posted
FactCheck.org is growing! Hopefully, so is the number of Americans who are trying to keep themselves informed during the election season!
-------- FactCheck Upgrades Service
10.08.2004
Well, we never expected that to happen! As nearly everybody now knows, Vice President Cheney's reference to "factcheck.com" at the debate Oct. 5 touched off an avalanche of publicity and new visitors to our site. Our University of Pennsylvania server was overwhelmed. The number of visitors during the 24 hours after the debate reached five times our previous peak volume, and we have no idea how many tried to get on the site and failed. We have now contracted with Boot Networks, a California company, to handle the hosting of FactCheck.org. The switchover began Thursday, Oct. 7. The content of the site will of course remain under the control of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, as always.
Visitors should notice that pages now load much more quickly. We are assured that visitors should be able to reach the site even at times of unusually high volume.
However, some features will be unavailable for a time. The "search" function is temporarily disabled, as is the "e-mail to a friend" feature. Streaming video of TV ads is not available. We are working to restore all these features as quickly as possible. In the meantime, our core content should be fully available.
We apologize for any inconvenience, and we thank you for your patience as we work through these "growing pains."
--Brooks Jackson Director, FactCheck.org ---------
quote:Cheney got our domain name wrong -- calling us "FactCheck.com" -- and wrongly implied that we had rebutted allegations Edwards was making about what Cheney had done as chief executive officer of Halliburton.
In fact, we did post an article pointing out that Cheney hasn't profited personally while in office from Halliburton's Iraq contracts, as falsely implied by a Kerry TV ad. But Edwards was talking about Cheney's responsibility for earlier Halliburton troubles. And in fact, Edwards was mostly right.
posted
You're both right. And... sorry if the topic heading appears partisan. That wasn't my intent (in fact, my congratulatory remark to Cheney was supposed to be sarcastic in light of his misreferencing the domain name). But, my intent wasn't to support Edwards, either. The real winner here is the American people, who are finding themselves more and more in the very uncomfortable position of either A) believing what their party tells them is the truth, or B) spending hours of their time reading up on what the real facts are. Remember, both sides are guilty of twisting the truth. That's the beauty of websites like FactCheck and Spinsanity!
I'm not sure it should be considered a victory for America that we can't trust any of our candidates, and have to go to internet websites to find out how they've misled us.
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posted
Or that the news media is not reliable either....It's the price of freedom without responsibilities...
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posted
Yes, unequivocally, score 1 for America. Anything that underlines a serious problem in our system of "freedom without responsibility" as Chad puts it is a major step forward for the American people. The first step to solving a problem is admitting there's a problem. Our beloved news organizations in this country have yet to give this problem the brevity it deserves. Dan Rather apologized for his irresponsible and unethical behavior, but what's been done about it? Has anything changed? Isn't CBS still just as liberal now as it was before? Isn't Fox News still just as conservative? How can we trust our media? What's the use of the First Amendment if we can't even believe those we entrust with the unbiased reporting of facts?
I consider it one of the most serious problems the world faces today. Hate to sound cliche, but it's still in our nature as human beings to believe and/or be influeced by propoganda, despite all our technological and cultural progress. If political parties can influence news coverage, how far off are we from state-controlled media?
posted
We are in the middle of an information revolution right now.
There are NO monopolies on information anymore. Information and misinformation are easily and readily accessible.
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posted
The American people aren't a passive party in being lied to and deceived. They have accepted being lied to and decption by the very people that they then turn around and support. The freedom without responsibility falls onto their shoulders at least as much as it does onto the people who are deceiving them. A working democracy, like most other worthwhile things, is a difficult path to tread.
Change isn't going to happen until the American people choose the harder path. We didn't need a website to let us know that our politicians were dishonest and dishonorable. All FactCheck does is point out specific lies and deceptions. It doesn't give people the will to stand up and say that they aren't going to take it anymore. Nor does it fill the pressing need for people to have positive information (i.e. to actually know something about the matters the politicians are talking about) instead of just knowing that these politicians are lying to us.
edit: You can lie with statistics, but only to people who are unwilling to put in the effort to learn about statistics and apply what they know to what you've said. It's very difficult to lie to people who have worked to know what you're talking about and are unwilling to accept easy answers.
posted
Exactly! Couple the growing apathy in this country with disturbing things like the 527 loophole and ineffective justice system who refuses to hold politicians legally responsible for checking the facts before running an ad campaign, and pretty soon you'll have a populace of puppets allowing themselves to be controlled by whoever's got the largest purse strings. FactCheck.org is a tool for the solution, not the solution itself. It angers me to be lied to, but I'll only find out I'm being lied to if I first find the facts.
posted
I think this shows that stupid people will continue to blindly accept lies (which is almost always the case) and intelligence people will weigh and judge the information they receive and investigate it and it's applications to them.
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This is a weird clause. I would have ended with "its implications." An application is something you use if you already have an idea, a plan, and you are using to this fact to apply your idea. Whereas the an implication is something revealed in the fact, through thinking about the fact. It is not something useful, but rather something that calls for more questions.
The question is, "Is it more appropriate to comb for facts to apply, or to read for to see what sense is already there or arises from the text?"
One person is looking for a nugget that agrees with a prior idea, the other actually paying attention to what the text says.
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And yes, I do think that this difference is where we screw up, again and again in foreign policy in general and Iraq in particular. We spent so much time looking for a fact to apply to our argument that we didn't take the time or expend the effort to look at the situation that was already there.
It's also the problem with the NCLB act, and just about any act of public or private policy which ignores the sense of what is before you, in the name of using it to bolster some rule.
quote:You can lie with statistics, but only to people who are unwilling to put in the effort to learn about statistics and apply what they know to what you've said. It's very difficult to lie to people who have worked to know what you're talking about and are unwilling to accept easy answers.
This isn't true - or at least, I don't believe there are any people I've met who could not be fooled with the right statistics. Not only do you have to do the research to see if the statistics are true, but you also need to do the research to find out if there are any other conflicting statistics, AND you need to understand the significance of thos statistics, the way in which they are being used, and whether or not they justify whatever is being concluded from them. Few people have the time for this. And even if you DO have the time, even then it's not certain you'll be able to see whether facts are being used correctly. There are many issues where even Phd-educated experts disagree on whether a given statistic validates a conclusion or not! Sometimes it takes years even for academia to figure out statistical lies.
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posted
Def-Jam, FactCheck does one thing. It provides negative information. i.e. He said this and it is not true. The thing is, we've known that our leaders, even those that we support, have been doing this for a long time, in both general and specific instances. The problem was that we supported them anyway. The American people's problem isn't that they were being lied to. It's that they were willing to be lied to and often even actively aid people in deceiving them.
posted
Squicky, I agree with you that it's always been this way, but I feel that the stakes are just too high nowadays to sit idly back and say "Oh well, that's just the way it goes". I know I'm not proposing any solutions to fix the way we govern ourselves. It's beyond me. I'm just an idealist who believes the more the public is informed, the better. And before FactCheck.org, where else could we have gone to quickly discern the facts behind a lie?
[Edited for the more the grammar which was not here earlier in]
posted
Yeah, I agree that it's an important tool. My point is that, it doesn't really matter what tools we have at our disposal if people don't have the motivation to put them to good use.
When no one is saying anything that is important and true and therefore dangerous, you don't need to restrict people's freedom of speech.
This is the same problem that Diderot ran into. It's very important to make information as accessible and analyzable as possible, but that's only one step and a relatively small one at that. The biggest (and perhaps sufficient) step is to have people who have a strong dedication to learning and to the truth.
The internet represents a quantam leap forward in potentials for information desemination. And, in some ways, it's being used that way, but that's pretty darn rare. Even before the internet and FactCheck, Americans had the best access to information resources of any people ever in history. And yet politicians win office by playing to the lowest common denominator, advertisers use pretty transparent tricks and proft by it, and various others fool most of the people most of the time.
FactCheck and the like represent potential victories, but the real battle is, as it has always been, for a informed, engaged, and above all mature populace. I guess my point was that having a place to check on the veracity of politicians statements doesn't really score one for the America public, because large parts of the American public prefer the state of being lied to rather than what they would have to do for this not to happen. It's a point for some idealized form of the American public that are oppressed against their will, but Americans are among the less oppressed, most potentially empowered, and have the highest potential for being able to discern lies of any people ever.
There was a gatorade commercial that I brought up before that started out with a young girl in soccer gear thanking Mia Hamm for "opening the door". The big problem I had with this is that, there were no doors keeping this girl from playing soccor. No one would stone her or ostracize her or in any way force her not to play. She could have chosen to play at any time. The "door" holding her back was that there wasn't a celebrity telling her that she should do it. Compared to what other little girls have to go through to do things like, I don't know, read, claiming that the were major obstacles in her path is pretty ridiculous.
However, because that's the attitude that we have, there was actually something keeping that girl and thousands like her from playing soccer. Right now, they had a celebrity to tell them to play soccer, so they did and found that they really enjoyed it. However, having the celebrity tell them to do this or not wasn't the problem, or was a relatively minor one. The big problem was the attitude that not having a celebrity telling them to do it constituted a barrier keeping them from doing it. If we could break down that idea and stomp on it and throw it in the trash where it belongs, we'd have a healthier society and a lot more little girls playing sports and, heaven forbid, maybe even thinking for themselves.
Likewise with the FactCheck thing, a mature populace wouldn't need FactCheck to improve the political situation and an immature one isn't likely going to benefit greatly from it. I have a big problem with that attitude that it's external things like the lack of places like FactCheck where people can go that it causing the problems in our political culture. People in Iraq and Afghanistan and China and The Sudan and hundreds of other places are victims. The American people are not, except by their own choice and inaction.
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If I sound like I'm attacking you here, or being mean, it's really not my intent. I think you're pretty cool beans.
posted
Mr. Squicky is right. You could be the most knowledgable person in the world, but if you don't ever DO something with that knowledge, what good it is to you?
Having the map to the treasure and actually having the treasure are two different things.
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posted
Squick, do you think that at any time in history there has ever been a populace where the majority of people meet your criteria for maturity? If not, do you think it's at all likely or even possible that there ever will be?
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posted
sax, No I really doubt that there was. I've certainly never come across signs of it. As for whether or not it's possible and what we can do to achieve it, that's pretty much what my life's work is about. I think that it's possible. Not only are the steps relatively basic, but being a mature person is actually just all around better. And, the way I look at it, if I'm wasting my time pursuing this, then anything else I could pursue would be at least as big a waste of time.
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posted
Furthermore, how much time and effort does it take to become sufficiently well-versed with matters of public policy to be mature? Would that magnitude of time investment negatively impact productivity in other areas? If so, is it more important to be knowledgable or productive?
Edit: That was intended to be posted before your response. By the way, I do apologize if this is coming across as snarky.
Squicky, listen here, you dirty rotten... just joking! You're cool beans, too! I wholly agree with the fact that we need a more mature society who is willing to do the grunge work of fact-finding. But, human nature simply isn't like that. I agree, Chad. People just don't want to know, sometimes they evern prefer to be lied to over the hard work involved in research. Hell, even I prefer it sometimes! The question of stupidity just isn't a factor, it's a question of, do I have the time for this? "It's going to take me weeks to sort all this crap out, and all I want to do when I get home is watch Seinfeld!"
This is why I cite websites like FactCheck.org as a victory... because it gives an apathetic and uncaring person something he/she never had before: a resource for finding any facts they want, quickly and painlessly. That's what I was referring to. Lying and cheating in politics is simply a fact of life. Our politicians aren't any different from the Roman emperors and senators 2000 years ago. But there's a huge difference between an apathetic Roman 2000 years ago and an apathetic American in 2004. Providing quick and easy access to the facts to anyone who wants them is a simple step, yes, but it's a profound one. In a historical sense I'd argue it was an inevitable and natural conclusion to the negative trend of lying in politics, and my hope is that it will grow into something bigger, better, more accessible, and most importantly, popular. Ain't it great?
posted
sax, There are tons of things, many of them reasonably important, that I know bugger all about. This is something that I'll freely admit. Maturity isn't a matter of what exactly you know about a particular subject, but rather one of how you go about determining what is important, how you go about pursuing information about the things that you think are important, and the responsibility you take for your knowledge or lack thereof.
In terms of American political life, I don't think that it is a particulary mature thing to be largely ignorant of public policy, but that's pretty much my opinion. However, the thing that I think is unequivocally immature and very dangerous to boot is the hordes of people who know next to nothing about these matters and yet regard their petty opinions as gospel truth. Or those who are unwilling to admit that their ignorance carries with it responsibility for some pretty dire things.
Edit: A good general rule for me is that I'm more or less passionless when it comes to debate. You don't really have to worry about offending me.
quote:However, the thing that I think is unequivocally immature and very dangerous to boot is the hordes of people who know next to nothing about these matters and yet regard their petty opinions as gospel truth. Or those who are unwilling to admit that their ignorance carries with it responsibility for some pretty dire things.
I buy that. So, would a mature person refrain from voting on ballot measures or voting for candidates about which he doesn't know much?
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posted
Not my place to say. I'm trying to get across that I don't see maturity as associated with any particular set of actions, but instead how you approach these actions and the fact that you are willing to take responsibility for the actions you take and the ones you don't take.
My version of maturity is to reject the validity of the system as it now stands but at the same time acknowledge that it's one of the best we can hope for in the circumstances. To be honest, I don't think that the average "informed" voter differs all that much in terms of important information that they know from the people who vote for whoever their favorite celeb tells them. In terms of the die-hard party people, I don't think you could even really differentiate between the two groups ("Rush/Michael Moore tells me to vote this way").
I try to keep as informed about what I think (And other people whose opinion I trust think) are important in terms of elections and such, but I also don't think that informed voting in our current political climate has any more of an effect than uninformed voting. Change, if it comes, comes largely down extra-political, or at least extra-voting, channels.
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