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'Fighting the Smears' a dangerous game

Submitted by Gary Bowman on Sat, 06/14/2008 - 03:43
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I posted this on my blog a couple of days ago but after reading Patrick's post, I thought I'd post it here too:
 

So Obama has launched a website called "Fight the Smears" to try to dispel some of the dirty rumours floating around the blogosphere.

Tom Bevan (from RCP Blog) thinks:

This strikes me as a smart, innovative strategy for Obama - yet another example of how he's willing to shed conventional thinking, and also to use the Internet as a strength to offset one of the vulnerabilities of his campaign (ie. the circulation of rumors and misinformation).


Yeah, I understand the logic here but because this is actually a "paid for by Obama for America" site, I feel like there's going to a deafening silence when one of these dirty rumours turns out to be true.

However, Bevan also notes that:

The true risk to Obama in taking this approach is if he and his campaign, in the process of trying to debunk a rumor, make some sort of declaration on the website that turns out to be misleading or untrue. Should a mistake like that occur, the entire thing will blow up in their faces and they'll wish they had stuck with the old way of dealing with rumors, which is to deny them oxygen.


I absolutely agree with this, and I think it's fair to say that this is more of an issue for Obama than it is for any other candidate. A statement about the "whitey" video like "no such tape exists", is going to look awfully silly if indeed it does. And there in itself is the problem of setting up a mechanism to deal with rumours and hearsay, I've just gone and perpetuated it by wondering what would happen if a tape actually does exist.  So regardless of whether or not the rumour is true, it doesn't make it go away. Ironically, I hadn't thought much about the "whitey" video until I checked the site...I also didn't know about the hand-on-the-heart issue.

I suppose that's the danger of this idea -- some rumours (like conspiracy theories) don't ever seem to really go away; and by accumulating and listing them, you're actually informing people (perhaps previously unaware) of issues you'd rather have disappear. I didn't look at the pledge of allegiance thing and think "well, they took care of that issue", I thought, "one video of him reciting the pledge of allegiance with his hand on his heart doesn't necessarily imply an overarching sense of patriotism...and why is there no mention of his empty lapel? Isn't the flag pin issue also a rumour about his lack of patriotism?"


It's actually a classic problem of inductive logic and reasoning: you cannot disprove a rumour about patriotism with a video of somebody reciting the pledge of allegiance. While the video may support the conclusion, this kind of causal inference does not guarantee any level of truth, and thus does not fully remove doubt instilled by the rumour. So although, in principle, a website dedicated to dispelling rumours may be a clever and noble idea, in reality, proving rumours to be false is, in logical terms anyway, an incredibly difficult feat.
 

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Comments

Proving negatives proves to be very challenging

Submitted by GOP_Rebel on Sat, 06/14/2008 - 16:00.

Logic indicates that it's easier to prove a positive than a negative because to prove a positive (something "is"), we only have to find one instance of it.  Since we can't test a proposition in every place and at every time to find out if it "isn't", we can never be absolutely certain that the proposition remains true in all times and places. It is much easier to prove that someone is a racist than to prove that someone is not a racist - which is one of the advantages of playing the race card in a political campaign. 

Using the "Michelle says Whitey on a tape" example (which, honestly, sounds like a perfectly ridiculous non-issue example to me but whatever), Republicans only require one sound bite to prove she said it, but Democrats must be able to prove that she never said it, is not saying it today, and never will say it anywhere, any time, in any way that was even remotely documented on video, on tape, in writing, etc. 

Seeing ex-CIA agent Larry Johnson's name associated with this rumor invokes a certain irony, because he was utilized by the Democratic Party to give their weekly radio address in the summer of 2005. According to The Weekly Standard:

A self-described Republican, Johnson argued that the failure of the president to fire Rove and anyone else supposedly involved in the leak had severely damaged national security and would certainly hamper future efforts to recruit informants in the war on terror.

According to "Fight the Smears" in regard to the Michelle/Whitey rumor:

LIE: Blogger Larry Johnson writes “New and dramatic developments. This is a heads up. I'll post the news Monday morning by 0900 hours.”

According to The Weekly Standard:

The Democratic party wants to use Larry Johnson as a seemingly safe mouthpiece to attack to the president. But, in doing so, they have adopted someone who fits perfectly the profile of the pre-9/11 CIA: see no evil, hear no evil.

And apparently we can now add "blog no evil", or at least nothing credible in this particular case.  I still think this is a silly place that Republicans ought not to have gone.  Still, when the Democratic Party lies down with a dog like Larry Johnson, they should expect to get up with fleas.

But back to the topic of logic.  It would be absurd to believe that all statements for which we have some evidence are false, right?  I notice that nowhere on the evil smear list is the one mentioning the...approximately...47 gaffes (as of June 14, 2008) that Obama has committed thus far in his interviews, rallies, campaign speeches and off-the-cuff remarks in which he either revises history or shows a complete misunderstanding of it.  I think that these are more damaging to his campaign among educated people that the so-called slurs and smears.  Now the problem is that we really don't know exactly how educated the American public is in terms of their knowledge of history, in comparison to Barack Obama.  And therein lies the dilemma that will cause campaign operatives to continue reaching for the emotionally charged solution to what is, IMHO, the problem of educating Americans about the real and potentially dangerous lack of knowledge and experience that makes Obama unfit to lead.