JLF Speaker Warns of Spin Crowding Facts From Political Debate

Facts have become an “endangered species” in American political debate, a change that leaves voters without the tools they need to make informed decisions. That’s the assessment the Wall Street Journal’s deputy editorial page editor offered during a John Locke Foundation Headliner luncheon Monday.

“Facts are at risk,” said Dan Henninger during the first of two JLF luncheons this week dedicated to analysis of 2008 election results. (Watch Henninger’s presentation here. Learn about today’s noon election wrap-up event in Raleigh here.) “Facts are an endangered species. And if I’m right, then our system of politics is in trouble as well.”

Henninger contends that the 2008 election shows evidence of a form of “Gresham’s Law.” That law posits that “bad” or cheap money chases “good” money out of circulation.

“It first occurred to me that a Gresham’s Law of information might be happening — bad information driving out good — when people started asking me the same question after I would give a talk,” Henninger explained. “Invariably, someone would get up and say, ‘So tell me, where do you get your facts?’”

The people asking the question were seeking good sources of reliable information, Henninger said. “They’d come to believe that they either didn’t have access to the facts or that they no longer could trust the traditional sources of factual information.”

In one October week, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama ran 50,000 30-second television ads, the equivalent of running ads on one television station back to back for 17 straight days, Henninger said. Nielsen Research reported that Obama ran nearly 1 billion Internet ads during the campaign. “And yet for many voters he remained a mystery,” Henninger added. “How could that possibly be?”

Access to facts is critical, Henninger said. “Observable, testable facts are the way people in our intellectual framework and tradition think or learn to think,” he said. “But maybe that’s changing. For a system rooted in observable facts to function, the parties to it have to share a minimum level of agreement about the facts. This is called trust, and trust is fading.”

That includes trust of the media, Henninger said. “My colleagues and I in the news business are as mistrusted and disbelieved as any other major American institution,” he said. “MSM — mainstream media — for many people has become a synonym for b.s.”

At least part of the problem is linked to the absence of facts in news coverage, Henninger said. The average person trying to make sense of the day’s news encounters a “world of spin, analysis, and high-velocity opinion,” he added.

“What if all opinion comes to be based on an opinion, that is based on an opinion, that is based on nothing more than another opinion?” Henninger asked. “At that point, it seems to me, you’ve arrived at a point close to Gresham’s Law of information — bad or half-baked information, rumor, or gossip driving our good information.”

Henninger traces the declining importance of facts in news reporting to the 1960s and 1970s, when hundreds of afternoon newspapers began shutting down. The surviving newspapers, considering television news a “mortal threat,” decided they couldn’t compete with the nightly TV newscasts in delivering straight, fact-based reporting, Henninger said.

Instead newspapers began to rely increasingly upon news “analysis,” he said. The concept of “spin” became more prevalent within news reporting. “It was about this time that many newspaper readers began to feel that they were the ones being spun,” Henninger explained. “It got harder to read a story, figuring out where the facts were, and where was the analysis?”

Readers looked for new ways to find their information, Henninger said. “They’re going to Web sites that are more congenial to their politics,” he said. “How can you blame them? If you know that you’re going to be spun by the news, why not just jump into a comfortable washing machine and be spun to the left or spun to the right, according to whichever you prefer?

“But, you know, something valuable and I think very American is being lost as more people take refuge in the political massage parlors of the Left and Right,” Henninger added. “What’s getting lost is the good old American tradition of making up your own mind.”

Many people today simply serve as “cheerleaders for somebody else’s opinion,” he said. “Punching up the Web or a talk show to find out what one is supposed to think is replacing the much harder work of thinking for one’s self. This is the road, it seems to me, to groupthink, or maybe to bluethink and redthink.”

This trend leads the political process to bog down, just when America needs good responses to Islamic fundamentalist terror, hostile nations seeking nuclear capability, and the global financial structure in crisis, Henninger said.

Facts need to return to the debate, Henninger said. “What I’m talking about is a common set of facts around a subject about which we can all reasonably agree,” he said. “It is inside that set of facts where we work and try to reasonably work out our political differences. That’s the way the system used to work. Absent that, I think, politics really becomes mostly just acts of faith.”

Without a change, voters will base their decisions on continually shrinking pieces of information, he said. “I think it’s entirely possible that [in] the 2012 election, people will be voting mainly on the basis of what they read in headlines on the Web. That’s all they’ll know.”

Mitch Kokai is an associate editor of Carolina Journal.