Right Wing Fabulism

I don’t usually read the Huffington Post, but today I came across two separate links from separate sources that led back to it, and both were pretty interesting. I mentioned the first one, about a re-brewing political scandal, in the post below. This link led me back to the HuffPost without my ever intending to go there. But after reading it, I was moved to write again.

Some of you may recall that I wrote a while back, condemning pretty harshly the confabulations of Scott Beauchamp, The New Republic‘s “Baghdad Diarist” who seems to have fabricated stories about American soldiers engaged in shocking misconduct while serving in Iraq. Beauchamp’s stories were particularly damaging because, unfortunately, some of our soldiers have acquitted themselves dishonorably and innocent people have been hurt and killed as a result. (The Marine in question in the linked article steadfastly insists he is innocent of any wrongdoing, and the military equivalent of an indictment came down only for negligent homicide, not for murder just last month, so it would seem that some of the initial reporting on that incident was exaggerated, too, or at least gave an exaggerated gloss on the facts.)

But I’m not writing about soldiers committing crimes or otherwise doing irresponsible things in war zones. I’m writing about new media correspondents making stuff up, either out of whole cloth or embellishing stories to the point that they stop resembling reality. It looks like the right-wing new media is not immune to this problem, and I find myself as repelled by it when it happens on the right as when it happened on the left.

So, rather convincingly, a left-wing fact-checker has determined that a mercenary-journalist writing for National Review Online has apparently manufactured a bunch of stuff, too. He more or less admits his embellishment and his inability to “source” his reporting, which is a departure from The New Republic‘s insistence that they were reporting the truth for eight months after the rest of the world figured out the guy’s pants were on fire, as well as its denial that the fact that the correspondent’s wife was also his in-house fact-checker created a significant journalistic conflict of interest.

National Review is free from those collateral problems (it may have a different sort of collateral problem, to wit, an editor’s attributing to Arabs a racial characteristic of veracity deficiency, which is a stone National Review ought not to be picking up, much less throwing, right about now), but the basic one — it is publishing stuff that is not necessarily “true” so much as “made up out of whole cloth” — remains. Their correspondent draws a distinction between commentary and opinion on the one hand, and reporting facts in an original format on the other, and he is right to point out that blogging, at least the way it’s done at the moment, does not always distinguish between the two.

The big lesson: don’t believe everything you read on the internet; it often pays to look deeper. Sadly, we can no longer even rely on the fact that journalists have editors who care about reporting the truth, and who fear defamation lawsuits, will tell us the truth since that hasn’t slowed down unscrupulous journalists as far up the food chain as the New York Times. Now, I’m going to have to look just a little bit deeper into what was going on in the post below.

If truth ceases to have meaning, if people of different political opinions can perceive different realities, if one’s opinion creates one’s facts as opposed to simply coloring one’s impressions of them, that’s a big problem. People who make decisions based on their subjective realities nevertheless have an impact on the real, objective reality, the one that we all share. And when we can’t see things with our own eyes and know them from personal experience, we have to rely on what others learn and tell us. When those people don’t tell us the truth, all sorts of unintended consequences, rarely good ones, start to kick in.