"We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers," says Neil Newhouse, a Romney pollster.
A half dozen fact-checking organizations and websites have refuted Romney's claims that Obama removed the work requirement from the welfare law and will cut Medicare benefits by $216 billion.
Last Sunday's New York Times even reported on its front page that Romney has been "falsely charging" President Obama with removing the work requirement. Those are strong words from the venerable Times. Yet Romney is still making the false charge. Ads containing it continue to be aired.
Presumably the Romney campaign continues its false claims because they're effective. But this raises a more basic question: How can they remain effective when they've been so overwhelmingly discredited by the media?
The answer is the Republican Party has developed three means of bypassing the mainstream media and its fact-checkers.
The first is by repeating big lies so often in TV spots -- financed by a mountain of campaign money -- that the public can no longer recall (if it ever knew) that the mainstream media and its fact-checkers have found them to be lies.
The second is by discrediting the mainstream media -- asserting it's run by "liberal elites" that can't be trusted to tell the truth. "I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans," Newt Gingrich charged at a Republican debate last January, in what's become a standard GOP attack line.
The third is by using its own misinformation outlets -- led by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and his yell-radio imitators, book publisher Regnery, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, along with a right-wing blogosphere -- to spread the lies, or at least spread doubt about what's true.
Together, these three mechanisms are creating a parallel Republican universe of Orwellian dimension -- where anything can be asserted, where pollsters and political advisers are free to create whatever concoction of lies will help elect their candidate, and where "fact-checkers" are as irrelevant and intrusive as is the truth.
Democracy cannot thrive in such a place. To the contrary, history teaches that this is where demagogues take root.
The Romney campaign has decided it won't be dictated by fact-checkers. But a society without trusted arbiters of what is true and what is false is vulnerable to every lie imaginable.
ROBERT B. REICH, Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, was Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written thirteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock" and "The Work of Nations." His latest is an e-book, "Beyond Outrage." He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.
Follow Robert Reich on Twitter: www.twitter.com/RBReich
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 |
|
| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Electoral Votes (270 to win) |
332 | 206 |
| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Total | 65,899,660 | 60,932,152 |
| Percent | 51.1% | 47.2% |
| Democrats* | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Current Senate | 53 | 47 |
| Seats gained or lost | +2 | -2 |
| New Total | 55 | 45 |
| Democrats | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Seats won | 201 | 234 |
The media is "supposed" to be the watchdog of the American republic.
Doesn’t' the media realize that in the quest for justice and freedom, it's the media that is the voice of the oppressed?
I cannot begin to comprehend what it must have been like, hiding in a bunker or a cellar somewhere in occupied Europe, listening to the BBC on short-wave, waiting to hear your orders, in code.
But I do comprehend the magnitude of todays events. The money that is behind Romney/Ryan - is no better than the industrialists, whom on promises by Hitler, that if we stay out of the war in Europe - would be rewarded with free slave labor and access to Europe's natural resources. Imagine, American industrialists consorting with the enemy to make a buck.
It's just as important then, as it is now, that the media, insist on the truth. Media, step up and ask the hard questions. Why on earth do you think that Romney/Ryan want to do away with NPR/PBS - because they do the hard-hitting stories in their respective formats.
FRONTLINE, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/storm/talk/ is straightforward, and naturally, Romney/Ryan want to get rid of it.
Why can we not get people to see the truth about the GOP lies???
It is incredible that people not only believe the lies but also spread them like a contagious virus!
There is a tradition of repeating the same lie to the point of total saturation and finally belief.
I do not like the company Mitt is keeping. No not at all.
Raise our voice. Vote loudly. Verify your vote. BE SURE.
Romney has got to GO.
That's not to say the willingness to lie for their party hasn't grown though. Even when the GOP was lying America into invading Iraq, if you listened carefully to the exact wording they used, a great deal of it was technically true even if the clear impression it gave was false, or leaving out details that would completely change the meaning of what they did say.
But at this point, the Republican party has dropped all pretense of honesty. I suppose you can't blame them when all their efforts at plausible deniability turned out to have been a waste of effort, as the news media never held them responsible for their deceptions at all.
But more troubling than one party of blatant liars, is the extent to which their voters believe those lies. Try to have a discussion with a right winger these days, and you'll quickly find that they've built their beliefs not on a different set of perspectives, but on a different set of facts. And nothing you can say or show them will convince them that there's even a chance of their "facts" being wrong.
A country with tens of millions of people who proudly ignore anything that does not support what they already believe... that's not just sad, it's dangerous.
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Fanned. That is IT.