Obama in Disinformationland By: Neal Gabler August 23, 2010 04:28 AM EDT
The recent Pew Research Center poll revealed that 18 percent of respondents believe President Barack Obama is a Muslim, and a whopping 43 percent are unsure exactly what religion he practices. This is disheartening on many levels — not least that it illustrates an astonishing degree of ignorance.
It is unlikely, however, that Americans are dumber now than they were, say, 25 years ago. With more of us attending college, we might even be smarter. But higher education rates and easier access to information have been undermined by what amounts to a vast and insidious revolutionary force — a kind of anti-Enlightenment in which facts yield to rumor, reason to uninformed opinion and objectivity to proudly declared subjectivity.
We swim in a limitless sea of misinformation, even disinformation, without much inclination to separate truth from fiction.
It isn’t that people are willfully ignorant — just willfully democratic. Many observers, going back to Alexis deToqueville, have remarked on America’s egalitarian spirit. While the huge differentials between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else may belie that spirit today, it is still alive and well in many nooks and crannies of the culture. Certainly in leveling the hierarchy of facts.
Daniel Moynihan famously said that everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts. Well, Moynihan spoke too soon. From the political shoutfests on TV and radio to the endless drone of sports radio callers to the millions of vanity blogs, opinion has rapidly become fact.
The idea that there is such a thing as verifiable truth — such as Obama being a Christian — is increasingly seen as elitist. It’s as if truth were yet another scheme by the powerful to impose their will on everyone else.
This overzealous sense of democracy has been encouraged by the right-wing, which has a stake in taking on science and evidence because these things are often likely to betray the tenets of their beliefs. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) offered one example of informational demagoguery on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, saying “I take the president at his word” that he is a Christian.
Steven Colbert has jokingly snarled that facts are liberal. The problem for the right is that facts are stubborn, so when you disagree with them — whether it is global warming or evolution or the effect of tax cuts on economic growth — you want to substitute your own “facts” for the allegedly objective ones.
Indeed, of the multitude of ways that President George W. Bush changed America, this may have been the most important. He helped legitimize the idea of individual truth. In doing so, he became the first president to challenge the old Enlightenment foundation on which this country was established.
But if democratic effusions and right-wing challenges enabled this leveling of the hierarchy of facts, the Internet has provided a means. Roughly 60 percent of the Pew respondents said they got their information on Obama’s Islamic faith from the media, which, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh aside, could only have meant the Internet. Whatever else it does, the Internet constantly offers information, that it spews willy-nilly.
The quantity is staggering. But with the quantity has come a qualitative change in how we process information. Because we are overwhelmed, we become less discriminating. We are less likely to sift. We tend to take it as all equivalent — one alleged fact is just as good as any other, regardless of the source.
In a way, Wikipedia is the new informational paradigm, replacing that old dusty paradigm, the Encyclopedia Britannica. On a Wiki page, built on the “wisdom of crowds” theory, everybody just sort of throws things in based on what he or she “knows” or has heard or has read somewhere, and everyone has to be his or her own fact-checker — another way of saying that there isn’t much fact-checking. You might call it an informational pyramid scheme — so-called “fact” building on so-called “fact.”
This is how the revolution begins. When you take the objectivity out of facts, when the options are believing everything or trusting nothing, you are performing a revolutionary act because you are removing the framework — the context — for the bricks that build our world of knowledge and ideas.
What makes it even more effective is that most people, however much they may believe in a democratization of fact, aren’t even aware it is happening. This is a quiet, grass-roots, guerilla revolution, waged on computer screens, rather than the frontal assault waged at tea party rallies or on political talk shows. That stuff is much easier to parry or ignore. This other stuff is part of our mental architecture now.
So when you read that the preponderance of Americans doesn’t know what religion our president practices, it is not that they are ignoramuses. It is that they have come to feel that whatever they think is fine because — in post-Enlightenment America — facts really don’t matter.
Welcome to Disinformationland.
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Neal Gabler is a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center and the author of “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination” and “Life: The Movie — How Entertainment Conquered Reality.”