A New Spin on the Right to Lie
posted by Frank Pasquale
Last year I was pretty disturbed by a Washington state Supreme Court decision that effectively created a “right to lie” for politicians. Yet I’m now seeing the wisdom of such an approach. Given the glacial pace of most legal processes, it would be very hard for a politician to sue his or her opponent and actually stop the lying before the election is over. If one candidate lied repeatedly, and the other took the high road and sued, how soon could anything be done? Moreover, if a lie is discovered, what’s the remedy? Re-doing the election?
The question of lying in politics is quite topical nowadays; as Farhad Manjoo (author of True Enough: Learning to Live In A Post-Fact Society) notes,
Since July, John McCain and his campaign have made 11 political claims that are barely true, eight that are categorically false, and three that you’d have to call pants-on-fire lies—a total of 22 clearly deceptive statements (many of them made repeatedly in ads and stump speeches). Barack Obama and Joe Biden, meanwhile, have put out eight bare truths, four untruths, and zero pants-on-fire lies—12 false claims.
Having some third party categorically certify a claim to be false is not the way elections are won. As Mickey Kaus puts it, “Lecturing the public on what’s ‘true’ and what’s a ‘lie’ . . . plays into some of the worst stereotypes about liberals–that they are preachy know-it-alls hiding their political motives behind a veneer of objectivity and respectability.” For many in the electorate, any appeals to authority are simply indications of elitism. Moreover, every attack on certain personalities merely energizes their supporters–it’s one more piece of evidence that the dear leader is striking fear into the hearts of nasty elites. Manjoo concludes:
[I]n the digital world, facts are a stock of faltering value. The phenomenon that scholars call “media fragmentation”—the disintegration of the mass media into the many niches of the Web, cable news, and talk radio—lets us consume news that we like and avoid news that we don’t, leading people to perceive reality in a way that conforms to their long-held beliefs. Not everyone agrees with me that our new infosphere will open the floodgates to fiction, but it’s clear that the McCain camp is benefiting from some of the forces I described.
In particular, McCain is feeding off long-held conservative antipathy to the mainstream news media, the same force that propelled the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth four years ago. The Swift Boat message was conceived on talk radio; in the months before they caught the attention of TV producers, the vets appeared on hundreds of local radio stations across the country to push the story that the media wasn’t telling the whole truth about Kerry. By the time they’d raised enough money to run TV ads, the Swift Vets had built up a huge network of people ready to defend their claims. These networks managed to render fact-checking not just ineffective, but countereffective—when newspapers pointed out flaws in the Swift Vets’ claims, the Vets’ defenders would pounce, arguing that the very act of fact-checking proved that the media was in the tank for Kerry.
In my master’s thesis in politics, I critiqued Sam Popkin’s book The Reasoning Voter (and Neumann, Just, & Crigler’s book Common Knowledge) on just these grounds. They said voters used heuristics to rapidly make valid political judgments; I thought such a characterization overly generous in many instances. But I never would have predicted ten years ago how rapidly heuristics would have hardened into wholesale rejections of reality in American politics.
September 15, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Posted in: Politics
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Responses (12)
Lori Ringhand - September 15, 2008 at 6:52 pm
So the system cannot prohibit lies in advance, cannot effectively rebut lies as they occur, and cannot punish lies after the fact. Why would any candidate do anything other than lie?
Justinian Lane - September 15, 2008 at 7:20 pm
I just love the hostility the right seems to have for facts and fact checkers, as well as their disdain for the New York Times.
RCinProv - September 15, 2008 at 7:38 pm
“Lecturing the public on what’s ‘true’ and what’s a ‘lie’ . . . plays into some of the worst stereotypes about liberals–that they are preachy know-it-alls hiding their political motives behind a veneer of objectivity and respectability.”
Hmmmm. Sounds like what John McCain has been doing ever since picking Sarah Palin.
rc - September 15, 2008 at 7:46 pm
frank your posts are getting increasingly predictable and tedious. wake me up when you post something that doesnt toe the liberal lines
Dan O - September 15, 2008 at 8:33 pm
RC said, “frank your posts are getting increasingly predictable and tedious. wake me up when you post something that doesn’t toe the liberal lines..”
Ditto
Jack - September 16, 2008 at 1:08 am
Frank,
Thanks for the interesting, reason-based posts.
Jack
JH - September 16, 2008 at 8:53 am
Facts have a well-known liberal bias.
JH - September 16, 2008 at 8:53 am
Facts have a well-known liberal bias.
A.W. - September 16, 2008 at 10:24 am
Hmm, yeah, okay. So first, you guys cite a “study” that says that McCain lies more often. No chance that this study is biased, is there?
Nah, of course not.
Then you go on to claim that Swift Boat veterans were liars.
Based on what proof? In fact, I recall that in their first salvo they exposed an outright lie told by Kerry. Kerry claimed that on Christmas of 1968, he was in Cambodia and heard “President Nixon” on the radio saying there were no troops in Cambodia. Only there’s a small problem with that story; Nixon wasn’t president at the time.
There were a few other cases of he-said, he said disputes, that don’t really allow us to pretend to know what the truth was. And then when it came to Kerry’s shameful testimony before congress, well that is undisputed truth. So all told, it seems like the Swifties came out ahead, and despite how things are seen in Democratic think tanks, they were not discredited.
The same is clearly happening with McCain’s ads. For instance, for the claim that Obama voted to teach kindergarteners “comprehensive sex ed” it is quickly becoming an article of faith that this is a lie. But is it, now. Look at what the proposed law said:
> Each class or course in comprehensive sex education offered in any of grades K through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV AIDS.
Gosh, clearly it was not supporting comprehensive sex ed. My bad.
The cognitive dissonance on this blog whenever it touches on politics is pretty amazing. Its not exactly tedious but annoying to watch how the left fails to ever turn the mirror on themselves.
PV - September 16, 2008 at 11:40 am
The same is clearly happening with McCain’s ads. [quote] For instance, for the claim that Obama voted to teach kindergarteners “comprehensive sex ed” it is quickly becoming an article of faith that this is a lie. But is it, now. Look at what the proposed law said:
> Each class or course in comprehensive sex education offered in any of grades K through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV AIDS.[/quote]
Take notice: the law states that “each class or course in comprehensive sex education offered in any of grades K through 12 shall include…”
This doesn’t MANDATE sex education for kindergarten; which is what McCain’s statement is proposing. It simply specifies what lessons a sex ed program in the range of grades K-12 should consist of, IF in place at the school in question. So yes, clearly, it is not supporting comprehensive sex ed in K-12.
A.W. - September 16, 2008 at 1:17 pm
McCain’s ad doesn’t say it mandates it, it says at most it allows for it.
And what do you know? It does.
And, SHOULDN’T we ban “comprehensive” sex ed for kindergarteners. Well, Obama’s own spokesperson didn’t seem terribly keen on the idea:
“The intent of the language and inclusion of kindergarten was simply to make it possible to offer age-appropriate, not comprehensive, information for kindergartners so that those young children could be given basic information so that they would be aware of inappropriate behavior by adults”
Except of course, the statute specifically authorizes what he claims the law is opposed to.
And as noted here (http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NzI3ZDUzOTE0ZThlMTU3MTY0MDI4ZTY0MTZhY2I2MGY=), while most of the bill’s sponsors were not returning calls on the subject, one admitted that it was not inappropriate touching at all, but rather just what it says “comprehensive sex ed.”
And let me say, i am a very pro-birth control, pro-sex ed kind of guy. But even people like me go, “Kindergarten? Really?”
There is a reason why when they finally did pass a law essentially identical to it, that they changed it to 6th grade. Because sex ed for kindergardeners is just plain messed up. And that is why the left is trying to hard to deny it: because they know it is too messed up to defend.
Maryland Conservatarian - September 16, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Justinian Lane writes: “I just love the hostility the right seems to have for facts and fact checkers, as well as their disdain for the New York Times.”
We’re hostile to Facts AND we disdain the NY Times?!?
…wow, that pretty much covers the whole spectrum – from fact to lie, doesn’t it?
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