My World Has Fallen And I Can't Get Up

In a terrific essay in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine ("The Right Stuff," p. 14), Virginia Heffernan details some of the changes in fact checking since her days as a fact checker for The New Yorker. It used to be that journalistic fact checkers did only what their job title suggested. They made sure their publication printed accurate information in a grammatically consistent manner. Nowadays, however, things have changed. With Google, everybody is or can be a fact checker; of course that means the very act of checking facts has sunk to the lowest common denominator. We don't check every word some politician utters on Politifact because we are passionate about accuracy. No, we check every fact because we want to play gotcha with the politician in question. If we catch an inaccuracy, we can make the politician look ridiculous at best and dishonest at worst. Fact checking has become just another way to spin things to our advantage. But Heffernan makes an even more disconcerting point when she ends her essay with ". . . if the Web has changed what qualifies as factchecking, has it also changed what qualifies as a fact? I suspect that facts on the Web are now more rhetorical devices than identifiable objects."

This illustrates the first way my world has fallen. For as long as I can remember, reading the newspaper has been one of the joys of my life. I read the paper with my grandmother when I was a grade schooler in Estes Park and we would talk about the world together over coffee (for her) and hot chocolate (for me). When Franny was a baby I would prop her up on our kitchen table and read The Denver Post outloud on weekend mornings when we weren't in a rush to get to school. Each morning when I'm not doing handy man stuff, I get home from the Y and read the Post with a pot of coffee. Then I go to the computer and look at The Daily Beast, The Drudge Report (my attempt to be listen to all sides no matter how dreary), Gary Hart's blog, Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Huffington Post, Politico, Fact Check, Politifact. By the time I'm finished with all that it is time for lunch and puttering around the house, or writing my own stuff. Sunday mornings are devoted to The New York Times and then, of course, the Broncos.

But I've noticed that all of that is beginning to change for me. The news is different than it used to be. I won't even talk about TV news because I try to make it a point to avoid it whenever possible. But the reportage in newpapers is getting more and more TVish. Actual occurances, what we used to call facts and events, are no longer the stuff of a typical new article. Instead, we are informed about how each occurance is viewed by liberal and conservative politicians. Then a continuation takes us into the paper where we are confronted by pundits on both sides of the issue who busily cut and paste sound bites, thereby keeping score on who is popular and who is not; who is going to win the next election and who is not; who is a socialist and who is a fascist and who is a tea partier, etc., etc. Then we are made privy to Sarah Palin's latest Tweet, a medium uniquely suited to her limited command of current events and history. It has all become meaningless.

I used to argue with some of my more cynical friends that it was possible to find the truth, that you could get around the spin. I'm not sure I believe that anymore. The New York Times published a ONE SOURCE piece hinting at Michael Bennet's multi-million dollar boondoggle of DPS's budget. The source was a school board member who was constantly at odds with Bennet and who actually shopped the piece to the Times so it would be published just a couple of days before the Bennet-Romanov primary. A simple fact check of that piece showed logical hole after logical hole, but the Times published anyway. I mean if you can't trust The New York Times who can you trust.

If I watch the news on Fox I come to the conclusion that I am living in a different world than the one inhabited by viewers of MSNBC. And major networks divide up their precious few minutes between Bret Favre updates and media created storms like the one over the proposed community center (read: Islamic terrorist recruiting center) in New York.

It is beginning to drive me crazy. Katherine and I were in the car on the way to the Y at 6 in the morning yesterday when I started to rail against this sad state of affairs. Katherine, concerned, leaned over and gave me a little hug as if to say "There, there. It will be alright." It has come to that.

And if that isn't enough, when I got dressed after my workout yesterday and headed to the towel desk to retrieve my membersip card there was organ music wafting through the basement of the Y. ORGAN MUSIC! I don't want organ music interrupting my exercise induced endorphin rush. But there by the towel desk was this little middle aged guy programming different rhythm lines into his Wurlitzer as he played his Born Free/Impossible Dream/Ain't She Sweet medley. AARGH!