Often poll results are themselves misleadingly reported. In October 2006, Newsweek found that a majority of Americans wanted President Bush impeached. While other pollsters had found the same thing, this news had not made it into any headline, and it never would. Newsweek buried the finding in an article about other poll results and reported it as follows:
"Other parts of a potential Democratic agenda receive less support, especially calls to impeach Bush: 47 percent of Democrats say that should be a "top priority," but only 28 percent of all Americans say it should be, 23 percent say it should be a lower priority and nearly half, 44 percent, say it should not be done. (Five percent of Republicans say it should be a top priority and 15 percent of Republicans say it should be a lower priority; 78 percent oppose impeachment.)"
Who could read that and discover that a majority of Americans wanted Bush impeached? It says it, if you look closely enough, but you almost need a course in deciphering Newspeak.
After President Obama spoke from the Oval Office about the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan on August 31, 2010, Calvin Woodward and Robert Burns of the Associated Press published an article called "FACT CHECK: Is Iraq combat really over for US?" which included some facts of its own that were in dire need of checking. Woodward and Burns challenged the basic pretense that the "combat mission" was over, noting that "Peril remains for the tens of thousands of U.S. troops still in Iraq, who are likely if not certain to engage violent foes." But the authors failed to mention the mercenaries and contractors that were also in Iraq in large numbers. The authors maintained that Obama's claim to have met his responsibilities was debatable. They did not, however, consider the United States' legal or moral responsibilities to cease, desist, confess, and make reparations.
The reporters claimed that Iraq "is expected" to "need" the U.S. military for years. But the passive voice allowed them to avoid stating who was doing this expecting. In fact, the treaty that President Obama said he would comply with requires the removal of all U.S. forces by the end of 2011. There's a loophole for non-Department of "Defense" forces, such as those employed by the so-called State Department. There's no loophole for the military, no matter who expects one.
The AP fact checkers also claimed that Obama had opposed the War on Iraq from the start, failing to mention that he funded it repeatedly as a senator and insisted on continuing it as a president. Remarkably, in his speech, Obama mentioned the negative impact of the financial cost of wars, and the AP had this to say:
". . . the costly Iraq and Afghanistan wars have contributed to the nation's budget deficit -- but not by as much as Obama suggests. The current annual deficit is now an estimated $1.5 trillion. But as recently as 2007, the budget deficit was just $161.5 billion. And that was years after war expenses were in place for both the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts. Most of the current deficit is due to the longest recession since the 1930s. . . ."
War expenses "were in place?" Woodward and Burns mean to say that the wars were already draining hundreds of billions of dollars each year, but what a terrible way to say it! The fact that we've wasted such sums in one year in no way lessens the impact of doing so again in the next. And doing so is not "in place." It is a choice that must be made each time by Congress, even if Congress always makes the same choice.
Shifting the blame for budget deficits to the recession is also a bit slippery, since war and military spending, and their redirection of funds away from more useful areas, have no doubt contributed to causing the recession. The AP noted that Obama had at one point promised to withdraw all troops in 2009 and had frequently promised to withdraw "combat troops" within 16 months -- "a promise essentially kept." Actually, Obama's quick promise at rally after rally had been to make ending the war the first thing he did, and this speech (the one being fact-checked on August 31, 2010, by the Associated Press) came after 19 months, not 16, of Obama's presidency. Woodward and Burns also played along with the myth of the surge -- on which see chapter nine.
I don't mean to knock the novel idea of fact checking. The Associated Press should be applauded for trying at all. We just need someone to fact check the fact checkers.
GOOD LIES NEVER DIE, THEY JUST FADE AWAY
Congress members behave as if once a war has begun, they must fund it forever. Similarly, many Americans behave as if once a war lie has been given credence, it must be believed forever. Even once lies are thoroughly exposed as lies and a majority of Americans comes to believe a war was based on lies, as happened with Iraq, a significant minority goes right on believing the falsehoods. I know from personal experience, and imagine you do too, that presenting some people with facts has absolutely no impact. They simply dismiss the facts or explain them away, their goal clearly being to hang onto their beliefs, not to believe what's actually true.
Jacques Ellul may have figured this out by 1965, when he wrote: "He who acts in obedience to propaganda can never go back. He is now obliged to believe in that propaganda because of his past action." Some recent studies suggest that this is a widespread phenomenon. In March 2010, Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler reported on research they had done in 2005 and 2006. They considered the fact that many Americans "failed to accept or did not ï nd out that WMD were never found" in Iraq, and the possibility that "journalists failed to adequately fact-check Bush administration statements suggesting the U.S. had found WMD in Iraq." The researchers presented people with news articles correcting their misunderstanding. They found that among those who placed themselves to the right of center politically, exposure to the correction made them more likely to stick to their false belief.
In 2005, Nyhan and Reifler found this result among individuals on the right, but by 2006 it was only those who considered Iraq the most important issue facing the country who refused to have their erroneous beliefs corrected by the facts. The researchers hypothesize, reasonably enough, that the waning emphasis on Iraq WMDs in the media by 2006 and the Washington elite's shift to other justifications for the war may have caused some people to attach less importance to clinging to their erroneous beliefs, even though they would have insisted they were true a year earlier. These individuals had not necessarily dropped their belief that the war was a good thing, just their belief that the most prominent original justification for it was factual. Likewise, they had not necessarily begun to doubt the sincerity of those who had lied to them, just the accuracy of what had been claimed. But how can we understand those who became more likely to believe a falsehood when their mistake was shown to them? Presumably they experience a combination of feeling threatened by the new information and distrusting the source of the written article containing the facts. Other studies have found that when an instructor orally, directly, and in an interactive manner confronts people with correct information they tend to accept it.
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