More on Lies

Shankar Vedantam at the Washington Post explains why fact-checking is a useless exercise in a political campaign. Money quote:

As the presidential campaign heats up, intense efforts are underway to debunk rumors and misinformation. Nearly all these efforts rest on the assumption that good information is the antidote to misinformation.

But a series of new experiments show that misinformation can exercise a ghostly influence on people's minds after it has been debunked -- even among people who recognize it as misinformation. In some cases, correcting misinformation serves to increase the power of bad information.

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Bill Moyers on The Efficacy of Lying

On his September 12th show, Bill Moyers gives this phenomenon the metaphor it needs:

. . . news cycles once measured in hours, are now measured in minutes and second. We live inside a media hurricane, an unrelenting force of attacks and counterattacks hatched in partisan quarters and hurled into cyberspace with such velocity the poor little truth is blown away like signposts on the gulf coast. Try getting a false or misleading charge retracted once it's made. You cannot un-ring a bell. Try and you'll find yourself an "enemy of the people." One Republican official told journalists in St. Paul, "We will get with you if you keep messing with us." And as John McCain and Sarah Palin barnstormed the nation this week, crowds that came out to see them booed members of the press.

"You cannot un-ring a bell."

Thank you Bill.

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Exactly

Cathleen Decker validates what I've been complaining about for weeks now: in presidential politics, lying is effective. Money quote:

". . . a campaign adage has proved itself again: Repeat something often enough, and it becomes real, even when it isn't."

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McCain's Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Ads

What a week for the McCain advertising staff. They've put out four ads this week, and the nonpartisan operation Factcheck.org has called out every single one of them. First, this ad claiming that Obama is trying to "destroy" Governor Palin, an ad which makes use of a quote from Factcheck itself:


Per Factcheck:

They call the ad "Fact Check." It says "the attacks on Gov. Palin have been called 'completely false' ... 'misleading.' " On screen is a still photo of a grim-faced Obama. Our words are accurately quoted, but they had nothing to do with Obama.

If you're going to out Factcheck Factcheck, you better get your facts straight.

Next was the ad that Joe Klein said was one of the sleaziest ads he's ever seen:


You won't see a more direct attempt to exploit the explosive intersection of the two biggest taboos in America: race and sex. Again, Factcheck:

Obama, contrary to the ad's insinuation, does not support explicit sex education for kindergarteners. And the bill, which would have allowed only "age appropriate" material and a no-questions-asked opt-out policy for parents, was not his accomplishment to claim in any case, since he was not even a cosponsor – and the bill never left the state Senate.

Finally, there is the spot just released claiming that Obama is trying to "belittle" Governor Palin:

The worst part of this one is the shot of Obama's clenched jaw overlaid with the scolding narrator's voice: "How disrespectful." Why not throw a "boy" on the end of that for good measure?

Once again, Factcheck:

The new McCain-Palin ad "Lashing Out" begins like an earlier ad we criticized, with its reference to Barack Obama's celebrity, but then goes down new paths of deception. It takes quotes from news organizations and uses them out of context in an effort to portray Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden, as unfairly attacking Sarah Palin and making sexist remarks. We've long been a critic of candidates (Obama included) usurping the credibility of independent news organizations and peddling false quotes, and this ad is particularly egregious.

Surely this will backfire?

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Liar (WaPo's Version)

Following up on an earlier item, the Washington Post has a story today about untruths becoming facts before they're undone. Money quote:

As the presidential campaign moves into a final, heated stretch, untrue accusations and rumors have started to swirl at a pace so quick that they become regarded as fact before they can be disproved.

Again, once a claim has been established as true, twice as much work has to be done to undo it.

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Nothing New Here

The Washington Post's Richard Cohen has an Op-Ed in yesterday's paper where he claims that Obama is being swiftboated, and that he needs to be tougher in responding to it. Money quote:

What Obama does not understand is that he is being Swift-boated. The term does not apply to a mere smear. It is bolder, more outrageous than that. It means going straight at your opponent's strength and maligning it. This is what was done in 2004 to John Kerry, who had commanded a Swift boat in Vietnam. Kerry had won three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and a Bronze Star and emerged from the war a certified hero. It was that record that his opponents attacked, a tactic Kerry thought so ludicrous that he at first ignored it. The record shows that he lost the election.

The swiftboating of Obama began before Palin's and Guiliani's now infamous "community organizer" jabs. It started at least over the summer with the release of the McCain campaign's "celebrity" ads. Those ads made the claim that Obama is "the biggest celebrity in the world," an obvious attempt to cast the Senator's worldwide recognition and popularity as a liability.

There's little doubt that the ad found its mark among voters. But where it really succeeded was in its effect on Obama. When Obama had a packed stadium of 80,000 people and a television audience of millions more for his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention, he chose to "dial down the rhetoric" and "get in gear" with an address heavy on policy details and light on soaring rhetoric. He didn't, after all, want to look like a celebrity.

Look, Obama's celebrity and his community organizing are strengths--great, great strengths. The McCain camp's job is to attack those strengths as weaknesses, not just on technical merit, but on the basis of Obama's character. A "celebrity" is not a statesman; a "celebrity" is rich, spoiled, and out of touch.

You'll notice that McCain's convention speech offered little-to-no policy details and relied heavily on moving rhetoric around the central narrative of that Senator's campaign, his experience as a POW. So after spooking Obama into giving a relatively tame address and thus squander the biggest mass audience he was ever going to get, McCain stepped right in and gave that audience what it really wanted: a celebrity.

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Liar!

Back in June, I read this op-ed in the New York Times. It contains the very juicy claim that "Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often remember it as true."

The rest of the piece explains how our brains remember things. In short, the human brain does not simply store facts like a computer hard drive. Instead, facts are initially stored in the hippocampus, but then every time we remember those facts, our brain processes and restores them all over again.

In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don't remember how you learned it.

So if a piece of information--say, that Sarah Palin killed the Bridge to Nowhere project--is initially stored as true, subsequent revelations that the information is not true have to work twice as hard to win your brain's ultimate allegiance. Point/counterpoint doesn't work with this stuff. It needs to be more like point/COUNTERPOINT or point/COUNTERPOINTCOUNTERPOINTCOUNTERPOINTCOUNTERPOINT.

You get the idea. And even then there are no guarantees.

Which is what allowed Governor Palin to repeat the claim about the bridge last week during her speech at the Republican National Convention. Even though the previous week had seen the claim thoroughly debunked, the chance to seed such a symbolic idea in the brains of millions of voters was too good to pass up.

Subsequent fact-checks and Daily Show riffs will only raise the indignation of those who knew it to be a misstatement to begin with. Because Palin's intended audience, for whom she had already, in a span of only days, become an emblematic locale for their emotional commitment, has now had that claim deposited in their brain as a fact not once, not twice, but multiple times.

And every time they recall it, their brain processes it as a "fact" one more time, and her symbolic standing as a "maverick" is further and further cemented.

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