Published November 25, 2018
In February 2012, I got to visit with syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. before he spoke at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. I asked him what he hoped would be the main point the students in attendance would remember from his speech that night.
“Just that facts matter,” Pitts said. “It’s really simple. It’s not a complex thing. Facts matter. It’s like the old axiom says, you’re entitled to your opinion — which I think is sacrosanct — but you’re not entitled to your own facts.”
That led us to talk about how failing to know history, failing to keep up with current events, failing to separate fact from fiction all help make a person easier to manipulate. The topic prompted me to tell him a condensed version of the greatest fact-checking lesson of my life. A high school teacher, playing the role of Thomas Paine, fed my senior class line after line about our school and church to see if we’d bother to do some fact-checking. Later, when I was telling a priest the story, he didn’t wait to hear how it ended before supplying the punctuation: “And you all sucked it like fish, didn’t you!” Indeed, we did.
“That’s a great story,” Pitts said.
And a great lesson, one that touches on themes that Pitts addressed in his talk at Linfield six years ago. They are all relevant today, with what feels like an even greater sense of urgency.
The post-fact world
Four decades after that unexpected lesson in high school, I’m disheartened by what has happened in this country. Debate begins at a decided disadvantage because, as Pitts pointed out, we can’t even agree on the facts.
I saw it happening with CNN’s “Crossfire” more than 30 years ago. Robert Novak and Tom Braden argued with separate sets of facts. It was theater. Entertainment. What Braden and Pat Buchanan had launched in 1978 on a Washington radio station found a larger audience. The concept was off and running. Each side seemed to think itself entitled to its own facts.
More recently, social media has allowed misinformation posing as fact to travel faster and farther than ever before. And as I wrote last week, even when the numbers are there for all to see, context seems all but forgotten.
Hoaxes and lies have a long reach these days. An expanded cable news lineup routinely gives airtime to people who spout falsehoods to further political strategies. So-called news organizations that didn’t exist a quarter-century ago have become vital cogs in those campaigns. There is a direct line from the most powerful of these, Fox News Channel, back to the Nixon White House. What many have been led to believe is a legitimate news organization is anything but, hatched as a political experiment and made to resemble a newsgathering and reporting operation.
It’s easy for me, someone with decades worth of experience in newspapers and online news, someone who has done much research on the subject, to see that Fox News is not legitimate journalism, but many Americans are unsophisticated viewers who can’t see past the facade. Like the untruths that the Thomas Paine character told our senior class, it’s made to closely resemble the truth (and legitimate news), but it has its value in not being so. That’s its purpose. Even when facts are reported, there is all too often a lack of context that robs them of real meaning and helps them to mislead. This happens elsewhere, of course, but at Fox News, it’s a feature, not a flaw. Sadly, the success of Fox News prompted other outlets to sacrifice integrity for ratings, weakening the entire cable news ecosystem. Warning: One who consumes cable news exclusively consumes empty calories, devoid of nutrients — and sometimes quite toxic.
So many people share untrue memes on Facebook and Twitter, much of it put out into the world by Fox News, or The Daily Caller, or Breitbart, or any of a number of other questionable sources. Many of them are disengaged from reality and don’t even know it. Sadly, some of the people sharing these false memes — about easily verifiable facts — were classmates of mine. They were likely in the room with me 40 years ago for what should have the fact-checking lesson of a lifetime.
Blaming the ‘other’
Listening again to the conversation with Leonard Pitts from 2012, I’m struck by how much of what we talked about is so timely in 2018. One portion prompted him to talk about Jay Feldman’s then-1-year-old book, “Manufacturing Hysteria: A History of Scapegoating, Surveillance, and Secrecy in Modern America.”
Said Pitts: “I found it very interesting reading it because there’s this whole compendium of the 20th and early 21st centuries of how we’ve been given — pretty much every decade, almost — a group to fear, to stampede us. German Americans, at one point. Japanese Americans. Communists. Labor unionists. African-Americans. Gays. Muslims. Illegal immigrants.”
Full stop. That last one’s in heavy rotation on the Trump playlist right now.
“Each group,” Pitts said, alluding to the full list and how it’s expanded and weaponized, “is the one that’s going to bring society down and destroy us. It’s this whole thing of imposing fear, and it makes people ridiculous.”
As an example, he hinted at what became his Feb. 29 column that year in the Miami Herald, about the Indiana legislator who warned about … the Girl Scouts. As Pitts wrote: “This brand of fraidy-cat politics where ‘they’ are ever out to get you and the sky is forever falling has become a staple of the Republican Party.”
Fear of the “other” is a supercharged political weapon. Think of how many examples we have in the past six years. One hits particularly close to home for me: the demonization and attempted erasure of transgender people. The rollback of trans rights, of gay rights, of voting rights, of women’s rights, of so many rights — is well underway now.
“If you’ve read the history,” Pitts said of “othering” groups for political gain, “if you know anything about the history of the country, it’s like, ‘I’ve seen this movie before. It doesn’t end well. Can we just cut it?’
“It changes groups every few years, but it’s always this whole idea that ‘they are the ones who are responsible for the miserable state of your life, or for whatever it is you don’t have that you feel like you should, so let’s do them in.’ ”
How is it, then, that people can’t be persuaded by facts to see through the popular fiction?
“People are very deeply invested in not seeing what they don’t want to see,” Pitts said. He added that when he began as a columnist, he was somewhat naive about that.
“I think I had this idea that if I have the facts on my side and they’re irrefutable, and my logic is ironclad, then at the very least, you have to give me reconsideration. I may not change your mind, but you have to at least think about what I’m telling you.”
And now?
“That is so not the case,” he said. “It’s unreal, and it’s just very frustrating.”
Backlash
The publisher and managing editor of the News-Register, the paper where I worked at the time, were part of the conversation with Pitts six years ago. In fact, they invited me to join them for what proved to be 35 minutes of interesting talk about journalism and its challenges.
After acknowledging that the United States had come a long way regarding race, women’s rights and other areas of civil rights, Pitts had a sobering reminder for us.
“What we’re seeing now is the backlash,” he said, “against pretty much all those things.”
Deeply held racism, we all agreed, is seemingly impenetrable. Keep in mind: This was more than four years before Trump was elected.
“The mistake that we make, the mistake that I make,” Pitts said, “and I don’t know if mistake is the right word, but the issue that you have is trying to use reason and trying to use fact. And I think that what you have to come to understand is that there are certain people for whom those (reason and fact) are not persuasive. There are certain people who believe what they believe because they believe, and that’s pretty much the entirety of the thought that’s gone into it. And I don’t know how to reach those folks.”
On some level, it was a relief to hear him say that when I listened to the recording of our 2012 conversation recently. At the time, I could not have imagined how many friends of mine could fall for a con man such as Donald Trump, or be unmoved by demonstrable fact. Hearing once again that one of my favorite columnists was at a loss when it comes to reaching people who have crossed the line separating them from the reality-based community makes me reassess expending the energy to try to break through.
‘Alternative facts’
The challenge is daunting, even terrifying. The Trump administration’s surrogates tout “alternative facts.” Their comeback against truth? “Truth is not truth.” And their champion, whose version of The Big Lie is a mountain of smaller yet preposterous ones over and over and over again, is Trump himself.
As George Will wrote in an Oct. 10 column, Steve Bannon describes part of the strategy by saying, ““The way to deal with (the media) is to flood the zone with shit.” Fox News Channel and Sinclair Broadcast Group television stations do their own shoveling on the other side of the great divide, to an audience predisposed to believe. The content is tailor-made for them, as they have been made more and more susceptible to it.
There is a line I remember from my seminary days: God created man in his image, and man returned the favor. There is, I believe, a similarly symbiotic relationship between Fox News and its core viewership. They are tethered in ways that feed each other and keep both in existence, each needing the other to survive.
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It’s difficult to function today without knowing what’s reality and what isn’t. As Pitts said six years ago during that conversation about the importance of having knowledge of history and current events: “If you don’t know what’s gone on, if you don’t know what the facts are now, then you’re pretty much the textbook definition of a manipulable person.”
Facts matter. That’s a true story.
Check it out
Overwhelmed by the number of “news” sources out there as you think about doing your own vetting of information? The media bias chart below is the best and most comprehensive I’ve seen at providing guidance. Click on it to enlarge it.
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Photo of Facts Matter sign at the Women’s March for equality in Manhattan in 2017 by Christopher Penler via Shutterstock.