A Short Handbook for Confronting Liars

Bruce Bartlett, The Truth Matters: A Citizen's Guide to Separating Facts From Lies and Stopping Fake News In Its Tracks

Reality exists. This didn’t used to be a controversial thesis statement; people of good conscience could disagree about how to interpret facts, or how to situate facts in a larger narrative, but debates about what constituted an actual fact stayed in Platonic discussions, where they belonged. But the increasing decentralization of news-gathering has separated citizens from objective reality, and we’ve “elected” a president who openly disdains facts. How can engaged citizens regain the factual landscape?

Bruce Bartlett started as an economic advisor to the Reagan Administration, and later retired to a lucrative conservative think-tank career. But he quit movement conservatism during the George W. Bush years, when he claims his former party became unmoored from reality. The current climate of buffet-style news sourcing, coupled with polarized voters seeking confirmation of their prejudices, tweaks his scholarly hackles. He wants you, the voter, to care about sources as keenly as he does.

This book offers a pocket-sized primer to source checking and factual verification in news. Some of it is very basic: does more than one source agree that something happened? Does an online source use links to verify claims of fact? Other pointers get more technical. Readers need to know context for facts, rather than fact dumps, for instance. Journalists who use orphaned statistics and unsourced quotes are probably actively confusing the issues, rather than clarifying.

Journalism is a profession, with its own practices and conventions. Though chin-pullers like me have lamented the professionalization of journalism, this has nevertheless helped working reporters build practices of internal verification and fact-checking into their business. But the conventions also obscure core practices in ways we can’t always see, a fact fake journalists use, judo-style, against us. A 101-level familiarity with journalistic practices among news audiences could open our eyes to objective truth versus baloney.

Bruce Bartlett

Technology has complicated the news distribution business. As 2016 proved, inflammatory lies travel quickly, and polarize the electorate. But the same technologies that spread lies, also make citizen fact-checking more possible. Much that turned the 2016 election into a national shitshow, like Pizzagate or false quotes attributed to either candidate, could be debunked through the Internet. Though straight Google searches often return widespread lies, more specialized tools, like Google Scholar or ProQuest, provide verifiable facts.

And some of Bartlett’s pointers involve readers acting in reflective, informed manners. One major source of fake news has been ordinary people resharing specious, unsourced claims because it confirms their pre-existing biases, or because a clickbait title inflames passions. Bartlett asks us to ensure the “facts” we use, and distribute, aren’t wrong. But that requires us to periodically check and make sure we aren’t wrong. A good debater first assumes: “I should double-check myself, too.”

Bartlett provides here a brief introduction to research techniques used in social sciences. Though he doesn’t get into the premises of original research (contact your local graduate school about that), this volume, sized to fit most purses and blazer pockets, provides up-to-date guidance in checking secondary sources and existing fact databases. Instructors could incorporate this book into high-school and college courses in journalism, political science, history, economics, and even behavioral psychology. One could hope, anyway.

This entire enterprise, admittedly, assumes readers want to screen reports to determine facts, and their context. In other words, Bartlett’s fact-checking process requires people engaged enough to spend time researching instead of passively watching TV. This isn’t a foregone conclusion; some people enjoy shouting others down, the schadenfreude they receive from hurting others and making them feel stupid. I wish Bartlett included a chapter in here on knowing when it’s time to cut provocateurs loose.

Not that Bartlett doesn’t have occasional partisan lapses. Early on, he describes Fox News as a centrist alternative to left-leaning mainstream news. This description would surprise Rupert Murdoch, who, in an interview given about the time this book debuted, described his baby as “conservative.” He also lumps satirists like The Daily Show and other late-nighters, who broadly lean left,  into “fake news,” which is specious since satirists admit their principles. Liars and jokers aren’t interchangeable.

This only proves that even scholars and fact-checkers need a skeptical eye occasionally. Informed readers should never be passive, because we’re already part of that reality which, I already noted, exists. Reading the news should change us, but we should challenge the news. The relationship is reciprocal, and requires constant testing and refinement. That’s missing in the “post-truth era.” The techniques Bartlett provides are slow and unglamorous; they’re also real, which is what we need.



On a related theme, see also:
A Short Handbook for Confronting Dictators