claims that Kerry's claim of $200 billion is a lie. My understanding that Kerry's sum includes all the money that we've spent up to now as well as the money that we are budgeted to spend. That sounds like a pretty fair interpretation to me. It's not like I go around telling people that I got a great deal on my house because I've only lived there a few months and only paid a few thousand dollars on it - the true price would be the full price of the mortgage.

The Fahrenheit 911 bash was pretty unconvincing as well. It relies on a distortion of the movie to make its point.

It seems like this writer thinks he can get away with lying by simply writing about other people's lies. If you are going to call other people out on their lies, you better have your facts straight.
posted by rks404 at 12:05 AM on October 22, 2004


That was an awful article. Did you read it, amberglow, or just assume it was about Bush because he's talking about liars?
I thought it was an interesting premise, and brought something new to the debate about the media's role. As for the examples, he could just as easily taken any number of them out of this campaign season.

If Kerry is purposely using a number that covers future costs of Iraq too, knowing he'll be called on it (since the actual number is not yet known), but not caring because it reinforces the idea he wants to push to us, and Cheney knowingly lies about Edwards in the Senate because it does the same thing, aren't we (and the media) just patsies either way?

and caddis, i think he goes further than that, saying the media is caught in a trap. They can act as stenographers, repeating whatever candidates say, and/or they can expose the misstatements and lies and bull of the politicians, but either way the politicians win. There's no way to counter lies purposely told, if their tellers want either the lie or the idea behind the lie propagated.
posted by amberglow at 5:37 AM on October 22, 2004


Basically, we're still being spun and lied to, even when the lies are exposed as such, and that's part of the plan. It's win-win for politicians, and lose for us, and lose for the media.
posted by amberglow at 5:41 AM on October 22, 2004


The one insight which is missing from a lot of this analysis is that the American people, by and large, care very little about politics. They just don't have the interest to pay careful attention -- while a big juicy line may grab their attention, a careful debunking of the same never has the chance. (And don't refer me to polls where people say they're very interested in the election -- people tend not to make admissions to pollsters which they find embarassing.)

I was making this point yesterday to a few political junkies I work with who simply refused to believe it. I then asked them what they thought about the Series. Two had no opinion, and one said he thought it would be "nice" if Boston won because his girlfriend's dad is a Yankees fan, and he'd like to see him pissed off.

That's the truth of it -- more than having partisans, what politics really has is fans, and those who aren't politics fans vote the way a non-sports-fan watches sports -- minimal attention most of the time, but tune in for the Super Bowl and the Wimbeldon finals because it just seems like the thing to do.
posted by MattD at 6:39 AM on October 22, 2004


I think MattD hit it. American politics has more in common with sports than anything logical.

amberglow, you're feeling the futility of realizing that if a lie is what someone wants to hear, it's the truth to them, and the people pointing out that this truth is a lie are just, well ... liars.

There's so much lying, or at least misrepresentation and stretching of the truth going on (on both sides), that people are facilitated in this mindset.

It has become easier for people to hear only what they want to hear and dismiss anything else as propaganda.

I have an uncle who is Republican because his parents were Republican, and he refuses to question anything. Instead he approaches it all like a sports fan. It's HIS TEAM, it was his parents' team, and he refuses to consider that maybe his parents might have been rooting for the wrong side. So, every time he sees an anti-Bush advert, he literally yells "Lies! Lies!" at the TV set.

There is NO WAY you can argue with this man, or with this mindset in general. His parents voted Republican because they were well-off and involved in business and they felt they were getting something out of it, but my uncle is lower-middle-class and has absolutely no logical reason in his mind to vote for or against Bush except that, ya know, Bush is his home team.

As long as this mindset exists, it's almost hopeless to approach the majority of the American public with facts or logic.

That feeling of hopelessness hurts, doesn't it?
posted by Shane at 7:45 AM on October 22, 2004


Well, no--i think what it is is that it doesn't matter whether people believe the original lie or not (or their side or not) because the repetition of the lie plants the underlying idea in everyone's head anyway. For the Kerry Iraq 200 billion thing, it's that we're spending money we don't have on Iraq, and not spending it at home, and running up massive deficits. For the Cheney I've never seen Edwards in the Senate thing, it's that Edwards is a lightweight. For either of those things to be reported on or factchecked they have to be repeated, thus furthering the underlying message anyway. Even people that don't follow politics hear about these things, no matter what side they're hearing them from, or which type of media. Whether you heard about those 2 examples from ABC/CBS/NBC or CNN or FOX or freerepublic or kos or DU or the Nation or Drudge, you still got the underlying message, no matter how it was presented.

This goes beyond my side or your side, or dem or repub, or red/blue.
posted by amberglow at 10:32 AM on October 22, 2004


If Kerry is purposely using a number that covers future costs of Iraq too, knowing he'll be called on it (since the actual number is not yet known), but not caring because it reinforces the idea he wants to push to us, and Cheney knowingly lies about Edwards in the Senate because it does the same thing, aren't we (and the media) just patsies either way?

Yeah, but Kerry corrected himself in the third debate and made clear that it was 120 billion spend and another 80 billion that has been approved for spending.

My point was I agree with the premise of the article but it wasn't executed terribly well. I tend to be of the mind that Kerry does it more than he should (as all politicians do), but that Bush's distortions are beyond the pale. It seems to me that Bush lies about essentially everything, realizing that the media will create a false parellel between the two campaigns and hold them up as equally untruthful; this happens despite the fact that Bush and Co. lie not only more frequently but also about more important items. That was also the subject of the ABC Memo that leaked, which you wouldn't know for all the bluster about liberal media bias that came out after. The Republicans have repeated that shit about a biased media for so many years that the media itself believes it and stopped doing their jobs.
posted by The God Complex at 1:24 PM on October 22, 2004


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