Don't let your bias do the talking (or send e-mails)

While we are on the topic of bias, do I really need to point out that it’s not exclusively a malady of the left?

A few people questioned my recent columns analyzing examples of left-wing bias on CNN and in Associated Press reporting, and thought they were themselves examples of biased reporting.

To which, I should respond first, that I am an opinion columnist and not a reporter. I write about topics that catch my attention, and try to write about them fairly. I always welcome criticism that shows me an error in my analysis, but more often than not just get attacked because people don’t like my point of view.

Oh well, that’s the nature of the business. 

But whether we are columnists, reporters or just individual citizens, we all have a responsibility to be fair in our approach to facts. They should not be dismissed just because we don’t like them, and they should not be considered gospel truth just because they tell us what we want to hear.

Unfortunately, it is all too easy for personal preferences to creep into reporting, as well as into reading — and we should all be on guard against that tendency. This is nothing new. Citizens have always had the ultimate responsibility for discernment between what is true and false, and it is they who must hold the press, as well as the politicians, accountable. Some such balance between the power of the people and the press is absolutely essential to the successful operation of our republic.

It was Thomas Jefferson who railed against “the falsehoods of a licentious press” while at the same time acknowledging that the free press is “the only safeguard of the public liberty.”

Jefferson considered himself to be the target of biased reporting on numerous occasions, and said of his opponents the Federalists that, “They fill their newspapers with falsehoods, calumnies and audacities.” Yet Jefferson thought that reason and humanity would prevail against any foolishness that appeared in the press, and he credited the common people with the ability to keep in check the excesses of bias that human nature creates in some journalists.

As Jefferson wrote in 1804, “The firmness with which the people have withstood the late abuses of the press, the discernment they have manifested between truth and falsehood shew that they may safely be trusted to hear everything true and false and form a correct judgment between them.”

I would venture, however, that it is even harder for a modern citizen to “form a correct judgment” of truth and falsehood today than it was in Jefferson’s time. That falls partly on the state of modern education, which we must leave for another column, and partly on the state of modern media.

Face it, information technology has grown exponentially since 1800, and with it has come a virtual flood of facts, fiction and fantasy. If Jefferson thought newspapers should be divided into four sections labeled “True, Probable, Wanting Confirmation and Lies,” then what could he possibly think of the modern Internet, with its weird capacity for making everything seem true, leaving us with the necessary assumption that everything we are told may be a lie.

Almost every day, I receive some kind of e-mail that touts the remarkable, stupendous, unbelievable news that: a) Supreme Court justice Elena Kagan represented President Obama before the Supreme Court regarding his eligibility for office; b) Hillary Clinton and the U.N. are taking your guns away; c) President Obama is planning to tax all of your financial transactions by 1 percent; or d) it’s already been proven that President Obama is a foreign national, but somehow the evidence is being covered up by the media.

Unfortunately, the people who send me these e-mails are so seduced by the “remarkable” and “stupendous” news that they forget it is also “unbelievable.”

But a minimal amount of investigation — the simple steps of checking the facts for yourself and applying a small amount of brain power — quickly reveal that all those stories are totally false.

And guess what, they are false even if someone who invented the hoax includes a statement that the facts have all been verified by snopes.com, the website that is famous for exposing Internet hoaxes.

One of those stories above included a valid link to snopes.com in which a quick reading will reveal that Snopes totally contradicts the claims of the e-mailer. Here’s the first paragraph of the e-mail, quoted verbatim:

“A one-percent transaction fee (TAX), proposed by President Obama’s finance team, is recommending a transaction tax. His plan is to sneak it in after the November elections to keep it under the radar. This is a 1% tax on all transactions at any financial institution. Banks, Credit Unions, Savings and Loans, etc..”

Now, let’s forget about the totally ungrammatical structure of the paragraph. The intent is clear — to link President Obama to a 1 percent tax. And the e-mail includes a link to http://www.snopes.com/politics/taxes/debtfree.asp where we are supposed to be assured of the truth of the claim.

But instead, we discover that the proposal is the brainchild of the little-known Democratic congressman, Rep. Chaka Fattah of Pennsylvania, who has been kicking the idea around since 2004. And yep, in 2010, he submitted the Debt Free America Act (HR 4646) that proposes to pay down the debt and eliminate the income tax with a 1 percent transaction tax. When checking on the status of that bill, I discovered that it was introduced on Feb. 23, 2010, and shuffled off to four committees the same day, never to be heard from again.

Back at Snopes, I was able to confirm the obvious: “President Obama’s financial team” had nothing to do with the 1 percent transaction tax,” nor did Nancy Pelosi — as another version of the e-mail hoax claimed. It was the work of one deluded, though perhaps well-intentioned, congressman.

The other phony e-mails are just as easily disproven. The one about Elena Kagan is particularly foolish. Someone tried to show that she would have a conflict of interest if the issue of President Obama’s eligibility were ever before the Supreme Court, and as evidence they presented a number of cases she had argued before the court in her role as solicitor general. The ultra-conservative website World Net Daily put out an article last August that claimed nine of these cases involved “Obama eligibility issues.”

Unfortunately for World Net Daily, they provided links to the cases, and not one of them had anything to do with President Obama’s birthplace or eligibility. They were simply cases that she had argued on behalf of he United States which included some mention — oftentimes very minor — of President Obama, who was technically her boss.

World Net Daily retracted their story, but unfortunately you cannot retract an e-mail, so this story has gone viral thanks to the proclivity of political junkies to forward junk mail to everyone they know — including newsroom editors.

One of the more boneheaded such e-mails is the one that claims that   the group “Americans for Freedom of Information” has “released copies of President Obama’s college transcripts from Occidental College,” which indicate that “Obama, under the name of Barry Soetoro, received financial aid as a foreign student from Indonesia as an undergraduate.” The e-mail then goes on to claim that Justice Antonin Scalia announced that the Supreme Court “agreed on Tuesday to hear arguments concerning Obama’s legal eligibility to serve as President.”

The truly funny thing about this e-mail is that it includes this howler — “Let other folks know this news, the media won’t!”

I mean, what planet do you have to come from to believe that this news could ever be covered up — or even that the media would want to cover it up! Forget whether you are right wing or left wing for a minute. This would be the story of the century, if it were TRUE, but that little old four-letter word is a real stumbling block.

Oh, yeah, and if you bothered to check this Occidental College e-mail out on snopes.com, you would discover that the original e-mail was dated April 1, 2009. Can anyone say April Fool’s?

Too bad there isn’t a Truth Filter to stop idiotic outgoing e-mails to correspond with the Spam Filter we have to protect our in-box from obvious junk.

But in the absence of a gimmicky technical solution, a little common sense can go a long way in penetrating to the truth of  these hyped-up partisan e-mails. I strongly encourage everyone to think twice before hitting the send button on any “too good to be true” e-mail “news story.” But based on what hits my in-box everyday, I suspect the common sense approach may be in short supply.

Let us hope Jefferson is not turning over in his grave when he ponders whether citizens of the truly great nation he helped found still have the power to discern correctly between what is true and false.