True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society

220 Pages·2008·0.96 MB·English

by  Farhad Manjoo

Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1 - “Reality” Is Splitting
Chapter 2 - The New Tribalism: Swift Boats and the Power of Choosing
Chapter 3 - Trusting Your Senses: Selective Perception and 9/11
Chapter 4 - Questionable Expertise: The Stolen Election and the Men Who Push
It
Chapter 5 - The Twilight of Objectivity, or What’s the Matter with Lou Dobbs?
Chapter 6 - “Truthiness” Everywhere
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Copyright © 2008 by Farhad Manjoo. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Manjoo, Farhad, date.
True enough : learning to live in a post-fact society / Farhad Manjoo.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-470-05010-1 (cloth) 1. Truthfulness and falsehood—United States. 2. Deception—United
States. 3. Communication in politics—United States. I. Title.
BJ1421.M’.3—dc22
2007044573
To Mom and Dad
INTRODUCTION

Why Facts No Longer Matter

This book dances upon a paradox: at the same time that technology and
globalization has pushed the world together, it is driving our minds apart. From
above, the three hundred million citizens of the United States look like clones, or
Matrix-like drones, each of us plugged snugly into a common consumerist grid.
A single corporation, Wal-Mart, serves 90 percent of the American population. A
ubiquitous national brand of coffee keeps us buzzing. Happy-looking strip malls
of similar architecture dot our suburbs, our cities growing nearly
indistinguishable from one another. Parachute into suburban Atlanta and you’ll
find yourself looking for the freeways you remember from Los Angeles or
Houston or Phoenix.

Yet for all our shared shopping experiences, we are not morphing into a
common people—not as a nation and not as a planet. True Enough chronicles a
society’s splintering. I am not describing the oversimplified cable-news trope of
the red-blue electoral divide. What I address is more drastic, and more acute.
The story has its roots in the digital revolution, which has given us more
information, and more power over that information, than seems believable. On
the Web, television, radio, and all manner of new devices, today you can watch,
listen to, and read what you want, whenever you want; seek out and discuss, in
exhaustive and insular detail, the kind of news that pleases you; and indulge your
political, social, or scientific theories, whether sophisticated or naive, extremist
or banal, grounded in reality or so far out you’re floating in an asteroid belt,
among people who feel exactly the same way.

In the last few years, pollsters and political researchers have begun to
document a fundamental shift in the way Americans are thinking about the news.
No longer are we merely holding opinions different from one another; we’re also
holding different facts. Increasingly, our arguments aren’t over what we should
be doing—in the Iraq War, in the war on terrorism, on global warming, or about
any number of controversial subjects—but, instead, over what is happening.
Political scientists have characterized our epoch as one of heightened
polarization; now, as I’ll document, the creeping partisanship has begun to
distort our very perceptions about what is “real” and what isn’t. Indeed, you can
go so far as to say we’re now fighting over competing versions of reality. And it
is more convenient than ever before for some of us to live in a world built out of
our own facts.

Late in April 2005, Eliza Jane Scovill, a three-and-a-half-year-old girl who lived
with her parents in the Los Angeles suburb of Van Nuys, came down with the
sniffles. Within a few days, her breathing became shallow and she developed a
phlegmy cough. Her mother, Christine Maggiore, took the girl to a pediatrician,
who found nothing serious and prescribed no medication. The next week,
Maggiore asked a second pediatrician to examine Eliza Jane. He suspected an
ear infection but felt it would clear up without antibiotics. Soon Eliza Jane’s
cough subsided, but when Maggiore sought the advice of a third doctor, he found
fluid in the girl’s right eardrum, and, also suspecting an ear infection, prescribed
a simple antibiotic, amoxicillin. On Sunday, May 15, Eliza Jane grew pale, her
fever shot up to 101 degrees, and she vomited several times. Late that night,
Maggiore called a doctor. While she was on the phone, Eliza Jane suddenly
collapsed. She stopped breathing. Maggiore would later tell the county coroner
that her daughter had “crumpled like a paper doll.”

The doctors who examined Eliza Jane in the days before she died had
proceeded as if she were a normal little girl. In fact, they all should have
suspected that she might be ill with something far more grave than a pediatric
ear infection. In 1992, Eliza Jane’s mother had tested positive for HIV. In the
years since her diagnosis, Maggiore, unlike most HIV patients, had declined the
antiretroviral medications that have been hailed for staving off death from AIDS.
Instead, Maggiore had come to accept the unconventional views of a set of
activists who argue that HIV does not cause AIDS. Indeed, during the 1990s,
Maggiore became one of the nation’s leading proponents of this idea. She
founded Alive & Well AIDS Alternatives, a nonprofit organization devoted to
questioning the “validity of most common assumptions about HIV and AIDS,”
and has attracted enormous attention. The rock band the Foo Fighters once held
a benefit concert for Maggiore’s group. Her self-published book, What If
Everything You Thought You Knew About AIDS Was Wrong? has sold 50,000
copies.
Maggiore advises HIV-positive pregnant women to avoid taking drugs that
doctors say reduce the risk of transmitting the virus to a developing fetus. She is
also a proponent of breast-feeding, which researchers have found is a major
vehicle of transmission of the virus from an infected mother to her child.
Maggiore breastfed both her children—Charles, who was born in 1997, and
Eliza, born in 2001, both of whom Maggiore conceived naturally with her
husband, Robin Scovill, a filmmaker who shares her beliefs about AIDS. Neither
child was tested for HIV, and Maggiore maintains that Eliza Jane was killed by
an acute allergic reaction to the amoxicillin she began taking the day before she
died. AIDS, that is, was not a factor. “I am a devastated, broken, grieving
mother,” she told one reporter, “but I am not second-guessing or questioning my
understanding of the issue.”

Two days after Eliza Jane died, a medical examiner at the Los Angeles County
coroner’s office performed an autopsy on the girl’s body. Eliza Jane was just
under 3 feet tall and weighed 29 pounds, underweight and short for her age. Her
thymus gland was markedly atrophied, a suggestion of HIV infection; the
suggestion was confirmed by a neuropathologist, who saw protein markers of the
virus while examining cells from Eliza Jane’s brain. White patches were found
on the lobes of each of her lungs. When the lung tissue was examined under a
microscope, doctors saw an opportunistic fungal infection known as
Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. PCP is a leading cause of death in patients
with advanced HIV. The medical examiner concluded that Eliza Jane Scovill had
died of AIDS.

The death of a little girl in Los Angeles may not look immediately germane to
the thesis of this book: that the limitless choice we now enjoy over the
information we get about our world has loosened our grip on what is—and isn’t
—true. But consider this: according to AIDS specialists, Eliza Jane Scovill’s
condition was highly treatable. Thanks to antiretroviral medication and
aggressive therapies for infections, middle-class toddlers in postmillennial
America simply do not die any longer of AIDS. What killed Eliza Jane, then,
was not only a disease but more precisely the lack of notice and care for a
disease—a denial, even, that her condition existed. What killed her was
disregard for scientific fact. It was the certainty with which her parents jettisoned
the views of experts in favor of another idea, their own idea, far removed from
observable reality. It was a willingness to trade in what was true for what was
merely true enough.
The “controversy” over HIV’s role in AIDS will seem, to most readers, no
controversy at all—those who espouse such ideas can look as loony as folks who
wonder whether Americans really did land on the moon. But we are all just a
mouse and a modem away from a world that sees the disease very differently.
HIV doubts, on the Web, carry the vestments of science—there are AIDS-
questioning journals that ape traditional academic publications, apparently well-
credentialed experts who say they’re actively researching the disease, and
reports of legitimate-sounding successful experiments becoming novel
treatments. Denial reaches beyond the Web, too. Anti-AIDS activists routinely
cross the globe to give lectures and hold symposia, and several have published
books pushing their ideas. In the spring of 2006, Harper’s magazine published a
lengthy article by Celia Farber, a journalist who has long been skeptical of the
HIV thesis, in which she put forward Peter Duesberg’s claims on the disease.

In 2004, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control staked out gay pride
events in Baltimore, Detroit, Oakland, and San Francisco. They asked more than
a thousand men their thoughts about AIDS and HIV. What did the men believe
was the cause of AIDS? How dangerous did they think the disease was? What
the researchers found is almost hard to stomach: Among minorities, conspiracy
beliefs were ascendant. More than half of the African American men surveyed
did not believe HIV causes AIDS. Forty-eight percent of the Hispanic men and
more than a quarter of the white men also questioned the link. Another survey
conducted that year by the RAND Corporation and researchers at Oregon State
University found that black men who espoused such theories were far less likely
than people who did subscribe to the HIV theory to regularly use condoms.

The high rates of denial point to what’s so remarkable about how HIV
skepticism has spread through the culture. Though AIDS doubters rarely break
through to the mainstream, and though their ideas are dismissed by established
scientists, they have created a lasting underground culture. Think of it as a
parallel universe of fact: a place at once a part of the mainland but profoundly
distant from it, a place where another truth—a truth pocked with holes, but one
just true enough to do damage—hold sway. It’s a place where a lot of people are
taking up residence.

Some important points before we begin: books about lies dominate the
shelves, but this one is very different. Although I will discuss some of the most
controversial news stories of our time, this is not a partisan endeavor. In the
following chapters, I’ll cover deception by groups on the right—the Swift Boat
Veterans for Truth, for instance—as well as those on the left, such as the folks
who claim that Republicans rigged the 2004 presidential election. I’ll also dig
into examples that don’t fit neatly into either dominant ideology—the people
who believe the government carried out the September 11 attacks, the
memoirists who stretch the truth, and the adherents of Lou Dobbs, the fire-
breathing anti-immigrant populist CNN anchor.

But this story is less about ideology than it is about psychology, economics,
and technology. It is a story about a media system rather than any particular
players in that system. The system is us. To understand why America is splitting
into niches, I will look at how humans process information in the face of many
choices; how we interpret documentary proof in a world now glutted with
videos, photos, and audio recordings; how we decide whom to believe in an era
in which “experts” of unknown quality dominate every news discussion; and
how news media outlets react to all these changes, how they’re driven to pander
to our preconceived ideas about society. I’ve tried to answer a key question:
How can so many people who live in the same place see the world so
differently?