The Sun Orbits the Earth: the Proper Uses of Opinion Polls

Last month, Time magazine and a bunch of other news outlets revealed a disturbing fact:  1 in 4 Americans believes the sun revolves around the earth.  Sam Grossman, writing in Time, offered this comforting caveat:  “Americans actually fared better than Europeans who took similar quizzes — at least when it came to the sun and Earth question. Only 66 percent of European Union residents answered that one correctly.”

Here’s a less comforting caveat:  In 1999, the number who didn’t know the earth-sun relationship was 1 in 5.  So that suggests that by 3000, that little piece of cosmological knowledge will be as rare as the proper use of a slide rule.

Now you might say, “But that doesn’t mean that all these standardized tests we’re making our kids take are going to waste.  They’re just learning more important things than obscure information about distant celestial objects.”  After all, does knowing that the earth orbits the sun affect our ability to use gravity?  No. Does it help me decide when it’s going to be light enough to wash my car (not that we Californians are washing our cars these days – we have a drought)?  No. So who really cares?

It’s true, my friends’ kids who went to Bay Area public schools learned a lot of cool stuff I didn’t learn in school, and not all of it involved video display screens.  They did whole units on Filipino history and the Black Panthers.  So I would be more sanguine about the loss of what I was raised to consider basic human knowledge if it weren’t for some other troubling facts I ran across recently.

Here are two quotes from an op-ed in yesterday’s New York Times: 

“In the United States, the share of market income captured by the richest 10 percent surged from around 30 percent in 1980 to 48 percent by 2012, while the share of the richest 1 percent increased from 8 percent to 19 percent. Even more striking is the fourfold increase in the income share of the richest 0.1 percent, from 2.6 percent to 10.4 percent.”

A January poll by the Pew Research Center and USA Today found that “65 percent believe the gap between the rich and everyone else has increased in the last 10 years.”

This wasn't the editorial's point, but it should have been:  35% of Americans believe something that is objectively false.  (And before anyone points out that the statistics in the first paragraph are based on 30 years, not 10, and thus don’t directly contradict people’s belief, here’s one that does:  “From 2009 to 2012, as the U.S. economy improved, incomes of the top 1% grew more than 31%, while the incomes of the 99% grew 0.4% - less than half a percentage point.”)

  

When Republican David Jolly won the Florida special Congressional election last week, it was touted by both sides as a win for the anti-Obamacare messaging of the Koch Brothers and Karl Rove.  In particular, it’s seen as a win for personal anecdotes about people being screwed by Obamacare.  One of those anecdote-tellers is Julie Boonstra of Michigan.  When a journalist from the Detroit News told Ms. Boonstra that the plan she enrolled in under Obamacare will in fact save her money, not be unaffordable as she has claimed, she simply said, “I personally do not believe that.”  

 

Chris Hayes, host of MSNBC's "All In" (a really stupid name for an often good show) interviewed a political scientist named Brendan Nyhan, who explained based on his research that debunking the stories doesn’t do any good because people with strong beliefs simply refuse to believe the evidence.  In fact, according to one of Nyhan’s articles,

“We conducted an experiment to determine if more aggressive media fact-checking could correct the false belief that the Affordable Care Act would create “death panels.” Participants from an opt-in Internet panel were randomly assigned to either a control group in which they read an article on Sarah Palin’s claims about “death panels” or an intervention group in which the article also contained corrective information refuting Palin.

Findings: The correction reduced belief in death panels and strong opposition to the reform bill among those who view Palin unfavorably and those who view her favorably but have low political knowledge. However, it backfired among politically knowledgeable Palin supporters, who were more likely to believe in death panels and to strongly oppose reform if they received the correction.”

It’s easy to blame the decline of education for our severe case of inability to distinguish issues appropriate for opinion polls from matters of fact.  David Coleman, president of the College Board and designer of the Common Core educational standards, certainly thinks so.  But wait, these people who are so sold on death panels and other fake horror stories about Obama and his care?  They’re not millennials or the product of famously failing inner-city schools; they’re old white people from suburbs.

So if we can’t blame teachers, our favorite scapegoats, then who?  The media, that’s who.

My friend’s son, Jack Mirkinson, who is media editor at the Huffington Post, was recently on CNN, along with popular physicist Michio Kaku, to discuss the proposition that “Climate Change Is Not Debatable.”    The point they made is that inviting climate deniers onto news shows is like inviting – well, the people who believe the sun revolves around the earth.

The fact that Brian Stelter brought up that issue and had Mirkinson and Kaku on to talk about it is progress.  But the principle, that the media need to limit segments in which people are asked their opinions to issues on which there is a legitimate difference of opinion, needs to be more broadly applied.  When Pew Research Center and USA Today released the results of the poll on wealth inequality, the headline was not “35% of Americans Don’t Know Inequality Is The Worst It’s Ever Been.”  It was, “Most See Inequality Growing, but Partisans Differ over Solutions.”  The question that needs to be asked is not whether most see inequality growing or not, it is.  The question is, why do a third of us not see what’s in front of our faces?  “Despite Progress,Many Say Racial Equality Still Not a Reality,” casts the question of whether we’ve achieved racial equality as a matter of opinion, when it’s a fact that by every measure, we have not.

Believing the sun revolves around the earth is basically harmless, even if it becomes a majority opinion.  We’ll keep having seasons and gravity will keep us from falling into the earth and burning up whether we believe in it or not.  The belief by two-thirds of whites that Blacks and whites are treated equally fairly by police is not harmless.  Our fallacious opinions on income distribution, affirmative action, racial profiling, health access and climate change are used to make bad policy.  And too often, the media amplifies our wrong opinions by reporting them without pointing out that they contradict the facts.

Syria: The Next Nicaragua? (Activist Triumphs the World Forgot)

Going to war is habit for Americans.  Essentially, we’ve done it every twenty to forty years since we became a country, but really, if you count the wars waged against all the different Native American communities throughout the lands and especially if you count the quashing of slave revolts, the first 100 years of the United States was a time of more or less constant war.  And since the Civil War, rather than getting less warlike, we’ve actually gotten bloodier and bloodier.  For all the talk of peace dividends and the end of the Cold War in the nineties, Clinton bombed or invaded 12 countries during his eight years.

It's not very surprising that the US public doesn’t have much faith in the prospects of antiwar movements.  Our record of stopping wars before they started is pretty dismal, and only two have been noticeably shortened by the presence of a grassroots antiwar movement – the Mexican War and Vietnam.

That makes what has happened in the last two weeks pretty remarkable.

Last Saturday, the San Francisco Chronicle’s lead afternoon story was “Possible US-led attack on Syria sparks rallies.”  The article, from the Associated Press wire, covered demonstrations of 100 people in Houston, 200 in Boston and Los Angeles, two dozen in Arkansas and 40 in Chicago.  The 15 or so in Oakland didn’t make the cut.

Today’s paper contains this news: 

“More than 30 protesters gathered Saturday outside the federal building in Lincoln to oppose possible U.S. military action in Syria.  The Lincoln Journal Star reports that among the crowd was 32-year-old Haidar Kazem, holding a Syrian flag and a sign aimed at throngs of Nebraska football fans that read "Go Big Red, No 'Little' War.”

Excuse me, 30?  Need I detail the demonstrations of hundreds or thousands I’ve attended that have been completely ignored by the press?  Remember when the New York Times justified not covering Occupy Wall Street by saying there were only a few hundred people involved?  The baffling fact that the demonstration in San Francisco today, which drew at least 1500 people, didn’t get a mention does not lessen the marvel that the mainstream media seems to be beating the bushes for antiwar activity to report on. 

Even more extraordinary is that Obama and his team, who appeared all set a week ago to go it alone, despite being rebuffed by the British Parliament, suddenly backed off.  CBS News mentioned the US public’s 20% support of an attack as one factor in that decision.  Another was that 140 Congresspeople, led by the East Bay’s own Barbara Lee, signed a letter demanding a say.  It’s easy for us here, and I’m certainly one of them, to assume that we just vote for Lee to make ourselves feel good, that she and other progressives in Congress don’t have any real power.  Indeed, it usually seems that way, but lo and behold, one of the most out-there members of Congress set something in motion that – at least momentarily -- stopped the war machine in its tracks.

Obama has backed himself into a corner, because on one hand he drew a red line, so his ego and all that are at stake, but on the other he made this big speech about democracy and letting Congress decide, so if he can’t get Congress on board, then he will look bad if he does it.  Which makes a call to your Congressperson a little less futile than usual.

Obama and the media have told us we’re “war-weary,” and that’s kind of nervy.  Afghans are war-weary.  Iraqis, Pakistanis, Yemenis, the guys still stuck in Guantanamo.  Except for the troops themselves – who are actually speaking out against a new war themselves -- and the very small percentage of people who have a family member in the military, we have no right to be “war-weary.”  Weary of what exactly?  We don’t even hear about the wars most days.

Nonetheless, it seems like even the media folks who couldn’t wait to attack Iraq, while they are not challenging patently false assertions like the 1400 dead in the chemical weapons attack that the US officials are hammering like a drumbeat (the Syrian Human Rights Observatory puts it at 502), are saying, “Enough already.”  It seems like our taste for blood may be waning slightly.  And that’s a good thing.

A study released last week purports to find that “the absence of a strong and visible anti-war movement, the way there was during the George W. Bush Presidency” is due to the desertion of Democrats following the election of Obama.  Now the authors’ data documenting a decline in participation by identified Democrats seems solid, but I dispute that there was a “strong and visible” peace movement during the period of the Bush presidency they’re looking at, which starts in 2007.  My recollection is that our ability to pull out more than a few hundred people plummeted in the six months after March 19, 2003, and that by 2006 the antiwar movement was more or less dormant.  I credit the decline much more to the perception that demonstrating just doesn’t do any good – that when millions out in the street couldn’t stop the Iraq war, the balloon essentially popped.

Now is a good time to blow it up again.  It actually turns out that the record of movements for stopping wars in recent times is not quite as poor as we think.  Historian Lew Rockwell reminds us that 

“Popular pressure against U.S. military intervention in Nicaragua [in the 1980s] not only blocked the dispatch of U.S. combat troops, but led to congressional action (i.e., the Boland amendment) cutting off U.S. government funding for the U.S. surrogates, the contras.”

Rockwell further points out that during the consumerist eighties, the dead period following the activist sixties and seventies, “the Nuclear Freeze campaign … organized the largest political demonstration up to that time in U.S. history, and drew the support of more than 70 percent of the public. In Europe, much the same thing occurred, and in the fall of 1983 some five million people turned out for demonstrations against the planned deployment of intermediate range nuclear missiles. Reagan was stunned.”  Rockwell posits that this led Reagan to pull back from Cold War rhetoric and seek an arms control agreement.   

I was part of those movements in the eighties and I never before thought about how successful we were.  When people talk about successful social movements, they don’t talk about Central America.  That’s partly because for many of us, our goal was an end to US imperialism, if not social revolution at home, and we didn’t get that.  It’s also because the media never credited us; they continued to make fun of us as a throwback to the sixties.

But we did do it, and we can do it again.  Today.

Just the Facts, Ma'am … Wait, What's a Fact?

A couple weeks ago, in my piece about Mike Daisey and the Apple Factory, I questioned why both This American Life host Ira Glass and Marketplace reporter Rob Schmitz appeared to take the word of Daisey’s translator about facts that contradicted Daisey’s version of events. A friend objected to my “throwing barbs suggesting that the translator is lying.” I didn’t intend to do that. I have no reason to believe the translator is lying; I know nothing about her. My point was that Glass and Schmitz don’t know anything about her either. Of course, Daisey admitted to many of the inaccuracies the translator revealed, and that would lead us to believe that where there’s a contradiction between their memories, hers is likely to be more accurate. But is that true?

Daisey’s credibility is shot because we know he lied. Fair enough. But we also know he told the truth, and that’s the piece that’s easy to forget. (In what could be an accident of good timing, last Friday the Fair Labor Association released a report which substantiates many of the stories in Daisey's show.)

The other night, Rachel Maddow, whom I adore, led off her show with a critique of Rick Santorum’s campaign speeches. She played a clip of Santorum reporting that according to something he read, “At eight of the ten University of California campuses you can’t take a class in American history.” She played the clip a few times, she asserted that it’s absurd, and then to contradict it, she read from the course catalog of one U.C. campus, UC Davis, showing that it offered numerous classes on U.S. history.

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Then she moved on to debunk a previous claim by Santorum – this one alleging that old people in the Netherlands wear “Do Not Euthanize Me” bracelets and leave the country rather than go to Dutch hospitals because they fear involuntary euthanasia. Santorum claimed that 10% of the country’s deaths are from euthanasia, and half of those are involuntary. Rachel then said, “It’s not hard to fact check this assertion. All you have to do is ask a Dutch person.” She then played a clip of herself sitting down with a Dutch journalist, Erik Mouthaan, who assured her that this is “totally not true.”

Actually, asking a Dutch person does not qualify as “fact-checking.” If a Dutch politician said that half of Americans are poor, I’m sure you could find lots of U.S. citizens, sadly even journalists, to confidently assert that that was rubbish. They’d be wrong, however.  I recently told a friend I was pretty sure both she and I have incomes in the top 30% of U.S. households. This friend, who is quite well-informed, emphatically disagreed. She is wrong. A single person who earns $65,000 or more is in the top third, and without knowing her exact salary, I know she is well above that. Of course, being in the top third of households in a country where half the people are poor is no great feat.
I waited for Rachel to give the real statistics on euthanasia in the Netherlands, but they never came. Those statistics are not difficult to come by. The Washington Post blog Fact Checker reports:

In 2001, The Netherlands became the first country to legalize euthanasia, setting forth a complex process. The law, which went into effect a year later, codified a practice that has been unofficially tolerated for many years.

Under the Dutch law, a doctor must diagnose the illness as incurable and the patient must have full control of his or her mental faculties. The patient must voluntarily and repeatedly request the procedure, and another doctor must provide a written opinion agreeing with the diagnosis. After the death, a commission made up of a doctor, a jurist and an ethical expert also are required to verify that the requirements for euthanasia have been met.

… In 2010, the number of euthanasia cases reported to one of five special commissions was 3,136, according to their annual report. This was a 19 percent increase over 2009, but “this amounts to 2.3 percent of all 136,058 deaths in the Netherlands in 2010,” said Carla Bundy, spokeswoman for the Dutch embassy in Washington.

Rachel’s guest was right, but she did not prove it, any more than Santorum proved his "Don’t euthanize me" bracelets claim. Going back to the University of California and American history, Santorum said that eight out of the ten campuses don’t offer such classes. In order to prove him wrong, she would need to show that at least three do, but she stopped with the one.

As it happens, UC Berkeley offers at least four, including:

100.007: The Great Exhaling
1948 was the year that America-after the Great Depression, after the Second World War, after sixteen years of the all but revolutionary experiment in national government of the New Deal and even in the face of a Red Scare that in many ways would dominate the next decade-let out its breath. Finally, that great exhaling said, we can go back to real life- but what was ";real life";? Centering on 1948, but moving a few years back and a few years forward, this class will explore the sometimes instantly celebrated, sometimes all but subterranean experiments in American culture that tried to raise and answer that question. The artists who emerged to tell the national story were male and female, black and white, from the west, the east, the south, and everywhere in between. They included Tennessee Williams of Mississippi and Marlon Brando of Nebraska with A Streetcar Named Desire; Jackson Pollock of Wyoming with abstract paintings so big they seemed like visionary maps of the country itself, a country where anything could happen; Miles Davis of St. Louis, with the spare, quiet walk down noir streets of the music that would come to be known as "The Birth of the Cool"; the cross-country explorations of Jack Kerouac of Massachusetts, Neal Cassady of Colorado, and Allen Ginsberg of Newark, New Jersey, following in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark, certain that the real American remained to be discovered; the grind-house, B-movie spread of noir, with the faces of Barbara Stanwyck of Brooklyn and Gloria Grahame of Los Angeles spreading the suspicion that in America nothing was as it seemed and rules and morals were for fools...

UCLA’s History Department website has a “United States” link you can click on and it tells you that:

“With more than twenty-five distinguished faculty members in the field of U.S. history, the UCLA Department of History offers one of the country’s broadest, most diverse, and successful graduate programs in the subject. Faculty expertise ranges from the pre-colonial history of the Americas to the present.”

How many facts does it take to screw up a monologue?

Six Ways to Avoid News Fatigue

People who have known me for a long time will attest to the fact that before I had a car, I never listened to the radio. In fact, I hated radios; I don’t know why, but there was something about the disembodied voice that really annoyed me. But once I started driving, I started occasionally listening to KPFA, because it was easier than fidgeting with tapes with one hand on the steering wheel. Then came 9-11, and in my hunger for news and analysis of the changing political world in this country, I got hooked on Democracy Now! That first foray into public radio led me to This American Life, Against the Grain, As It Happens, and the occasional dip into Fresh Air. Somewhere along the line, I discovered the Sunday folk music shows on KPFA (Across the Great Divide is the best), followed by the Saturday afternoon lineup on KALW (Folk Music and Beyond, Thistle and Shamrock, A Patchwork Quilt, Bluegrass Signal), Michael Feldman’s What Do You Know and KPFA’s Voices of the Middle East and North Africa. Suffice it to say, I’m now a dedicated, if not consistent, radio listener.

A few years ago I started doing radio as well. So now when I listen it’s not only for the information they’re giving; it’s also to get ideas for stories (usually by noticing what gender angles or women’s voices are left out of the other shows), and to learn to do it better from people who have more experience and professional training.

But somewhere along the line, I stopped enjoying it so much. Of course, I still sometimes hear things that inspire, enliven, uplift or enlighten me, but more often, I turn it off feeling more despondent than I did when I turned it on.

What changed, the radio or me?



photo by 4rilla

 Probably some of both. When something is new, it’s exciting. I hadn’t known you could get all this information just by plugging in a little radio! How cool is that? It made me part of a community with my friends, who had been dedicated KPFA and KALW listeners for years. Learning to do radio has been one of the great privileges of my last few years, and since people kept criticizing my shows without giving any helpful advice, it was liberating to realize I had a classroom right on my desk at work. Now that I’ve been listening for a number of years, I realize I’m hearing the same people a lot, and I usually know what they are going to say.

But I also think that progressive community radio has been influenced by changes in the mainstream media more than we realize. Five or ten years ago, shows like Against the Grain, Democracy Now! and the KPFA Sunday Show used to interview a lot more activists than they do now. They’ve become more expert dependent, and the way you become an expert is generally by publishing a book or a New York Times op-ed or getting a Ph.D., and while you are doing those things, you’re probably not out organizing a social movement. As someone who’s trying to do both, I can tell you it’s nearly impossible.

In the first three days of last week, I probably heard or saw twelve hours of coverage of the debt ceiling deal, if you count Comedy Central. I heard eight economists, five reporters, three Congresspeople, the former Labor Secretary and the current press secretary (no partridges). I heard Dean Baker twice and Rick Wolff three times on two different shows. Not surprisingly, they said the same thing each time. Ultimately, none of them had anything to say I didn’t already know. It’s not that they don’t know things I don’t – they know a lot. But they all said the same things they’ve been saying for months because they’re being asked the same questions: why does Obama always give in to the Tea Party? (he doesn’t have enough experience standing up to bullies). What’s this going to mean for us? (bad bad bad). What would he have done if he were FDR or LBJ? (Tax the rich, create jobs, lay down the law to Congress.) Meanwhile the mainstream pundits kept repeating the mantra “You have to cut Social Security and Medicare,” without a peep from the likes of Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert.

No one said anything about what those of us who want to see a different strategy can or should do to bring it about. Democracy Now! interviewed Terry O’Neill of the National Organization for Women, who spearheaded a campaign to get Congress to protect the needs of women, but they didn’t interview her until after the deal had been approved in Congress. I interviewed her the week before, when at least people could sign the online petition, but I don’t have the listenership that DN! has. I don’t say that it would have made a difference if another few thousand people had signed a petition, but at least it would have given people some way to participate.

Along about Thursday, a phrase flashed into my mind. News Fatigue. I’m not sure where I first heard of it, but I sure know I’ve got it. At a party the other night, I mentioned this to a number of friends and acquaintances, and nearly everyone said, “Oh, yes, I don’t listen to any of those shows any more.” A couple people mentioned things they’re listening to instead. Then Sunday evening, I happened to catch part of New America Now: Voices from the New Majority (Fridays at noon and Sundays at 3 pm on KALW 91.7 FM San Francisco). They were talking about redistricting, and the part that I heard went into depth about how prisons are used to give disproportionate influence to some very small districts. It was fascinating. I’d never heard that, it made total sense and it explained some things I had never understood. I was so interested, I sat in my car for fifteen minutes after I got where I was going.

So here are six shows I’m going to listen to instead of the daily news-oriented shows, and if you have News Fatigue, you might want to try them too:

1.  Fresh Air (KALW 9-10 am, repeated 6-7 pm; KQED 1-2 pm or 7-8 pm; podcast available): Terry Gross asks great questions and has interesting people on. It’s usually upbeat without being fluffy. Her guest on Monday was Charles C. Mann, author of 1493, which documents how Columbus changed the world by introducing Europe and the Americas to each other’s crops, animals and diseases. She's more progressive on most issues than you might think.

2. Your Call (KALW 10-11 am, repeated at 8-9 pm; available for download): Maybe it’s because it’s a call-in show, but they almost always have a more grassroots angle on whatever issues they’re covering. They bring in a lot of local folks you hardly ever hear elsewhere. (One week, their Friday media roundtable even included a guy from Socialist Worker!) A recent show I heard was “How Are Magazines Surviving” with editors and publishers of Bitch, Utne Reader and The Sun.

3. Are We Alone? Really cool science show on KALW (Tuesdays at 1:00 pm), also available for podcast or download. The last show, “Written in Code” explores “ENCORE Genes – what are they good for? Absolutely… something. But not everything. Your “genius” genes need to be turned on – and your environment determines that. Find out how to unleash your inner-Einstein, and what scientists learned from studying the famous physicist’s brain.”

4. This American Life (KALW Sundays 1:00 pm, KQED Saturday noon and 10:00 pm or by podcast): With rare exceptions, it’s interesting, funny and unexpected. The last one I heard (I podcast it, but I often forget to download the podcasts and they’re only available for two weeks) was called “When Patents Attack!” and was about patent trolls. Don’t know what that is? You want to find out!

5. Making Contact (Friday 1:30 pm on KPFA, or on the website): Unfortunately it’s only half an hour a week but they sometimes have extras on their website (they even put a piece of mine up once, though I can’t find it now). Last week’s show was called “Remixing Revolution: Art, Music and Politics”, excerpting a panel discussion called “The God’s Must Be Crazy: Reviving the Black Supernatural Experience.” Before that they had a two-parter on the Wisconsin workers’ revolt. Irresistible.

6. Rock en Rebeliòn (Sundays 5:00 pm on KPFA; check website for archives): I love this show ’cause I get to practice my Spanish by listening to people who often are not native speakers so they speak slowly. Plus it’s bilingue, so if I get lost, I can generally catch up when they drift into English, and the beats are great.

What are your suggestions to break out of news fatigue? What shows or other experiences do you love? (If you’re getting this by email, don’t email me your ideas! but go to the blog and post them as comments so other people can see them too.)