Factoid Spinning By Instant Experts

.

The word, factoid, was coined by Norman Mailer in 1973. According to Wiki, its meaning has evolved over the decades and two distinct definitions have appeared in the dictionary:

.

Definition of factoid

1: an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print

2: a briefly stated and usually trivial fact

.

Mailer was writing about Marilyn Monroe, perhaps the most iconic celebrity of all time who remains to this day at the center of the controversy over what sort of human beings were the Kennedy Brothers. Merriam Webster adds this bit of historical perspective to the term: “Mailer explains that factoids are ‘facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority.’”

That term was coined by Richard Nixon to describe his constituency, people who did not protest anything because they were busy leading the contented lives of free American citizens. Mailer contended that such people were conned by manufactured emotional cues embedded in “news” accounts to support disastrous policies like the Vietnam War.

The subtle distinction between a “lie” and a “product” is vital to understanding mass communications and power today in the Digital Era. A manufactured factoid is of course a lie, but it is far more than a lie and it has a much more ambitious purpose than a mere lie — which is simply an intentionally false assertion of “fact.” As Mailer grasped, and we see much more clearly now on the internet, manipulating emotion has almost nothing to do with facts or reality. It is infinitely more powerful than a simple lie, which can be countered. A factoid cannot be “disproved” if it seems true and if the assertion is trivial enough.

The most important aspect of both definitions of factoid is the triviality of the “fact” in question.

.

My first experience with internet factoid spinning came in 2004 with the controversy surrounding Dan Rather and a 60 Minutes report about George W. Bush’s military record. Instead of going to Vietnam, the son of the ex-director of the CIA served in the Texas Air National Guard. Rather alleged that Bush did not live up to his National Guard contract and was, in effect, AWOL for much of his time in service.

One aspect of the evidence was a memo allegedly written by his squadron commander, named Killian.

.

The “Killian documents” were initially claimed by CBS to have come from the “personal files” of the late Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, Bush’s squadron commander during Bush’s Air National Guard service.[50] They describe preferential treatment during Bush’s service, including pressure on Killian to “sugar coat” an annual officer rating report for the then 1st Lt. Bush. CBS aired the story on September 8, 2004, amid more releases of Bush’s official records by the Department of Defense, including one just the day before as the result of a FOIA lawsuit by the Associated Press.[51]

The Killian documents are widely considered to be fake. Starting with a Free Republic web posting by Harry MacDougald, a conservative Republican lawyer posting under the blogger name, “Buckhead.” MacDougald and multiple fellow bloggers claimed that the formatting shown in the documents used proportional fonts that did not come into common use until the mid-to-late 1990s and alleged that the documents were therefore likely forgeries. [52][53] While the widely publicized rationale of “Buckhead” was technically inaccurate, both related and unrelated serious challenges to the authenticity of the documents nonetheless exist. For instance, it is unlikely that the typewriters available to Killian’s secretary could have produced such a document, and the documents contained U.S. Army, rather than U.S. Air Force, jargon.[54][55][56][57][58]

The forgery allegations subsequently came to the attention of the mainstream media, especially after experts also questioned the documents’ authenticity and lack of a chain of custody.[59][60][61] The original documents have never been submitted for authentication. The man who delivered the copies, Lt. Col. Bill Burkett, a former officer in the Texas Army National Guard and outspoken Bush critic, claimed that he burned the originals. Burkett admitted lying to CBS and USA Today about where he had obtained the papers and eventually expressed doubts of his own about their authenticity.[62]

.

Some Freeper calling himself Buckhead somehow wigged out that forensic factoid about electric typewriter fonts, and, as if by magic, every wingnut on the internet began a sustained campaign of invective against the fraudulent memo produced by Liberal Dan Rather on the Liberal CBS television network. The themes evoked by Rather and his opponents were very heavy. On one side of the dispute, this raised the question of rich sons from powerful families and how they avoided the draft. It also raised the issue of Shrub’s character — which had been celebrated after September 11 as greatness personified. On the other side, Bush supporters viewed the alleged forged document as proof of the fundamental dishonesty of Rather and “the media.”

What united both sides in this weird affair was a partisan resort to factoid spinning. Fierce arguments raged across message boards and comment threads all over the internet. What kind of fonts were available three decades earlier? Wingnuts blanketed the internet with documentation of the Font Question.

The fate of the Bush Presidency turned on this incredibly trivial detail. I argued at the time as did many other Rather defenders that there was plenty of other evidence to support the claim of special treatment for Dubya, but the onslaught of indignant wingnut whinging was relentless. Rather left CBS in a state of semi-disgrace and semi-heroism, all because of a font.

.

Sixteen years later, we see furious debates over factoids. They come from all points on the political compass and they are always disputed by the opposite political orientation. As of this summer, the two biggest issues to hit our country in decades are disrupting everything – the pandemic and the various demonstrations that keep raging as millions of people are out of work and have nothing better to do than raise hell about how full of shit our society remains.

Invariably these factoid arguments are snarky and insulting, filled with demands to “document” assertions — even as the topic at hand is often the unreliability of “documentation” as Rather found out the hard way. Everything about the public health crisis is subject to intense internet debate from Instant Experts who know precisely what has been done wrong in the struggle against a plague.

.

1. The disease – where did it come from? Nobody really knows, but there are lots of theories, often expounded as fact.

2. The disease – is it just one thing? I have seen assertions that it is five distinct things.

3. Testing – is there one or many different tests? How does a test work?

4. Testing – are the tests accurate? Are there false positives or negatives reported?

5. Cases – what does that mean? Hospitalization, non-life threatening complaints treated at the patient’s home? Any positive test?

6. Cases – how are those “cases” reported and to whom?

7. Cases -- should all those subcategories be lumped together?

8. Treatment – are there any effective treatments of infected patients? What are they? How are successful therapies communicated to other health care providers?

9. Herd Immunity – what is it?

10. Individual immunity – can one catch the disease twice? Or can you catch each of five varieties?

.

I have a Bachelors degree and I graduated from the University of Texas School of Law. I have been a politics junky my whole life and I am the obnoxious kind of guy who shouts out the correct answers while watching Jeopardy. I confess I never gave any one of those questions a second of thought before March 11, 2020 when the National Basketball Association decided to shut down.

Yet I am surrounded on the internet by hundreds and hundreds of epidemiology experts who know all the numbers, what they mean, which numbers are reliable and which ones aren’t. Threads on this board run to dozens of Comments, furiously debating the direction in which numbers are “moving.” (Talk about reifying a metaphor!)

Totally separate from the substance of the Pandemic Debates, ever since Buckhead set the internet on fire with his typeface factoid, I have been suspicious of such Instant Expertise Of The Moment. We live in the Era of Fake News and Brockian Sock Puppets.

On the other hand, on this board and others I have seen a few superb yet modestly argued discussions of the various problems we are facing. Such pieces acknowledge that this is a novel phenomenon. There is no “scientific” answer to the challenge it poses because real science is struggling with it. Amid the flotsam and jetsam of “data” collected in unverifiable ways, such articles try to illuminate rather than condemn the allegedly ignorant or malevolent characters who do not support the favored way to fight the disease.

What distinguishes Buckhead and other programmed internet manipulators is that their factoids are tools as they employ lawyer’s logic. You start with the conclusion and then you assemble what facts and factoids you can muster in support of that conclusion and then you go to digital war – mainly accusing everybody who contradicts the agenda you are pushing of being liars, immoral, fascistic, murderous, heartless and otherwise contemptable.

It seems to me that factoids are such a popular internet topic of discussion because they absolve us all of debating the underlying issues with each other. Since we are all novices with respect to the novel disease tormenting us now, we really don't have much of anything intelligent to say to one another. Instead we can wax indignant about how “brainwashed” our opponents are, without ever having to make a coherent political argument.

There is no democracy or transparency in making the decisions that rule our lives now. It is all presented to us for our cheerleading or booing pleasure, with us having nothing whatsoever to do with whether we shut down or open up or anywhere in between. Just like the perpetual wars all over the world, we are told what to think about those decisions, but we have no say -- direct or indirect -- on anything.

How convenient for the existing decision makers that we spend our energy arguing with each other about utterly non-political questions like how do we calculate the number of people infected. Just like the typeface that kept Bush in office, this organized factoid spinning suggests to me that "numbers" are going to be the cause of Trump's defenestration. Good riddance to bad rubbish -- which is exactly what the donor class wants us to think.

.

I don’t care if factoid spinning is pro or con, left or right, religious or atheistic, carnivore or vegetarian. I get the feeling of wanting to counter bogus factoids — I did it myself in the Rather Case. But it is yet another example of the incomprehensible shallowness of our political culture.

And, it is a sure tell of a troll. Anybody who posts mainly factoid spin is definitely a troll, probably paid by David Brock.