How internet insinuation becomes campaign fact: a warning, using examples from Warren campaign

[MBS]

A smart piece by Rebecca Solnit. She uses two examples from Elizabeth Warren campaign, but it's about much much more than that -about the election in general and about internet-fueled opinions in general. This kind of thing has happened, is happening, and will happen, to every primary candidate, and it will certainly happen to the Democratic nominee in the general election.

First, Solnit describes a poorly written WaPo story that misrepresented Warren's legal work, but (more or less) died because people who actually knew something hit back hard through social media to correct the facts and insinuations. The second story is about misrepresentation by a blogger about the person who introduced Elizabeth Warren at a speech in Oakland, CA, and how that morphed into wildly inaccurate characterizations of Warren's education policy.

https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-how-internet-insinuation-becomes-campaign-fact/

The Internet is a costume party in which everyone comes dressed in an opinion, or rather dozens of them or an endless array, one right after another. An opinion is, traditionally or at least ideally, a conclusion reached after weighing the evidence, but that takes time and so people are dashing about in sloppy, ill-formed opinions or rather snap judgments which are to well-formed opinions what trash bags are to evening gowns. If opinions were like clothes, this would just be awkward, but opinions are also like votes. They shape the discourse and eventually the reality of the world we live in. Journalists used to say that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts, but opinions are supposed to be based on facts and when the facts are wrong or distorted or weaponized, trouble sets in.

There was actually a nice victory over distortion and insinuation a couple of weeks ago. The Washington Post put out a story on May 23 that was titled “While teaching, Elizabeth Warren worked on more than 50 legal matters, charging as much as $675 an hour.” (If you look it up now, the title has been changed to not shout about the money any more.) It was kind of a nonstory: one of the nation’s leading bankruptcy lawyers, while teaching at one of the nation’s most distinguished law schools, did some work on the side, as law professors apparently often do. If you didn’t know anything about legal experts’ compensation rates, $675 an hour might seem high, and the whole thing seemed to be trying to suggest that there was something shady about the whole thing. Perhaps women are not supposed to earn a lot of money, though we knew from the sideswipes about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s waitress work that we are not supposed to work in low wage jobs either. Perhaps women are always either too much or not enough. For the record, I am wildly enthused about Warren as a presidential candidate, but I was enthused about accuracy a long time before she came along, and this is a story mostly about accuracy and its opposites. The stories I’m relating could be told about any number of other candidates who’ve been misrepresented in ways that have stuck as smears.
. . . .
Response to the Washington Post’s story about her $675 an hour was a best case scenario. A barrage of legal experts, lawyers, and law school professors (and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) hit social media, while readers hit the Washington Post with 2,700 comments; those that I read were all scathing. By the end of the day, Slate had a story headlined “Washington Post Discovers That Elizabeth Warren Was Paid a Reasonable Fee for Providing Legal Services to Unobjectionable Clients” and Esquire and New York Magazine had also mocked the Post’s insinuations. . . Eight days later, things didn’t go as well, perhaps because the misinformation didn’t start out in a high-profile outlet. . . . The falsehoods and insinuations seem to have influenced a lot of people, and I heard from locals that Warren was losing support and supporters over this. Some of that is on people who were careless about their criteria for reaching a conclusion, but I’ve seen how this works with earlier smears about earlier candidates: the first round may be malicious, the second is gullible, and then the weaponized information becomes what everyone thinks they know, or a vague unease, or a fuzzy suspicion. It dilutes, a smear becoming a stain becoming a taint.

In my own dreams of educational reform, there’s a curriculum focused on how to research anything and check everything, how to understand what is and isn’t substantiated by the facts, when you do and don’t have the evidence to draw a conclusion, and how to live with the uncertainty and mystery that abound in all of us. Such an education would inoculate against the propaganda, lies, distortions, and rumors that circulate so freely now, on the left and in the center as well as on the right. In the meantime, the responsibility for the news rests with consumers as well as producers, or rather when we accept and repeat statements we too become producers of the beliefs that shape this world. It behooves us to do so with care.

[delisen]

1. Any evidence Oakland charter school controversy is a "smear?"

[rgbecker]

2. Is this the "Controversy" you are refering to?

https://gadflyonthewallblog.com/2019/06/04/charter-school-lobbyist-introduces-elizabeth-warren-at-rally/