From Pine View Farm

“Just the Facts, Ma’am” 1

Leonard Pitts, Jr., tries to figure out when a fact becomes a non-fact. A snippet:

As best I can recall — my computer ate the email — that was how the key line went in a reader missive that had me doing a double take last week. It was not the outlandish assertion that struck me but, rather, the emphatic claim of its veracity. We’re talking Shift-Lock and all-caps so there would be no mistaking: “Obama is a Muslim. That is a FACT.”

Actually, it is not a fact, but let that slide. We’re not here to renew the tired debate over Barack Obama’s religion. No, we’re only here to lament that so many of us seem to know “facts” that aren’t and that one party — guess which — has cynically nurtured, used and manipulated this ignorance for political gain.

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1 comment

  1. George Smith

    April 27, 2015 at 4:57 pm

    I keep telling people it’s old school, reference William Shirer on the populace under a controlled media prior to WWII:

    “Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a cafe, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was to try to even make contact with a mind which had become warped …”

    The US isn’t Deutschland in 1936-37. But Fox, the right wing news environment and its audience constitute a controlled media in which the truth is whatever they say it is. And nothing dents it. I think Leonard Pitts knows that.