So Much Information

Once upon a time "doing your research" was a lot more difficult than it is today. A politician would make a claim, and unless you had personal knowledge of what was claimed, verifying or debunking the claim would take a lot of work. In 2019, however, there's a plethora of information at our fingertips through the magic of Google searches. Unfortunately, a lot of that information is unreliable.

Before Trump co-opted the term, "fake news" referred to information that was deliberately misleading or outright false, presented as real news. Websites were set up exclusively to deceive people, sometimes controlled by Russian Intelligence. These sites still exist and continue to churn out misinformation. Then there are sources that present opinion as facts. It's easy to look at incomplete information and come to a conclusion, then present that conclusion as factual. Oftentimes alternate explanations exist and are ignored.  Major news organizations, in addition to presenting the news, i.e. factual information, devote a large amount of their energy to delivering opinion, commentary, punditry and the like. Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow, to give examples on the right and the left, are prominent examples.

But doing an internet search until you find an opinion that you agree with isn't "doing your research", parroting what your favorite talking head says happened isn't either. It's not true just because Fox News or the New York Times says so.

Fortunately, much of what politicians claim can be independently checked.

A great example occurred this morning. Trump and his sycophants have taken to Twitter to let us know that he received an enthusiastic welcome at a college football game this weekend, and to complain that the "fake news media" wasn't covering it. You may recall that he received a less-than-warm welcome during a World Series game recently, the booing overwhelming any pockets of cheers in the stadium. He also experienced a mixed reception at a UFC bout in New York. But the cheers outnumbered the boos at Saturday's football game. How do I know? I know because, despite the whining about lack of coverage of the enthusiastic greeting, five seconds on Google yielded coverage of the overwhelming cheering for Trump by CNN, USA Today, the Washington Post, CBS and the New York Times. Another five seconds likely would have produced more examples. My point is, that despite all the griping that you wouldn't see coverage of public support for Trump in the mainstream media, a quick check showed ample coverage of public support for Trump in the mainstream media. Yet many Trump supporters won't check the facts for themselves, but will believe unquestioningly what their cult leader says.

Many of Trump's claims can be checked out pretty easily, not by depending on the mainstream media, or the Democrats, but by simply referring to what Trump himself said earlier, either in a tweet or a news conference. many of the figures that he cites can easily be checked using statistics published by the government (the same government of which he is the titular leader).

Which brings us to a timely and arguably much more important group of claims. Trump and his supporters have been inviting us to "read the transcript" (which isn't really a transcript, but a reconstruction based on contemporaneous notes, so I usually call it a "transcript" - in quotes) and has made claims based on what is in the "transcript" and the whistle-blower's complaint, as if what is in these two documents exonerate him. To a certain extent this works. As usual, his supporters don't "do the research" and repeat back what their master tells them.