(Dobbs) If Someone Says They Know What's Going To Happen, Walk Away
Once unprincipled opportunists put things out there, no one can put them back in the box.
“What do you think is gonna happen?”
Whether it’s about the outcome of next week’s elections or the war in Ukraine, I’m asked that a lot. I suppose some assume that as a journalist who has covered wars and politics, I have some inside track on the variables that will determine the denouement of both.
I don’t. Maybe more to the point, no one does. In the war, Russia’s president’s temperament has been as unpredictable as Ukraine’s surprising successes. In the elections, preference polls have been as dubious as voters’ distressing decisions.
So what I usually say when asked to guess about how things will turn out is, “I don’t have a clue, I’m not in the prediction business.” As I wrote just four days ago in the commentary “Lies, Lies, and More Lies,” I always tried only to report on what I’d seen with my own two eyes, or at the very least, what I’d gotten verified by multiple sources I knew I could trust. There is a place in our lives for speculation, but there is a difference between saying “Here’s what might happen,” and “Here’s what will happen.”
Think of it this way: if your meteorologist says, “It’s going to be sunny today, or it’s going to rain,” that’s what might happen. If the meteorologist says, “It’s going to be sunny,” that’s a prediction about what will happen. Except, sometimes it doesn’t. And remember, weather forecasters are making predictions based on science!
There is no science about wars. There is no science about politics.
The trouble is, plenty of Americans with a megaphone— politicians, commentators, activists, even hard news journalists— too often pretend they do have a clue, and speak with certainty as if they do have science behind them. But usually, at best, their answers are based on extrapolation. Occasionally on inference. Periodically on utter guesswork. And worst and most dangerous of all, sometimes on advocacy for an outcome they are pushing.
Which leads me to a report two weeks ago from the credible polling firm Gallup. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Gallup found that only 32% of Americans trusted the mass media to report the news “fully, accurately, and fairly,” the lowest trust figure it ever recorded. This year, it’s only two percentage points higher. So whether rounding up or down, only one out of every three Americans trusts what they hear or read in the news. And it doesn’t matter where they get it: this applies to television, newspapers, and the internet.
Digging deeper, Gallup says that even among independents— the people who presumably don’t have a powerful predilection for either political party— only 27% trust the news while more than 40% say they have no trust at all.
This saddens me. My business, television news, used to be most trusted news source in America. That’s how CBS News, which for years had the highest ratings of the three legacy networks, was able to promote its anchorman Walter Cronkite as “the most trusted man in America.” But that was before Fox News, Newsmax, InfoWars, Breitbart and Drudge and Bannon and Limbaugh and conservatives in general marshaled their forces to discredit traditional media. It didn’t advocate their narrative, so they went all-in on advocacy journalism of their own. For the purpose of balance, I’ll add that longtime critics have always charged that traditional “mainstream” media is an advocate for liberal causes, which only means that now, they say, the playing field is even.
But the problem with trust, and distrust, is more complex. At least some of the blame falls on social media. Take as an example last week’s attack in San Francisco on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the Speaker of the House. A rumor began to circulate within a day of the assault that Pelosi’s attacker was a male prostitute and Pelosi was his gay lover and the two men had gotten into a fight. From all reasonable indications— including statements to the police from the invader himself— it’s not true. The city’s police chief says, “There is absolutely no evidence that Mr. Pelosi knew this man. As a matter of fact, the evidence indicates the exact opposite.”
But the fiction of the malevolent canard didn’t stop it from spreading. Which comes back to trust. How can people know who to believe or what to believe when a story like that is disseminated, then even mocked, by prominent if increasingly disreputable figures in the public eye?
New Twitter owner Elon Musk is only the latest entry in these pernicious propaganda wars. Relying on a right-wing publication out of California that claimed during the 2016 election that Hillary Clinton was dead and had been replaced on the campaign trail by a “body double,” Musk retweeted a link to a story the same organization put out last week that Paul Pelosi’s attacker was a male prostitute and that the two men had struggled over the hammer that injured the Speaker’s husband during a drunken brawl. “There is a tiny possibility,” Musk recklessly added, “there might be more to this story than meets the eye.”
The Republican governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, had the heartless gall, all in a single sentence, to connect the homicidal hammer attack on Paul Pelosi with his own partisan rancor toward the Speaker: “There’s no room for violence anywhere, but we’re going to send her back to be with him in California.” The first half was the decent thing to say. The second half was a disgrace.
Donald Trump Jr., his father’s spitting image in more ways than one, pathetically put a portrayal on Trump Sr.’s “Truth Social” website the night before Halloween of a pair of underwear and a hammer with the words, “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.” Equally pathetic, he had more than 5,000 “likes” (and a thousand “shares”) almost immediately.
Once these things are out there, no one can put them back in the box.
A professor who studies extremism and polarization at American University in Washington, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, told CNN, “We have a population that is unable to discern what is true and what’s not, and this spreading of misinformation from credible sources undermines that.”
It’s probably fair to say, that’s their goal.
So what’s going to happen when the results of the election come in next week? Since we must be wary of disinformation and we can’t trust the polls, the only trustworthy thing I (or anyone else) can say to you is, I don’t have a clue. But there are poisonous forces out there who, in the interest of manipulating public opinion, will tell you they do. Don’t believe them. Wait for the science. Wait for the facts. From what we’ve seen, they’ll probably dispute those, too. But we’ll know better.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 36-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Once it was learned that sensationalism sold better than plain old facts, the cat was out
of the box. These days they have taken it to a new level without need for truth or any sort of
honorable intention necessary.
The book " Extraordinary popular delusions and the Madness od Crowds" is worth reading to get an understanding of the madness of crowds nowadays.