It's All About Fact Checking

I think I'm going to add a new pet peeve to my blog quiddity: Now joining the fight against hypocrisy will be the fight to get people to check facts.

Of course many people don't have the time to delve into even the most simple details of an issue of the day. That's understandable. But if that is the case, people should be willing to admit to themselves that they don't know enough about something to make a decision about it. If you want to form your opinion on an issue based soley upon the opinion that your favorite blogger happens to have about that issue, it's like driving down a road with your eyes closed based upon somebody's opinion that the road is "pretty straight". My new tag line: Good luck with that.

Personally, I've gone slack-jawed trying to figure out this whole bank bailout and auto bailout and regulations and stuff. I've seen tons of opinions from the blogs that I read, but I wouldn't deign to chime in on my blog about the issue because even though I have lots of opinions, I don't have any real facts.

The facts are out there if you look. Most respectible articles on the internet have the common courtesy to provide links to any facts they cite. (If they don't, alarm bells should go off.) The problem is that nobody reading the article bothers to click on those links to see what the author is talking about, and how he or she formed his or her opinion. What's most interesting is that oftentimes the facts found at the links that the authors provide as their source of information are read so selectively that the contradiction to the author's entire dialectic can be found in the very link he or she is citing. Authors will often do this with the knowledge that nobody actually will click on the link to "fact check" them.

Which brings me to today's example of more right wing exaggeration:

George Will is one of my favorite columnists, but when it comes to climate change he has this incredible tendency to twist facts to fit his conclusions. (See here for last month's example of George Will's same brand of chicanery.)

In today's column, George Will said,

Reducing carbon emissions supposedly will reverse warming, which is allegedly occurring even though, according to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization, there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998.

(George Will then provides a link to those statistics.)

Reading this above sentence on its own, what opinions can you make? That global warming peaked in 1998? That climate warming has come and gone throughout history no matter what efforts man makes? I wouldn't blame you if that is what you thought.

But then you check facts: You click on the link (.pdf file) that George Will provided. You look at the same charts that he looked at. What do you see? This:

(I put the arrow and "1998" in there myself for clarity.)

Now, George Will is one of the best Republican authors and pundits in the country, so when he plays fast and loose with the facts, he's a little more subtle: 1998 is indeed the warmest year on record, just like he says. But, looking at those charts, does the impression that the quote above gave you about global warming stay the same... that global warming peaked in 1998?

This is a slightly more sophisticated version of what I've been complaining about these last few days: That Right Wing writers take a fact, form a misleading opinion about it, and then publish that opinion without giving the reader those selfsame facts. It's perfectly legal. It's a perfectly sensible way to win over the hearts of an uninformed populace. This approach has been around since the beginning of time. But let's admit it's not honest; it's withholding information from people because you know that you have a losing argument when you have all the facts lined up against you. But, as I said: On many issues, it's the only approach some people have.

Please everyone: Check facts. Look it up. Find things out. Educate yourselves. If you come to a conclusion different than your friends or me: Cool. At least your opinion is informed and you have the facts that you can use to say, "This is why I think this way." Once you have that, then by all means, welcome to the debate.