Obama Appearance on "Funny or Die."

The big news today is President Barack Obama's appearance on comedian Zach Galifianakis's mock interview program "Between Two Ferns" on the "Funny or Die" site.  The President and the comic trade barbs, with Galifianakis of the "Hangover" movies adopting his customary slouching, passive-aggressive style and the Prez dishing it right back at him.  The humorous six-and-a-half-minute spot has recorded six million hits in less than a day.

The President does have a message to deliver in the midst of the wit, and the viral nature of how the piece has taken off has confirmed the genius of choosing this medium to reach the young adult demographic. 

See the video here, and prepare to laugh!

News Article Misleads

I saw a news story about this year's national retail Christmas sales today, and it really bothered me.  It seems like it's getting harder and harder to find news stories that are just that--news stories--rather than opinion pieces in the guise of news, or perhaps news stories, but, as in this case, presented in a slanted way that skews the meaning in a misleading direction.

The story that got my goat this morning was by Mae Anderson and Candice Choi of the Associated Press.  It paints a bleak picture of anemic holiday sales and a commercial disaster for retailers this Christmas season.  It starts, "Bargain-hungry Americans will need to go on a post-Christmas spending binge to salvage this holiday shopping season."  My goodness, that's terrible.  And I had been hearing before Christmas that things were looking good!  The article goes on, "...U.S. holiday sales so far this year have been the weakest since 2008, when the nation was in deep recession."  

After reading this I was wondering how much sales had dropped compared to last year.  So, after the distressing opening about merchants needing salvation and sales being weak, then slogging through several individual examples of shoppers in the stores after Christmas looking for deep discounts, I finally got to paragraph fourteen.  It states, "So far, holiday sales of electronics, clothing, jewelry and home goods in the two months before Christmas increased 0.7 percent compared with last year, according to the MasterCard Advisors SpendingPulse report." 

What, sales increased?  As in, they sold more this year than last?  Objectively, that is not weak or worse.  It is better.  And what is more, the report is incomplete, with more data apparently still to come in.  In paragraph eighteen we read, "The National Retail Federation, the nation's largest retail trade group, said Wednesday that it's sticking to its forecast for total sales for November and December to be up 4.1 percent to $586.1 billion this year."  So, despite the gloom and doom opening, we find out that sales are up, not down, and that the industry itself remains optimistic that when the final figures come in they will be much better yet.

So what on earth were the authors talking about?  Farther into paragraph eighteen they shed some light on this by writing, "That's more than a percentage point lower than the growth in each of the past two years, and the smallest increase since 2009 when sales were up just 0.3 percent." 

Now we see.  Instead of writing that Christmas sales in 2012 continued the upward trend of the past three years, though at a slower rate than the past two, which would have been accurate, we are told that business is dire and can only be "salvaged" by a last-minute "binge."  Terms like "salvaged" and "binge" conjure up images of disaster and manic behavior, a perfect picture of desperation before an impending calamity, rather than ongoing growth at a marginally lower level than the last couple of holiday seasons.

As an AP story, the item was picked up by ABC News and major papers across the country such as the San Francisco Chronicle, Denver Post and Houston Chronicle.  When consumers turn to news sources they need to be able to depend on unbiased information.  When they get slant in the guise of information, they are savvy enough to recognize that for what it is.  The more this happens the more it breeds cynicism among the public about the news in general.  Without accepted facts rational civic debate is impossible.  Opinion and analysis pieces have their places.  This blog is certainly one, for instance.  And like it, they need to be clearly labelled as such.  

History: You Can't Make It Up As You Go Along

"He who controls the past controls the future." So wrote George Orwell, the English novelist whose 1984 and Animal Farm stand as two of the twentieth century's great warnings about the power and danger of intentional untruth in the hands of propagandists.

Orwell's quote well encapsulates the issue at stake this month when the Texas State Board of Education (SBOE) votes on what to recommend in its curriculum guidelines. "A near majority" of the 15-member elected SBOE is, according to Newsweek, "locked in a hyperconservative embrace, aligned as a bloc to promote a social-issues-centric view of the world." The Board's decisions have a determinative influence on what is written into textbooks supplied to the second largest education system in the country, and a major influence on smaller states who then often have to choose from among the publisher's selections approved by SBOE.

In short, the conservative bloc on SBOE is bent on rewriting history to conform to their preconceived political and ideological views. In pursuit of this goal they are engaging in unfounded revisionism of the historical facts. They feel that if they can put words into the mouths of the Founding Fathers, for example, they can legitimize their current political and societal views. This goes hand in hand with other conservative efforts to overturn settled historical fact in the service of partisan ideology. As Steven Thomma recently reported for the McClatchy papers:

The right is rewriting history. The most ballyhooed effort is underway in Texas, where conservatives have pushed the state school board to rewrite the guidelines, downplaying Thomas Jefferson in one high school course, playing up such conservatives as Phyllis Schlafly and the Heritage Foundation and challenging the idea that the Founding Fathers wanted to
separate church and state.

The Jamestown settlers? Socialists. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton? Ill-informed professors made up all that bunk about him advocating a strong central government. Theodore Roosevelt? Another socialist. Franklin D. Roosevelt? Not only did he not end the Great Depression, he created it.

As if these entirely fallacious assertions were not enough, among other changes recommended by the conservative bloc are chopping Thurgood Marshall and Cesar Chavez from the history book and replacing them with the inventor of the yo-yo, and giving a favorable gloss to the reputation of Joseph McCarthy. There are not only the expected plans to give "creationism" equal footing with evolution, but also, as member Don McLeroy puts it, to inculcate the view that America is "not only unique but superior...divinely ordained to lead the world to betterment."

When conjoined to the erroneous historical pronouncements of well-known spokespeople like Fox personality Glenn Beck, one-time Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann, it is apparent a widespread effort is underway to control current political debate by inventing a set of non-existent historical precedents, to expunge inconvenient facts from the record. If this makes headway, the very bedrock upon which opinion is formed in a democratic republic will have been subverted. Here the reality-based folks in media, academics and society at large must be uncompromising in drawing the line. As was perhaps best expressed in a quote attributed to the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts."

Ominous Decision: What to Do

Good contributions by readers have moved me to revisit yesterday's topic. Webfoot pointed out the lack of outcry over "activist judges" overturning long precedent for an ideological purpose. Don voiced a principle that has been in my mind too for quite awhile: that if union members are allowed to refuse to pay dues that go to political purposes should not corporate shareholders and customers be given equal consideration concerning such matters as dividends and prices?

Miriam connects us with a good source and a way to start taking action. See American University Professor of Constitutional Law Jamin Raskin explain the principles at stake in Thursday's Supreme Court decision to allow corporations to intervene in the political process with unlimited funds--and what we can do about it. To see the four-minute presentation click here.

Ominous Decision

The recent Supreme Court ruling on corporations, political advertising and free speech is highly troubling. Overturning decades of precedent and the McCain-Feingold law, the court in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission decided that corporations can spend unlimited amounts of funds for speech in favor or opposition to political candidates and may do so at any time, overturning McCain-Feingold's previous 30-day before an election rule. The 5-4 decision split along familiar lines, with conservatives in the majority and liberals in dissent.

Many rulings in the past have affirmed the ability to restrict money as opposed to speech. This ruling appears to equate the two. Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion also seems to consider corporations people, saying, "By taking the right to speech from some and giving it to others, the government deprives the disadvantaged person or class of the right to use speech..." The language thereby puts a corporate entity in the same legal class as a human person. Presumably this applies even if the corporation is primarily owned by foreign investors such as BP or even a foreign government, as with many Chinese companies. That's a cheery thought. Imagine Chinese Communist front corporations given unlimited power to run advertising for U.S. politicians who support their agendas and unlimited funds to slam those with whom they disagree.

The decision does uphold the principle of requiring the financial backers to identify themselves. But I wonder whether the ads will have to say, "Paid for by Exxon Corporation" or can run as many now do as sponsored by, "Citizens for a Better Tomorrow" or some other such innocuous-sounding group serving as cover for the real backers.

Of course the ruling will increase even further the power and influence of corporate interests over the political process. Corporate resources dwarf those of unions. But I would expect first the mud to come from activist groups like the Swift Boaters.

In a best case scenario there could be a backlash against too much corporate interference and manipulation, but recent history offers little encouragement to believe in that scenario. In a worst case scenario the actual public interest could become practically without advocacy in the major media. President Obama warns it could lead to a "stampede" of special interest government and is calling on Congress to pass some new restrictions. Of course he is right but it is hard to see that they can do much good other than to require the utmost transparency of commercial funding sources.

If not overturned in the future this further unleashing of corporate power could have far-reaching and extremely pernicious effects on the fabric of American democracy. Hopefully there will be a proliferation of media-monitoring groups like Accuracy in Media to at least try to keep the public informed about who is trying to influence them and why.

More on Irrational Disbelief

Last time we looked at "manufactured doubt," manipulative advertising campaigns designed to make people skeptical of the findings of science. They are often mounted to protect the interests of industries whose products or practices are threats to people's health or safety, such as the campaigns run for the tobacco, asbestos and coal industries. This is one reason it is often difficult to secure popular consensus when scientific consensus is more or less settled.

But other reasons lie within the minds of the target public itself. One main reason is denial. There is a tendency not to want to believe bad news, particularly if it means one needs to change one's behavior to address the problem. "Temporal relativism" is another. This relates to personal perspective and the slowness with which things may seem to change to the anecdotal observer. A gradual decline may not seem so noticeable within the time frame a person is paying attention to something. For instance, there were an estimated 450,000 lions in the wild in Africa in 1950. There are fewer than 30,000 now. Someone who has been going to Africa only in the past 10 years may not see the extent of the problem.

Anti-intellectualism is another reason. America seems particularly cursed among advanced nations in the high percentage of its populace who are extremely skeptical of the scientific method and quantitative analysis. The society is really rather schizophrenic in this regard. On the one hand we led the space, computer and genetic revolutions and on the other we have a higher percentage than other advanced nations of people who feel the earth is only 6,000 years old. This goes back to an early nineteenth century anti-aristocratic bent captured by Andrew Jackson. After him for the next few decades you had better have been born in a log cabin and display the "common touch" if you wanted to get elected president. It largely explains the appeal of counterfactual and even defiantly illogical figures like Sarah Palin today. An aura of authentic simplicity equates to credibility with this group.

America's "culture wars" have generalized the divide. Without a tradition of familiarity with classical education any more, figures like St. Thomas Aquinas, who sough to bridge faith and reason, are largely unknown in this country. Instead, science and adherence to its findings are often dismissed as threats to religion among traditional culturists. It need not be so. The Roman Catholic Church, since an encyclical by Pope John Paul II in 1996, is now tacitly in agreement with the idea of human evolution, for example.

Finally, there is the phenomenon George Lakoff identified as "frames." Click on the link to see a five-minute discussion from Lakoff himself. The writer of the incisive books "Don't Think of an Elephant" and "Moral Politics" posits a conservative frame of reference that cannot, for example, conceive of societal factors for behavior, such as a link between poverty and crime, but must ascribe all behaviors to individual choices, and thus cannot accept the efficacy of "social programs," no matter what statistical data is attached to them. These causes are also important factors in explaining why fact, science , data and even self-interest are frequently rejected in favor of irrational disbelief.

Junk Science: Manufactured Doubt

Have you ever wondered why it is that substantial blocs of people refuse to believe certain things, even after they have been considered "proven" by the findings of science? Galileo, for instance, was put on trial in 1632 for teaching the heliocentric (sun-centered) doctrine 89 years after Copernicus convincingly first proposed it and 22 years after his own telescopic observations confirmed it. In the nineteenth century Joseph Lister had great difficulty securing acceptance of the principle of antiseptic surgery and the need for surgeons to wash and disinfect their hands and instruments. For much of the twentieth, many Americans clung to the unfounded view that women and African-Americans lagged behind white men in intelligence.

More recently we have seen how persistent has been popular opposition to a range of questions regarded as conclusively settled by the overwhelming opinion of the scientific community. Among these stand such precepts as biological evolution by natural selection, the futility of "abstinence only" sex education and the occurrence of global warming as a result of human activity. Regardless of the findings of research, millions seem steadfastly wedded to debunked ideas. Why is this so?

In this piece I'll link you to an excellent synopsis showing one facet of the reason, the existence of well-funded disinformation campaigns by special interests who stand to lose a great deal of money if the facts of science are heeded. In a future issue I'll explore other attitudinal and psychological reasons.

But today I'd like to introduce you to the "Manufactured Doubt Industry," a thriving subset of the public relations or advertising industry. Pioneered by the tobacco industry campaign directed by the firm Hill and Knowlton beginning in 1954, this very company went on to sow obfuscation and delay on behalf of cancer-causing asbestos and ozone-layer destroying chlorofluorocarbons. All succeeded in delaying the implementation of urgently needed protections by many years.

Then, beginning in 1988, the fossil fuel industry followed up the strategies developed by Hill and Knowlton in a now twenty-year-old campaign to pull the wool over gullible eyes in order to limit regulation of the effects their products are having on earth's climate and web of life. For an eye-opening insight, read the well-written and researched article "The Manufactured Doubt Industry and the Hacked Email Controversy" by Jeff Masters in "Common Dreams" here.

For a preview, the basic steps of disinformation used in "manufacturing doubt" are included in this article on the ozone hole issue. It has been called the standard package of tricks. It remains disappointing that the media too often fails to differentiate between the objectivity of legitimate peer-reviewed scientific publications on the one hand and reports by in-house shills and thinks tanks in the pay of industry such as the Science and Environmental Policy Project on the other. But now you know better.

ABC Debate an Insult

The Presidential Debate moderated on ABC last Wednesday by Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos was a disgrace. Rather than concentrating on issues of substance the two "newsmen" spent the first 50 minutes on tabloid-calibre gaffe, gotcha and guilt by association bunkum. Their evident assumption that this is the kind of examination the American people want of their next potential leader is an insult not only to the intelligence of the American voter but to the democratic process itself.

There's no need to worry about Iraq. It's more important to know why Barack Obama doesn't wear a toy American flag on the lapel of his suit jacket.

Kids die because they don't have medical coverage. So what? What we really need to hear is a discussion about quotes from retired preachers from seven years ago.

Should we attack Iran next? Why would anyone care? It is more relevant to talk about how much danger Hillary Clinton faced in Bosnia thirteen years ago.

We are in a recession, gas is $3.69 a gallon, two million people face foreclosure, and with these conditions afoot the taxpayers are getting tagged for $30 billion to bail out hedge fund managers. Our journalistic whiz kids want to know how, under such circumstances, a candidate could be so "out of touch" as to dare suggest people might be bitter about the economy.

What planet are these political "experts" from? Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to ask what swamp they just crawled out of. It is hard to see how much lower this race to the bottom of infotainment can go.

Such is the level of public discourse fostered by our learned cognoscenti. This kind of stupidity will be discussed in the history classes of the future as merely one more indicator of the pathetic decline of a once-promising country.