“[C]an’t be disproved” is the new standard in making salacious rumors into “news”
at the Idaho “Statesman”. Note the scare quotes. There’s nothing even remotely statesmanlike about this piece. Not a shred of varifiable evidence is on offer here.
I am thinking of writing a story about a rumor-mill promoting newspaper whose editors dressed up as Shirly Temple, as she appeared during her child-hood acting days, and payed me $200 each to stick a butt-plug in their asses and spank them with a wooden paddle as they sang “On the Good Ship Lolly-Pop”. The story won’t be even remotely disprovable but that doesn’t appear to be a bar to publication as news. I’ll let my readers decide whether my story is true or not. I haven’t time to fact-check what is unvarifiable and I haven’t the scruples to be even remotely concerned with such quaint notions as truth and facts and the reputations of others. The public, however, has a right to know that the editors of the Idaho “Statesman”, have been accused of engaging in such behavior. If the editors of the “Statesman” dare deny my allegations, I’ll dutifully acknowledge their denials.
December 4th, 2007 at 6:05 am
Craig,
It’s the same standard of proof the White House used for war with Iraq. We can’t prove he has destroyed all his weapons, so we’ll assume he hasn’t even though we can’t prove it. Doesn’t make it right by any means, but it is still the case that the “Statesman” isn’t the only people who are guilty of this.
Also how would you fact check this? You’ve got one person’s word for it, but there’s unlikely to be hard evidence. All you could do is call Sen. Craig and ask if it’s true. He’ll deny it and then it’s ‘he said, she said’. Should the allegations (and that’s what they’re reported as, not facts) not be reported because they are unprovable?
December 4th, 2007 at 9:03 am
Actually, Paul, I would dispute that the Iraq WMD thing was disprovable. Whether Saddam had or had not destroyed all the WMD that we knew he had once had (in no small part because we had sold him the makings of some of it) was completely provable or disprovable — he could have (a) let inspectors into every location they wanted in and been completely transparent to them, or (b) he could have accounted for all those weapons as the UN demanded. He was cagey. He’d let them in most places and then say they couldn’t go here or there, or he’d delay the inspection just long enough that he could have removed the forbidden stuff or periodically throw inspectors out. He ran a shell game for so long, most of the intel agencies of the world that kept their eyes on such things were convinced that he DID have wmd and that includes countries that refused to join us and that actively fought our Iraq invasion.
Also…Saddam has an active nuclear/bio/chemical warfare program or didn’t on the one hand, a Republican politician is gay or isn’t on the other. One has repercussions on a wide, life or death, including genocidal scale, the other merely ruins a man’s reputation and runs him out of Washington — not for having homosexual liaisons, mind you; none of his detractors could give a rip about that per se but for (rumored) having them while denying that he’s gay. It’s the denial that really pisses them off. Several of them come out and say that.
Now we know that Saddam was supporting the “Kill a Kike, Your Family Gets $10,000″ lottery being run by the Palestinian Authority. He actually used chemical weapons against Kurds. Can anyone say that he wouldn’t use weapons that the whole world knew he once had and that he refused to account for and that refugees from his country were telling us he was still producing? Okay, it’s kinda, sorta, the same standard but not really because these things were actually easily disproved by either Saddam coming clean with the paperwork on the destruction of all those weapons he did at one time have or by Saddam not being cagey with inspectors.
This sort of thing is not check-out-able…therefore, I would argue, has no place in a suitable-for-something-other-than-fishwrap newspaper. You really want someone running stories about you like this? Someone you’ve pissed off finding people to make completely uncheckable, salacious rumors to, oh, say, the Mail or some other rag about you? I mean, why not? They wouldn’t be reported as facts but as you-make-up-your-own-mind rumors.
Does this strike you as journalism?
December 4th, 2007 at 9:16 am
And the WMD thing was, finally, disproved thus proving that the “Saddam has WMD” thing was not the same as the “he’s light in the loafers” thing. The one really was disprovable; the other, not.
December 4th, 2007 at 10:24 am
Craig,
I think you might have missed the part where I said it wasn’t right. It was only one sentence in a lot of verbiage. That clearly says that I agree with you about how close this is to proper journalism and the desirability of it.
December 4th, 2007 at 10:37 am
Ah! Sorry. My bad.
December 4th, 2007 at 11:23 am
Since when is “can’t be disproved” a concern of the right? All you guys have are negative arguments. The whole argument for the existence of God is a negative argument. So is the belief that tax cuts raise revenues more than tax stability or increases. So is the argument of “fighting them over there instead of here.” And on and on. It’s ALL the Right has! I don’t like it when anyone does it, but you stretch it way too far out here. If men are coming out and saying they had sex or whatever with an obviously gay man - and an obviously gay man who is anti-gay and has the political power to act on that assuastion - that’s newsworthy.
Why don’t you take a look at the steaming pile of truly negative arguments that spew forth endlessly from the sleazy Right?
JMJ
December 4th, 2007 at 11:56 am
Well, my argument for the existence of God is my experience of God. Okay, not a reason that you are likely to find convincing but then, when was the last time I argued the existence of God with you? I don’t have, nor do I think there exists, an air-tight logical argument for the existence of God.
As for tax cutting raising revenues more than tax stability or increases, I’m not touching that one with a ten foot pole. I’m not an economist but if I were, I would argue that high taxation has a negative effect on the economy, not that they raise more revenues than taxing does. I’ll leave that argument to bona fide economists to hash out.
I reject the over there/over here thesis. Obviously the guys we actually are fighting over there, due to the impossibility of one and the same individual being in more than one place at the same time, cannot possibly be over here while we’re fighting them over there. That much is just simple logic which not even you can refute. On the other hand, we aren’t fighting every individual who might wish to do us harm over there and so it is entirely possible that there are such persons over here, simply because they aren’t over there.
I’m glad you don’t like it when anyone does it. That means you don’t like it when the Idaho “Statesman” does it.
Right?
So what’s with this “…that’s newsworthy” crap? Until it’s verifiable, never mind disprovable, it ain’t news. It’s rumor-mongering crap.
December 4th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
Craig,
“I don’t have, nor do I think there exists, an air-tight logical argument for the existence of God.”
What I was saying about the God argument is that the Right regularly uses the “prove He doesn’t extist” argument to say there is a God. It’s a negative argument and has no place in intellectual discourse.
As for tax cutting raising revenues more than tax stability or increases, … I’ll leave that argument to bona fide economists to hash out.”
Again, the point here isn’t what you personally think, it that the Right regularly employs that hegative argument that lowering taxes=higher government revenues. Now I don’t know about you, but I haven’t heard of a duplicate Earth in which taxes are raised as our’s are lowered and the comparison of revenues has been made in real time.
“I reject the over there/over here thesis. Obviously the guys we actually are fighting over there, due to the impossibilit y of one and the same individual being in more than one place at the same time, cannot possibly be over here while we’re fighting them over there. That much is just simple logic which not even you can refute. On the other hand, we aren’t fighting every individual who might wish to do us harm over there and so it is entirely possible that there are such persons over here, simply because they aren’t over there.”
LOL! Good point. But the Right does regularly trot out the rhetoric of there/here without addressing other possible explanations for why we haven’t been hit again (on our soil, at least). For example - maybe they got everything they wanted on 9/11 and just haven’t found the need to hit us on our soil again. Maybe they’re killing plenty of us over there, so why bother hit here. Maybe they will follow us back should we withdraw, but then maybe they wouldn’t have had we not invaded. And on and on. But to assume that the reason we haven’t been hit on our soil again is because we’re on “their” soil (even though we are not on their soil, but rather the soil of their neighbors - terrorists come from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, etc - not Iraq and only indirectly from Afghanistan) is unfounded. Again, you’d need a duplicate control Earth to prove such a thing either way.
“So what’s with this “…that’s newsworthy” crap? Until it’s verifiable, never mind disprovable, it ain’t news. It’s rumor-monger ing crap.”
It may well never be verifiable, but rather a “he said/he said” thing. But it is newsworthy for one main reason: he’s been caught attempting to solicit illicit gay sex in a public place while he is a vehemently anti-gay conservative, Christain, GOP senator from a solidly Red state, and now other gay men are coming forward to disclaim his assertion that he “is not a gay man.” If you don’t see the newsworthiness of that, then I just don’t know what to say further. I know I want to know this information.
JMJ
December 4th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
Jersey,
I think by stating what I personally believe on these points, I am commenting on what you rightly complain about some on the Right doing. So by saying what I did, I took myself to be commenting negatively upon the very same arguments by some on the right that you were. In short, at least on those things that you specifically mentioned, we are in agreement.
As for the Idaho “Statesman” story, we’ll just have to agree to disagree. I want to know varifiable facts. If I want rumors, I’ll hang out at the back fence and gossip. Then again, I have religious scruples about gossip. I try very much not to do it and I object when others do it. Which, not surprisingly, is the reason for my strong distaste at the Idaho “Statesman”’s latest factless rumor-fest.
December 5th, 2007 at 7:14 am
After the swift boat incident, how can anyone deny that this is the new standard?
December 5th, 2007 at 8:42 am
Christopher,
I said ‘…new standard in making salacious rumors into “news”‘. Anybody can write about any fool thing about anybody. When it came to the newspapers, however, they were greatly skeptical about pretty much every claim. I’m not aware that any of them merely regurgitated the claims of Kerry’s critics uncritically, as the Idaho “Statesman” has done here. One single critical bone in a single editor at the “Statesman” would have told them that newspapers shouldn’t be rumor mills. I mean, unless you think this amounts to actual journalism.
December 5th, 2007 at 6:33 pm
This from NT times . Or this
or from the st pete times 9/24
“the quick challenge of the Bush/National Guard stories was a marked departure from the reaction just about a month ago, when some major news outlets took weeks to thoroughly analyze allegations by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that Democratic candidate John Kerry lied to get his war medals.
Back then, the charges simmered in the news cycle - helped by Kerry’s own reticence to directly address the allegations - feeding a controversy that eventually hurt him in the polls.
For Wayne Slater, Austin bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News, the Swift Boat controversy brought uncomfortable questions. “As journalists . . . is it our obligation to (validate) every single piece of information, and then decide to print?” he asked.
“On the other hand, if we don’t write about an episode and it becomes a huge topic on talk radio and cable news, do we look like we’re favoring one side?” Slater added. “The very process of raising an issue and introducing it into debate can spoil the process.”
December 5th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
Christopher,
Thanks for responding. Unfortunately, I’ve a migraine and the point that you are making with these arguments escapes me because migraines mess with my ability to (a) concentrate sufficiently to retain a comprehension of what I’ve read long enough to fully understand an article of any length and (b) messes with my ratiocination such that even what I retain, I cannot be certain that I understand. In short, this is my problem, not yours.
Could you state briefly (in a short paragraph) precisely what it is that you wish me to take away from your previous comment and the articles that you linked?
It would be really helpful.
December 5th, 2007 at 7:45 pm
I also think i totally misread and so misunderstood your comment from 7:14 am. I took you to be saying that the standard of non-disprovability was nothing new in that it was utilized by the Swifties three years ago. Now, upon rereading, you are affirming that non-disprovability is undeniably the new standard.
If my new understanding is correct, then I think I agree with you. I find this lamentable and deplorable and unacceptable.
For now, I need to take a break from trying to think to hard. There’s little point to it with my head pounding away.
Again, thanks for responding and forgive any misunderstandings I may have taken from my misreading of your comment.
December 5th, 2007 at 8:09 pm
As for the Swifties, not all of their criticisms of Kerry’s political usage of his wartime experiences fall into the not-disprovable category. Indeed, in at least one criticism, they were undeniably correct and Kerry had to admit his own error. I speak of Kerry’s famous seared memory of Christmas Day, 1968, while he was, as he recalled, delivering Americans into Cambodia and listening to a radio broadcast of “President” Nixon telling the American people that there were no Americans in Cambodia. This is, of course, verifiably nonsense. Nixon was not President on Christmas Day, 1968. There had been covert actions taken upon North Vietnamese forces holed up within Cambodia by that time but they had been authorized by President Johnson, not Nixon. When Nixon finally authorized actions within parts of Cambodia, they were not covert but overt. He gave a speech explaining what he was about to do and why.
I presume that this was merely an honest error on Kerry’s part. God knows my memory plays tricks on me from time to time but the point is, Kerry’s claim was not only disprovable but verifiably false.
Many of their criticisms, however, were distinctly less so so I take your point — assuming I now understand your point.
In any case, my head hurts. I’m going to lay down.