How Bad a Joke Are “Alternative Facts?”

What you see is often not what you get.

The now infamous video of a confrontation between a Catholic high school student and a Native American elder near the Lincoln Memorial on January 18th shook the cable news landscape like the launch of a Saturn Five rocket. Much of what was left after the first 48 hours of media conflagration was a lot of hot dust and scorched earth. Many were outraged, some were burned, many were confused, and no one was happy.

(I’ve embedded the initially-released video at the very end of this post.)

After a cool-down of a few days, some perceptive commentators noted that what went most terribly wrong in the immediate aftermath of the incident was the dependence on one three -and-a-half minute video, shot from one angle with the camera held almost perfectly still throughout, to convey truth.  It was that video— and one intense image in particular pulled from it—that triggered a righteous media blast from the Left.  A tweetstorm erupted, blown initially from the Left and soon answered by gusts from the Right, while more, and increasingly ambiguous, information flowed in.

As it turned out, there were several other videos that cast the event in a different light, or lights, more friendly to the students. CNN had to walk back their first, hastily-released employment of the video to depict callow MAGA-hat-wearing  teenagers threatening and disrespecting a Native America elder.

An exhaustive, interpretive blow-by-blow of the event by Caitlin Flanagan can be found in The Atlantic here, entitled “The Media Botched the Covington Catholic Story.” Flanagan heaps scorn on CNN and liberal celebrities. She defends the smiling white boy in the MAGA hat as possibly being “the one person who tried to be respectful of [the Native American elder] . . . and for this he has been the most harshly treated of any of the people involved.” (You can find this arresting speculation in Flanagan’s piece about two-thirds of the way down, near the end of the paragraph that begins, “Now we may look at the viral video. . . . “)

The thrust of Flanagan’s article is a charge against journalistic malpractice by left-leaning media, pundits, and celebrities, with CNN and the New York Times in particular getting raked over hot satirical coals.  Along the way, she raises the question of how truth may be extracted from multiple viewpoints: can those viewpoints, combined, converge on the truth, or is the truth forever split among the eyes of many beholders? Flanagan’s answer is the latter—at least in the immediate aftermath, while the incident still glares in the rear-view mirrors.

Caitlin Flanagan, incidentally, writes prolifically about women’s issues. She tries to be politically even-handed. It’s a puzzle how well that works for her, since her counter-reactions to excesses of the Left often drive her strangely far into the Right.

The point here is not that Flanagan is right or wrong in her analysis of the Covington School incident, but it is about how multiple viewpoints lead to multiple  interpretations—even when the viewpoints are as true to life as a camera lens.

Form shaping perception: fakes and deepfakes

Ian Bogost, also in The Atlantic, homes in on the deceptiveness of video—any video.  In referring to the Covington School video, he says:

Despite the widespread creation and dissemination of video online, people still seem to believe that cameras depict the world as it really is; the truth comes from finding the right material from the right camera. That idea is mistaken, and it’s bringing forth just as much animosity as the polarization that is thought to produce the conflicts cameras record. [my emphasis]

Bogost goes on to discuss the crucial impact of form—how photographic elements are “selected, edited, and re-presented”—on the way content is received, felt, and understood.  In a slightly different context, he treats in the same vein the filming of journalist Jim Acosta fending off a White House aide who was attempting to take the mike from him. There he adds a warning about “deepfakes,” the digital manipulation of video “to construct new footage that never really took place.” That manipulation, in the Acosta case, was done by the political Right, but the Right is not the exclusive purveyor of deepfakes.

(BTW, note the anachronistic use of “footage” carried over from the days of analog film, applied to digital imagery. Reminds you of using “carbon copy” to refer to a duplicate.)

We are conscious of how our perceptions are manipulated in a clearly imaginative work such as a movie, whereas we tend to take raw “real-life” videos at face value, especially as taken by amateurs—”you can’t fool the camera.”  Well, you can’t fool the camera, but the camera can fool you.

(For Bogost on Covington, see  Stop Trusting Viral Videos , and on Acosta see Video Doesn’t Capture Truth.)

It’s one thing to weigh multiple perspectives. Team Trump wants us to weigh multiple truths. 

The many names of Truth: Rudy Giuliani defends dishonesty

Q: How many truths does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: If it is sufficiently twisted, just one. It breaks the bulb, and the result is darkness.

It’s now a commonplace that we live in a post-truth age. The emotionally and intellectually stunted current occupant of the most powerful office in the world lies compulsively, and expects his underlings to lie for him.  Remarkably, they do so even when the lie is so blatant you’d think the tellers might either hang their heads in shame, or, just as (un)likely, burst out in maniacal laughter.  The term “fake news” is invoked by politicians on both Left and Right so often that it has lost its punch and become merely tiresome.

It’s unfortunate that the flood of deceptions channeled through social media, and even conventional media, has become massive enough that you are tempted to resign yourself to a world where truth is a lonely island surrounded by oceans of falsity.

Refreshingly, within the last year some of the social media giants have sought with some success to quell the most vile conspiracy theorists. But the less vile, or the less powerful although still vile, or even the well-meaning but criminally ignorant, still ply their way in  toxic seas of misinformation. The Theory of Evolution is false. Global Warming is a hoax. An embryo is a person. Vaccines cause autism. Illegal immigrants supported by George Soros are swarming up from the Mexican border through our nation’s midsection, selling heroin along the way, thieving from law-abiding citizens and raping women as they go, from the Rio Grande northward 1,500 miles to find Minnesotan vacation homes to squat in. Homosexuality is unnatural. Homosexuality is satanic. The Deep State is trying to destroy our country from within. Islamists are occupying American towns and imposing Sharia Law. There’s a government plot to take away our guns.

Rudy Giuliani, running interference for the Trump team, was much derided for telling Chuck Todd that “truth isn’t truth” on Meet the Press in August of last year.

Touché, Chuck. Chuck Todd scored big with the Left when he suckered Giuliani into this blunder.  But if you’ve watched the exchange framing this apparent nonsense, you can’t help but appreciate that Giuliani was getting at the proposition that finding the complete truth may require gathering multiple versions of the central truth.  That’s a task familiar to a former prosecutor—a role that, fantastical as it seems now, many experts swear Giuliani was once really good at. It’s difficult, which is why Robert Mueller is spending so much time triangulating (more like quintupulating) testimonies in the Russia-Trump probe.

Alternative facts: Kelleyanne Conway’s assault on the English language. 

Kellyanne Conway was also ridiculed for defending Trump with the imperishable oxymoron “alternative facts.” But, quick! What’s the speed of light? If you answered “186,00 miles per second” you would be speaking one of many “alternative facts,”  depending on what medium you’re looking through. 186,000 miles per second is (approximately) the speed of light in a vacuum. That’s what we typically learn in school; but it’s slower in Earth’s atmosphere, and in water light glides along at a leisurely 139,500 miles per second. In a diamond, it crawls at a mere 77,500 miles per second.

I’m playing games here with “alternative,” but that’s just the game that Kellyanne Conway plays regularly. Kellyanne works to pull us into a universe as distinct from reality as a vacuum is from a diamond.

Kellyanne wants to twist “alternative” into the socket that is more properly labeled “optional,” as in, you can fly from New York to Los Angeles through Chicago or, optionally, Atlanta. These are “alternatives” in the logical sense that if you choose one of them you can’t at the same time choose the other. Once you choose, your path is fixed. But Kellyanne’s tactic is to point to the GOAL as what is fixed, and the “alternatives” are whatever you choose to believe. Does it really matter whether you flew through Atlanta or Chicago as long as you got to Los Angeles? In the case of the Trump team, the GOAL is the notion, believed true by many of his followers, that Donald Trump is a Great Man.  Whatever alternative it takes to get to that goal is a lesser concern. Does it really matter if Trump’s inaugural crowd was not as large as Obama’s, as long as you believe Trump is the hero, and Obama the dog?

 

Is the joke on us?

Millions of us laughed at Kellyanne’s “alternative facts,” but the mindset behind them, of ends justifying means, is what underlies both the Trump team’s war on the media and contempt for the rule of law.  The propaganda she doles out weds suspicion of the press to suspicion of the “Deep State.” Any “alternative fact” that fits that paradigm hardens the Right’s conception of the President being under attack by forces of darkness.

Kellyanne is onto something we can lose sight of in our smugness about what we perceive as stupidity of Trump defenders.  She, unfortunately for the American public, is not stupid, even if her mouth sometimes gets ahead of her brain. Her word-twisting captures enough of the truth to persuade anyone who’s on her wavelength. They don’t have to be stupid, they just have to share a body of beliefs. Good old confirmation bias, instantly available, and she taps into it without missing a beat. She’s more dangerous than Stephen Miller, who wears his ill-will on his sleeve, because she seems so earnest in defending a warped version of virtue against unscrupulous media.

For his part, Rudy Giuliani is more than the buffoonish role he has cheerfully embraced.  One can’t help wondering if, under the grin of a clown, the shrewd mind of an experienced prosecutor is still at work. In a courtroom, diversion can be as effective as presenting evidence. Is he laughing at the Left for laughing at him, all the while his undermining of truth erodes public confidence in the Mueller investigation? Does he go home at night and, sitting down to a lavish dinner of conspiracy theories, exclaim, “Ha! Got ’em again!”

It is telling that a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that only “half of Americans have confidence Mueller’s final report will be fair and even-handed.” Only 24% have “a great deal of confidence,” and 22% have “none at all.” See Poll finds doubt of Mueller’s even-handedness . We can count on social media for much of this skepticism, but those who still have some shreds of respect for Rudy Giuliani  might still give him credence, and that’s not funny at all.

BELOW:  the video addressed by Caitlin Flanagan