Loyalty to the lie

Research has supposedly shown that conservatives are more loyal than liberals. I suspect that the problem is a bias in the object of loyalty. Conservatives may be more loyal to their tribe, while liberals are more loyal to their ideals.

In any case, conservatives have certainly proven loyalty to their favored lies and the liars who continue to propagate them long after they've been conclusively refuted:

Not long ago, if you told a whopper like [Sarah] Palin's and it was as thoroughly debunked as hers was, that would have ended the discussion. These days, it is barely even part of the discussion. These days, facts seem overmatched by falsehood, too slow to catch them, too weak to stop them. 

Indeed, falsehoods are harder to kill than a Hollywood zombie. Run them through with fact, and still they shamble forward, fueled by echo chamber media, ideological tribalism, cognitive dissonance, a certain imperviousness to shame, and an understanding that a lie repeated long enough, loudly enough, becomes, in the minds of those who need to believe it, truth. 

That is the lesson of the birthers and truthers, of Sen. Jon Kyl's "not intended to be a factual statement" about Planned Parenthood, of Glenn Beck's claim that conservatives founded the Civil Rights Movement, and of pretty much every word Michele Bachmann says. It seems that not only are facts no longer important, but they are not even the point. 

Rather, the point is the construction and maintenance of an alternate narrative designed to enhance and exploit the receiver's fears, his or her sense of prerogatives, entitlement, propriety and morality under siege from outside forces.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/07/01/154586/leonard-pitts-jr-on-facts-lies.html#storylink=omni_popular?storylink=addthis#storylink=cpy

The strangest aspect of persistent lying is that it exacts no penalty from the credibility of the liars. In a nation with truth as a social norm, Palin, Beck, Kyl, and Bachmann would long since have been laughed out of the national conversation.

Because wingnuts clamor to be lied to and the media no longer care about anything other than eyeballs on their ads, we are a nation on the path to failure. It may already be too late to rescue the greatness of America from its self-professedly loyal destroyers.

Living a lie will do that to you.

Lying to you

I surely can't be the first person to notice this. (Don't call me Shirley. RIP.)

Paul Steinhauser of CNN completely misrepresented a McClatchy-Marist poll.

The actual poll asked whether voters think Republicans ought to compromise with Democrats to get things done:

The Republicans have control of the House of Representatives. Which statement comes closer to your view about what you think should happen:

• The Republicans should compromise with the Democrats and President Obama to get things done
• The Republicans should stand firm on their positions even if it means things don't get done

Steinhauser dishonestly portrays the results as showing that the voters want Democrats and Republicans to work together.

One day before a White House meeting between President Barack Obama and top congressional leaders from both political parties, a new poll suggests most Americans want Democrats and Republicans to compromise.

The actual poll is about what Republicans should do. Steinhauser spins it into a bullshit balance, portraying the voters as saying something they didn't say.

Some liberal media! In my newsroom, this would be a firing offense. If I only had a newsroom.

Why does it matter if the media lies about polls? Those lies can actually push people toward different positions. That's why candidates and parties pimp their biased partisan polls during election season.

Republican preference

As always, Republicans would rather prevent 100,000 legitimate votes that they're going to lose most of, in order to prevent a dozen fraudulent votes. They don't believe in democracy.

Update (10/18): Yep, those wingnuts are simply trying to protect civilization by destroying it.

Ranch for sale

Come 2009, Duhbya's toy ranch in Crawford will have served its photo op purpose. The White House press office's claim to the contrary is proof.

Beggar the future

Public education is the lifeblood of American democracy. As the South's record in recent elections shows, an undereducated population is ripe for political manipulation, even against its own economic interest. Of course, there are cultural and social factors at work as well, and the people are not stupid, despite what Hollywood says. I still retain my dual citizenship!

Poverty tracks very closely with poor scholastic achievement, and this report paints a bleak picture that's getting bleaker.

If there's a silver lining, it's the fact that public school achievement has been improving despite the demographic slide in socio-economic status. What, that's impossible? You haven't heard that? You've heard just the opposite?

There's a more than 25-year upward trend in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) - as a whole and every major demographic.

There's good and bad news in public education. Too bad we never hear the good news.

Courtiers of conventional wisdom

The move of the Democratic Party upscale, chasing campaign contributions, was not the only force that led us from a robust and liberal democracy in 1978 to the threshhold of fascism today. Just as important and harder to reverse has been the transformation of journalism.

Most journalists today are courtiers of the conventional wisdom. They think journalism happens at press conferences, and they're happy to write up what they hear as if it were news just because someone important says it. They think that any context they provide should match the consensus narrative of the press corps.

What happened? No single event gave us the Kewl Kidz media. Instead, a series of societal changes all pushed our public discourse in the same direction:

• Repeated right-wing assertions that the media was biased against them
• The end of the Fairness Doctrine
• The advent of cable news stations
• Narrow corporate dominance of media
• The ascendancy of entertainment values pretty much everywhere in society

In the 1970s, the people who brought us news evidently thought of it as good for us, like compulsory schooling, spinach, and cod liver oil. They were right, but we preferred cotton candy and Paris Hilton.

You may think of the prior era's ethic of journalistic objectivity was wrong, foolish, or impossible - or all three. I don't. I think it served us well. But that doesn't matter; it's only of academic interest.

That "objective" media environment is not coming back. McClatchy may fight a rear-guard action against reporting that starts from ideology instead of reality, or perhaps it will simply step into the barely served market for left-liberal reporting. If so, a good slogan could be A bias for facts, since most of the liberal world wants to know what actually is true.

(More to follow on the individual bullets as time permits.)