Making liars pay a price

This article by Edward Wasserman is generating some discussion about what the traditional media should do when influential people spread misinformation to the public. Propaganda works essentially by means of repetition, so reporting the lies only to correct them typically assists in disseminating them. No wonder that so many Americans believe the nonsense being spread by opponents of health care reform, given that the US media, without bothering to explain the details of the proposed reforms, has played those myths up even when reporters did point out that the complaints are imaginary.

Wasserman is of course right that merely debunking persistent lies doesn't work to deflate them. But his proposed solution won't work either.

Wasserman, taking his cue from Greg Marx's post at the Columbia Journalism Review, argues that the trad media should somehow train itself to just ignore the liars and thus deprive their lies of oxygen. But that takes no account of Fox News, viral emails, televised blab fests, and all the modern means of disseminating politically convenient lies.

As tristero points out, that solution would have done nothing to halt the disastrous rush to war against Iraq with all the misinformation being spread by the Bush administration and its busy little helpers. But tristero's solution, for the media to learn to mock the liars, is unlikely to happen. And though it would be a good start, it's insufficient because rebuttals are necessary as well. It's hard to harness ridicule to serious fact-checking.

A better solution is for the media to make sure that the liars pay a steep price for every lie they try to disseminate. Here for example is a scenario offered by Wasserman:

Suppose some headline-loving political eminence announces that the reason the health system is in crisis is illegal immigration. Now, you could refute that with experts, with numbers, with facts. And it wouldn't matter a bit -- not if you lead your newscast with him, if you let that week's debate revolve around his claims. You'd still whip up rage, you'd still give him a soapbox, you'd still bleed off attention from the issues lawmakers need to tackle to fix healthcare, you'd still create a population that believes something that isn't so.

The real solution seems pretty self-intuitive: Make the story about a liar spreading lies. Put your politician on the defensive by making him the focus of the story. Describe how he is making things up, call them 'lies', show the extent to which he's doing it deliberately, and let him try to defend himself. If he weasels out or backtracks, ask him when he's going to set the record straight publicly and if he'll be apologizing to the people he misled. If necessary, target the liar repeatedly and remind your audience of other lies the politician has foisted on the public.

In other words, confront the sons of bitches who are screwing up political discourse by spreading lies. Make it clear that there's a heavy price to pay for lying, and lies will become less attractive.

Didn't any reporters in America ever learn how to deal with schoolyard bullies? Punch the political bullies hard in the nose and they'll leave us in peace. Maybe literally.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Bush on Iraq: the view from the ground

Milo rang last night to suggest I repost this piece written a few years ago. He thinks new readers might still find it relevant. Milo believes that Bush administration policies on Iraq never really go out of style, as I too discovered in the past. So without further excuse, "The view from the ground" (lightly revised).

I don't want to badmouth anybody, but I think he was misleading you. It's much worse than he's letting on. The whole situation is a mess. It's not going to just get better by itself, you can see for yourself that it's broken beyond repair. It's up to you of course whether you want to trust him. But I think he's leading you down the path, making you think you can get off easy, then dropping the bad news on you later.

It's just not possible to do it his way. And they won't let us anyway even if it would work, which it won't. He's already wrecked so much of the...well, I don't want to badmouth anybody, but take it from me it's beyond repair.

You see those pipes? That's your leech field and they're all clogged. You've got to replace the entire septic. Dredge all this muck out and put in a new system.

But once you do that, you're all set.

Just like in Iraq. Cut out the terrorists, drop in a new army, and you're ready to go. You've got to listen to the generals. Just let the experts do their work, you'll get the best results.

I'm with the President a thousand percent, don't understand what those Democrats want from him. Did you see his speech yesterday? Made sense to me. So what if Iraq's a mess now? Let'm backfill and landscape, and you're all set.

Just too many bodies exposed at the moment.

It's all Saddam's fault anyway. He's the one who chose to go to war against us, we didn't attack him. He kicked out the inspectors. If he didn't want war, he shouldn't have done that.

What's that? They're all smashed right through here. If you ask me, some idiot drove a truck right over the yard and crushed the pipes. You've got an oil fill pipe over there. I bet it was an oil tanker backing up to the house instead of parking at a safe distance.

Idiot, if you ask me.

It was up to Bush to decide whether or not to go into Iraq, it wasn't Congress's decision to make. Saddam wouldn't let the inspectors in, so what could Bush do? He couldn't let'm thumb his nose at us. Course if he let them in, they'd've found the WMDs so he slammed the door in their face.

Can't believe the French couldn't even see that.

They go straight down the hill. Bet they polluted the stream. Even back then there were rules. Can't believe they got away with it. You know some money changed hands. That's the way this town council has always been.

Can't trust politicians about anything.

Bush admitted the WMD intelligence was bad, you gotta admire his honesty. Of course it was bad, the CIA just didn't do its job.

You can't fault Bush for that.

Gotta come out too. I know he tried to convince you he could save it, but you can see for yourself it's all fouled up. I've got some expertise here, so I think you gotta take that seriously.

Never seen anything quite this messed up. They did everything wrong, including a few things I've never seen before.

Amazing, really.

Not that any of it matters. Saddam was a danger and we had to take him out first before he hits us with WMD. Even if Bush got everything else wrong, he got that right. You don't want to see a mushroom cloud over Cincinnati or wherever.

Aluminum tubes? No, I'm going to use PVC. Never use aluminum that way, it would be all wrong for the job.

The people who are accusing Bush of lying just aren't telling the truth. There's no evidence he ever hyped the evidence for WMD, and it doesn't matter how many times the Democrats say it, it just isn't true.

Besides every other country saw the same intelligence, and they all voted to give the President authority to overthrow Saddam. You can't just go back and rewrite history.

It's always been about giving the Iraqi people freedom and democracy, simple as that.

This is just preliminary. I'll come back next week to take exact dimensions and measure your gradient. It'll take a few weeks to draw up a plan and get estimates back for materials and fill. This is a little tricky, I want to get everything right at the outset and give you folks an accurate idea of what you're getting into here.

As I said, I think you have to give Bush credit. He's admitting that not everything went according to plan in Iraq. You won't hear many presidents admitting that mistakes were made.

Especially when they're really big mistakes.

I'm gonna put in a tank triple the size of the current one. I'd put in a bigger one but there's no room. It's much more than you probably need, but it really makes sense to go with a bigger size than necessary so you don't have problems down the road when maybe you have kids. Trying to cut corners can really cost you in the end.

The generals in Iraq say they have everything they need to win. In fact they're already winning. They don't need any more troops.

Probably start bringing them home soon, maybe, but only when there's a complete victory.

If you ask me, Bush is right to refuse to explain when that'll be. That would be artificial. We don't want the terrorists to get any ideas.

I'm pretty sure I can begin this job in three weeks, if the permit comes through. It's complicated so count on it taking at least five days. I'm thinking more like seven. Eight at the outside.

My God, look at how fast he's going on this road. No concern for life and limb.

Can you believe they're even criticizing Bush now over civilian casualties. What did they think would happen when we went to war?

It's pretty irresponsible.

Better turn my engine off. Gas is so expensive now I can barely afford to fill up. What was I saying.

crossposted from unbossed.com

"Remove one zero": Manipulating body counts in Iraq

Together with the Maliki government, General Petraeus is campaigning aggressively to convince reporters and the public that his claims of diminished sectarian violence are based on sound statistics. The GAO, the Associated Press, McClatchy and others have found that the Pentagon is undercounting and underreporting deaths and violence generally. The credibility of Bush and Petraeus, and their prescription of more-of-the-same, won't stand up if their statistics are revealed as nothing but a load of hooey.

At the National Press Club on Wednesday, Petraeus was greeted as a conquering hero. Never the less he remained sufficiently defensive as to wave around some papers that, he claimed, showed he was being straight regarding his highly dubious statistics. He called it "setting the record straight":

As only the military can, we have a three-page document on ethnosectarian violence methodology. And it is fairly comprehensive. And it's pretty logical and rational.

Today's LA Times has more regarding the record-straight-setting operation from the Pentagon:

U.S. military officials sought Wednesday to counter accusations that they were manipulating death tolls to make Iraq look more secure.

Stung by accusations that Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, had presented selective statistics during his testimony before Congress, the military released a statement here outlining its definition of sectarian violence: bombings, killings or other attacks committed by an ethnic group or religious sect against another, for purely sectarian purposes...

The Iraqi government also compiles statistics, but does not differentiate between sectarian and other violent deaths.

And there's the rub. Petraeus is far from eager to acknowledge that the Pentagon is dependent for its statistics upon those compiled by Iraqi civil authorities—which often are inaccurate, unmethodical, falsified, and incomplete, and always dispersed rather than centralized. The figures given for murders, bombings, and other acts of violence are a minimum count rather than an accurate representation of what is happening. The central Iraqi government, naturally, has an interest in cooperating in the pretense that the situation is really not so grim as news reports suggest:

In Baghdad on Wednesday, the national security advisor, Mowaffak Rubaie, agreed with the U.S. military that numbers coming from the media and other outlets were "very, very, very exaggerated."

Asked what the true death toll was, Rubaie said, "I don't have a figure, but I can say one thing: You probably would be correct if you removed one zero from the figures which are in the public domain or published by the newspapers."

But bashing reporters who dig out the truth won't get you very far. Iraqis know perfectly well that the Maliki and Bush governments are minimizing the body count deliberately:

Noureddine Hayali, a member of the main Sunni Arab bloc in parliament, said he suspected officials were not reporting sectarian deaths in other cities.

He also questioned whether the U.S. military figures included such incidents as killings last March in the northern city of Tall Afar...

"It is not in the interest of the government to show all these numbers. They want to show that they have made progress by decreasing death numbers," Hayali said.

Even Iraqi officials, when pressed, admit that their own figures are incredible:

Rubaie acknowledged that the government needed to devise a method to account for its dead citizens.

"I admit that we, as the Iraqi government, have a responsibility to go back to our records and do this properly and openly and help produce a figure which is credible," he said.

It's simply preposterous, then, for Petraeus and Bush to pretend that these Iraqi statistics are reliable.

Retired Army Col. Douglas A. Macgregor, a defense analyst ... said several factors made body counts unreliable in Iraq. Among them are the Muslim practice of burying bodies as soon as possible, the general chaos of war, and sectarian agendas within Maliki's government.

"You're talking about an environment where there is absolutely no accountability for anything," Macgregor said. "The bottom line is, whatever figures you are given are simply inaccurate."

Don't think so? Here are pertinent comments by the Independent's Patrick Cockburn in what is, to my mind, one of the classic dissections of Bush's "surge".

More lies have been told about casualties in Iraq and the general level of violence there than at almost any time since the First World War. In that conflict, a British minister remarked sourly that he suspected the military authorities of keeping three sets of casualty figures: "One to deceive the Cabinet, a second to deceive the people and a third to achieve themselves."

The American attitude to Iraqi civilian casualties is along much the same lines. The Baker-Hamilton report drawn up by senior non-partisan Democrats and Republicans last year examined one day in July 2006, when the US military had reported 93 attacks on US and Iraqi forces. Investigation by US intelligence agencies revealed that the real figure was about 1,100.

The Iraqi government has sought to conceal civilian casualty figures by banning journalists from the scenes of bombings, and banned hospitals and the Health Ministry from giving information. In July, AP reported, 2,024 Iraqis died violently, a 23 per cent rise on June, which was the last month for which the government gave a figure.

This is almost certainly an underestimate. In a single bombing in the district of Karada in Baghdad on 26 July, Iraqi television and Western media cited the police as saying that there were 25 dead and 100 wounded. A week later, a list of the names of 92 dead and 127 wounded, compiled by municipal workers, was pinned up on shuttered shopfronts in the area.

That is a measure of how much lying is going on. For General Petraeus and George W. Bush to pretend to the American public that their statistics are credible is a mark of extreme arrogance.

crossposted from unbossed.com