John Taylor: America’s Information Crisis
The pass-the-Palin-baby story, unworthily amplified by Andrew Sullivan yesterday before being squashed by the truth this morning, should help Republicans understand the frustration that the Obama family must feel about the persistent falsehoods repeated about them. In retrospect, it’s not enough to ignore books such as Jerome R. Corsi’s Obama Nation. Anyone who wants our politics to be as decent as our country should denounce it and also question Simon & Schuster’s decision to publish it.
But can our politics ever be decent? Far left and right exhibit deep veins of anger, resentment, and conspiracy-mindedness that are a permanent source of America’s political energy. An upstanding McCain tactician will say about Corsi’s book that while he wouldn’t buy it, he’ll take the votes of those who do. Ditto Sen. Obama and the fringe left. In divisive times the ends of the scale are especially important to politicians’ balancing acts.
And thanks to the new media, the nut case gallery has never been so noisy. These days everybody with a blog can toot their horn, even we unreconstructed Nixonites. Conservatives may have been the first to realize that the blogosphere, like talk radio, was a way around the MSM, but soon everybody was doing it. Sometimes (perhaps less often than bloggers like to think) these e-vangelists deserve praise for poking a story through the big media’s thick epidermis. Other times, poor or nonexistent sourcing by outlets whose sole aim is to achieve a political outcome ends up fooling unsuspecting readers. That’s what those who manufactured the story about Trig, his mother, and his sister hoped to accomplish this weekend. While they presumably wanted to force Gov. Palin off the ticket, all they did was force the 17-year-old child they’d so ruthlessly attacked to go public with the truth about her pregnancy.
Friends say that I’m naive about the essential amorality of politics. They say the relative civility of political discourse thinly disguises a raw, vengeful grasping for influence, leverage, and power that’s as ancient and abiding as human civilization. After all, it’s often not what’s true; it’s what sticks. Richard Nixon learned this lesson of a political lifetime while running for VP in 1952. He had an audited fund for political expenses just like Democratic Presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson’s. But a left-wing newspaper accused RN of corruption, not Stevenson, and so an undeserved reputation for financial impropriety clung to RN. It wasn’t right, and it wasn’t fair. It was the way the game was played, and as Dr. Corsi and Obama’s blogging friends have shown, it still is.
But if American society has always spawned fringe movements and publications, until recently they weren’t a click away from every reader in the land. Until recently, the newspaper industry wasn’t dying. There’s something to say for those who, irrespective of the unavoidable influence on their work of their own political views, are by and large dedicated not to promoting them but reporting the news. Someday there may be web sites we can to go to for such discerningly reported stories we can really trust.
To be fair, these sites do exist. The problem is that they belong to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other great newspapers. The reporting we read there is mostly paid for by the advertising in the newspapers fewer and fewer of us are buying. This Labor Day, what kept the libel about the Palin family from spreading further than it did was the professionalism of influential MSM reporters and editors who wouldn’t dream of publishing it without independent confirmation. They were similarly careful about the content of Corsi’s book. With fewer young people reading newspapers, with people developing the fanciful impression that well-reported content should be free, and with the rise of the influence of outlets where reporting of any kind takes a back seat to opining and spinning, the U.S. may be heading into an information crisis — too much, and none of it very good.