unSpun (14 page)

Then what? How certain can you be of any given fact, however authoritative the source may be? How do you tell the important facts from the not so important? How do you draw valid conclusions from the information you have? Those subjects we turn to in our next chapter.

How Can We Know?

How could an undocumented quote be so widely accepted as accurate? McIver thinks those who swallowed the quote fell into a psychological trap like those we spoke of in Chapter 4: “It says what they want to believe, so they assume it is true.” But we think there's a larger question here. How can we ever be certain of our facts when even the
Yale Law Journal
can turn out to be wrong? What should we do to avoid being misled? Clearly, finding facts in a world of disinformation requires something more than just relying on generally reliable websites, or generally reliable books, newspapers, or encyclopedias, or factual sources of any description, for that matter. We'll spend the rest of this chapter giving you some of the general rules we follow at FactCheck.org.

RULE #1:
You Can't Be
Completely
Certain

T
HE FIRST THING TO REALIZE IS THAT ABSOLUTE CERTAINTY IS ELUSIVE
, especially in the practical domains with which we have been dealing in this book. We are not speaking of pure logic or mathematics, where 1 1 1 always equals 2. Nor are we dealing with faith-based beliefs, which generally aren't subject to scientific proof or disproof. In fact, we should be suspicious of any claims that something is “always” or “never” so. How can you be certain?

“Slam Dunk,” Then and Now

THEN:

PRESIDENT BUSH (Dec. 21, 2002): “I've been told all this intelligence about having WMD, and this is the best we've got?”

CIA DIRECTOR GEORGE TENET: “It's a slam-dunk case.”

BUSH: “George, how confident are you?”

TENET: “Don't worry, it's a slam dunk.”

—quoted by Bob Woodward in his book
Plan of Attack

NOW:

TENET: “Those were the two dumbest words I ever said.”

—quoted by The Associated Press, in a speech at Kutztown University on April 28, 2005

You might think that all swans are white because you have never seen a black one. But there are black swans, in Australia. Karl Popper, a famous philosopher who died in 1994, held that even the so-called laws of science are hypothetical, subject to being disproved someday by new evidence. You only need one counterexample to disprove a claim of “never” or “always.” All swans are white—until you see a black one. But you never can tell when that might happen.

Everybody craves certainty, if only because living with doubt is psychologically uncomfortable and gets in the way of deciding what to do. That's why we often fall into the “I know I'm right” trap we mentioned in Chapter 4. CIA director George Tenet did that when he expressed absolute confidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But experience shows it's wise to practice “active open-mindedness.” Tenet certainly wishes
he
had.

Perfect knowledge is seldom if ever available to humans. For one thing, new information is constantly arriving, and human learning is constantly expanding. How certain are we of that? Quite certain—which leads us to:

RULE #2:
You
Can
Be Certain
Enough

I
N THE WORLD OF PRACTICAL REALITY, WEIGHING THE FACTS IS A
matter of choosing the right standard of proof to give us the degree of certainty we need under the circumstances. We can't be absolutely certain, but we can be certain enough to make a reasonable decision. A civil jury in Santa Monica was certain enough in 1997, for example, that O. J. Simpson will never find “the real killer” of his wife, Nicole Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman because
he's
the real killer. But sixteen months earlier, a criminal jury in Los Angeles found him not guilty of the same crimes in one of the most celebrated trials of the twentieth century. Both votes were unanimous.

How can that be? A big reason is that our laws require proof of guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt” in a criminal case. That is—quite appropriately—a very high standard, and it applies because that's how “certain enough” we need to be before depriving anyone of his or her liberty or very life. But in a civil trial, a lower standard applies because only property is at stake. The twelve-person jury in the civil trial unanimously found that a “preponderance” of the evidence showed Simpson killed Goldman and committed battery upon Nicole, whose throat was slashed.

In our everyday lives, we have to pick an appropriate standard. Imagine trying to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” whether one brand of cornflakes is better than another. You would never get breakfast! But the more important the decision, and the more difficult it is to reverse the consequences of that decision, the more careful we have to be.

Carpenters and seamstresses have a saying: “Measure twice, cut once.” It's one thing to guess or use trial and error with respect to trivial matters or decisions that can easily be reversed, but you should try for a higher degree of certainty before buying a car or a house, and a higher degree still when choosing a spouse or a president. The research on this point is reassuring: when confronted with decisions that are significant and irreversible, people do tend to be more analytical, and to take more time thinking about the decision. Be as certain as you need to be.

Johnson's Rock

A note to our academic friends: We don't hold with the philosophical notion that maintains there are no facts, only subjective interpretations. That's a fine subject for debate in the classroom or an all-night bull session in the dorm, but it isn't much use in the everyday world.

We stand with the eighteenth-century English writer Samuel Johnson. His biographer James Boswell said he told Johnson it wasn't possible to refute Bishop Berkeley's “ingenious sophistry” that matter didn't exist. Boswell recalled:

“I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it,—‘I refute it thus.'”

That's our position. If you can kick a rock, you have verified the rock's existence as a practical fact. You have proof enough. We can't prove the sun will rise in the east tomorrow, because nobody can foretell the future. We do have evidence that it's come up in the east every day for perhaps 4 billion years, so we operate on the theory that it will rise there again tomorrow. We're certain enough we're right, and we haven't been proved wrong yet.

RULE #3:
Look for General Agreement Among Experts

S
OME STATISTICS ARE SETTLED AND ACCEPTED BY ALL SIDES
: D
EMOCRATS
, Republicans, and even vegetarian anarchists. The circumference of the earth is 24,901.55 miles at the equator, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. We won't quibble with that. The national average price for a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline was just over $3 the week ending July 24, 2006, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, and we know of nobody who seriously quarrels with EIA's figures. By the same token, there's hardly any disagreement with the tabulations of the Bureau of Labor Statistics that say the U.S. economy added 6.6 million payroll jobs in the three years following the depths of a job slump in August 2003, or that the unemployment rate fell from above 6 percent to as low as 4.6 percent during the same period. Economists and political pundits can debate the meaning or the significance of those BLS figures endlessly, and sometimes they debate the definitions and methods on which they are based. But the numbers come from two huge monthly surveys that economists generally accept as the best available measures of employment and unemployment.

Keep in mind that consensus isn't proof. Galileo demonstrated that in the seventeenth century, when he challenged nearly 2,000 years of Aristotelian thinking about physics and was proved correct. Sometimes the lone dissenter is on to something, and we should always be alert to that possibility. Nevertheless, we can be much more confident that we are getting the facts right when we start with what's widely accepted by authorities on all sides.

RULE #4:
Check Primary Sources

A
NYONE WHO HAS PLAYED THE CHILDHOOD GAME OF
T
ELEPHONE
knows how messages can be garbled in retelling, just as the Darrow “quote” was transformed from an old preacher's story to a footnoted quotation in a prestigious law journal. The British tell the story of a military message sent to headquarters: “Send reinforcements, we are going to advance.” After passing from one soldier to another, it supposedly arrived as “Send three and fourpence, we are going to a dance.” That's no doubt fictional, but miscommunication does happen. It's always best to check secondhand accounts against the original.

Our courts recognize this principle by generally refusing to accept secondhand accounts, or “hearsay,” as evidence. If Jim says he heard Joe tell about a robbery he saw somebody else commit, Jim's account isn't really good evidence. Jim could have heard it wrong, or remembered the story incorrectly, or Joe could have been joking or making it up or just mistaken. For a better idea of what happened, we need to hear Joe tell the story himself, under oath so he has a strong incentive not to lie, and we want to hear him answer questions from both sides to draw out relevant details that might help us weigh what he's saying, such as how far away he was, whether the light was good or bad, and how good his eyesight is. Even worse than hearsay are news stories based on anonymous sources, who often don't have firsthand knowledge themselves and are giving the reporter
secondhand
hearsay. And we the readers have no way of knowing who's talking, let alone how good their eyesight or hearing is, or whether they might have a motive to shade their story or just lie.

Sometimes checking primary sources is as simple as comparing a newspaper headline with what the news story actually says. Consider a Reuters story of November 16, 2005, that was headlined “Cheney says war critics ‘dishonest, reprehensible.'” Similar headlines appeared in many newspapers, prompting a furious outcry against Vice President Richard Cheney. How dare he call it “dishonest” and “reprehensible” to question the wisdom of a war that was, to put it mildly, not going well? But what Cheney actually said was this: “The suggestion that's been made by some U.S. Senators that the President of the United States or any member of this administration purposely misled the American people on prewar intelligence is one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired in this city.” Cheney was referring to senators who had suggested he and the president were liars, not to “war critics” in general. There's a big difference.

Nevertheless, many lashed out at Cheney as though he had accused all who criticize the Iraq War of being dishonest scum, as implied by the Reuters headline. Later Cheney said, “I have a quarrel with that headline…. I do not believe it is wrong to criticize the war on terror or any aspect thereof. Disagreement, argument, and debate are the essence of democracy, and none of us should want it any other way.”

As that incident shows, it's wise to get in the habit of reading news with the question in mind, “Does this story really back up the headline?” By the same token, ask whether the lead paragraph—which is nearly always written to be as dramatic as facts will allow, and sometimes a bit more—is really backed up by the details of the story. When you see a partial quote such as “dishonest” and “reprehensible,” look for the full quote to see whether you think the reporter or headline writer understood the context fully.

Even a full transcript can be wrong. In January 1995,
The New York Times
reported that President Bill Clinton said in his State of the Union address that government should be “leaner and meaner.” What Clinton actually said was “leaner, not meaner.” Also, after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, we at FactCheck.org and other news organizations quoted David Lokey of the Federal Emergency Management Agency as denying that “New Orleans is filling up like a bowl” at the very moment when floodwaters were rising. In reality, the clueless statement had been made by Republican Senator David Vitter of Louisiana, who was standing next to Lokey at the same news conference. A CNN typist had gotten the words right but put them in the mouth of the wrong speaker. Videotape of the event showed Vitter speaking the words as he stepped in front of Lokey.