Lazarus Austin is a junior majoring in history. He can be contacted at [email protected].In today’s world, known as the Information Age, information and misinformation are floating around everywhere. Within the blink of an eye, we can find the answer to almost any question.
When it comes to news, people update themselves from a variety of sources: the Internet, newspapers, TV or radio. Many people get their news from political commentators such as Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Al Franken and Michael Moore.
These partisan political commentators can be dangerous.
Their followers, however, can be even more dangerous.
Day after day, they feed us information to back up their claims and views. They are motivated both to entertain and convince people of a predetermined viewpoint.
In order to sound credible, they have to support their arguments with evidence. As a result, they scan the information world for anything and everything that will agree with their views.
As a result of this “predetermined” mindset, information turns into misinformation. They stoop to making outrageous exaggerations, selectively choosing supportive information and sometimes even lying. Of course, much of the time, this process is unintentional or unconscious. However, that does not change the fact that it is pure misinformation and wrong. Also, both parties are guilty of this. I’m not choosing sides here.
Although I consider myself independent and don’t like choosing a label, many people consider me to be conservative. So, for the sake of this article, I will only bash conservatives.
Let’s start with talk radio, which we all know heavily leans to the right. That’s why so many liberals want the “Unfair” Doctrine re-enacted. In particular, let’s talk about Rush Limbaugh.
Limbaugh has supposedly been so untruthful that the heads of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a media watch group, have published a book alleging more than 100 false or foolish statements by Limbaugh.
Does that sound absurd? You wouldn’t think that he has 13.5 million listeners a week (the highest for talk radio) with that kind of record. I just finished reading his first book over Christmas break. Do you think I checked all his endnotes for accuracy? Heck no.
When people are listening to Limbaugh’s or anybody else’s show, they don’t check the information. However, can we blame them? There is so much information and evidence out there that we would go berserk if we checked it all. I hardly have enough time to read the book let alone check sources.
So as long as a talk show host gets most of his evidence right, how would we know when he’s wrong unless we checked everything? The answer is we don’t take everything for granted, and we don’t ignore the criticisms of others such as FAIR.
For example, many Republicans believe Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet. About a month ago, I noticed a satirical comment by Ann Coulter, the scourge of both liberals and conservatives alike. “Al Gore was a vaguely gay, morbidly obese former Clinton administration official who raised campaign cash from Buddhist monks and claimed he invented the Internet,” she said.
Generalizations like these are too often taken for granted by most Republican or conservative readers who don’t make the effort to double-check their history.
The truth is that Al Gore never claimed he “invented the Internet.” He was, however, very instrumental in passing legislation that helped “create” the Internet.
Another point of contention is the ostensible media bias. I won’t argue about its overall bias but instead refer to the 2000 presidential election campaign.
Although I was only 10 years old then (yes, I am only 18), I vividly remember everyone complaining about the left-leaning press supporting Bush (no doubt supported by Limbaugh in both his books and on his show).
In fact, according to a study done by the Pew Charitable Trusts Project for Excellence in Journalism, Bush received twice as many positive articles as Gore while also receiving fewer negative articles; neutral articles were also listed.
Examples like this are only the tip of the iceberg. Rhetoric by political commentators is all too often unchecked.
Listeners are also not confined to an underground minority. The Pew Research Center says 25 percent of people regularly listen to Rush Limbaugh or watch “The O’Reilly Factor,” two very partisan shows. These attacks on reason by rhetoric are possible because many of their followers are gullible.
Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and their political opposites are too careless about the truth, and, unfortunately, as Bryan Keefer of Spinsanity put it, these political pundits “reveal something sad and important about the state of the country: Those with a talent for inflammatory rhetoric rather than facts have their fingers on the pulse of contemporary political debate.