Making Maureen Look Sane

I think I’ve figured out the New York Times’ strategy while Maureen Dowd is on vacation – fill the editorial pages with columns so horrible that when she returns, she will appear grounded, stable, and factual.

Stacy Schiff leads the Maureen Dowd Gravitas-Enhancement Program today with a column that scolds us for not trusting the MSM to give us the facts while we ourselves believe the most scurrilous lies.

What scurrilous lies? Why that Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code” is based on history and that there were WMDs in Iraq. Oh yes, and for using Wikipedia, which carries a disclaimer that you shouldn’t rely on it to be completely accurate.

I’ll write more on this later. I just don’t have time to dive into Schiff’s bland meanderings right now. But I will and it’ll be fun. I promise.

UPDATE: Okay, I’m ready to dive and you know what? I lied to you yesterday. It’s not going to be fun. I wanted to make it fun but I just can’t.

I admit that I sorely underestimated just how utterly wandering yet repetitious Schiff’s column is.

Here. Let me boil down the column to one sentence: You people are all stupid.

Schiff takes exception with everything from Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code” to WMDs in Iraq to Wikipedia to demonstrate that we’re all pretty much dupes, ready to swallow any falsehood that anyone throws at us.

Except the MSM. They never throw falsehoods, at least not that I can tell from what Schiff had to say.

Here’s a nice quote on Dan Brown’s novel:

More than 60 percent of the American people don’t trust the press. Why should they? They’ve been reading “The Da Vinci Code” and marveling at its historical insights. I have nothing against a fine thriller, especially one that claims the highest of literary honors: it’s a movie on the page. But “The Da Vinci Code” is not a work of nonfiction. If one more person talks to me about Dan Brown’s crackerjack research I’m shooting on sight.

The novel’s success does point up something critical. We’re happier to swallow a half-baked Renaissance religious conspiracy theory than to examine the historical fiction we’re living (and dying for) today.

Well, yes, lots of people do believe that “The Da Vinci Code” is either true or based on historical facts. That’s a bad thing. This opinion probably would have been tougher to form if it hadn’t been helped by a special made by ABC News that featured one of their news reporters, Elizabeth Vargas. It probably didn’t help Schiff’s dyspepsia that Vargas’ burden of proof was…err…dubious.

The show unravels like a mystery perpetuated by secondhand gossip. Vargas said ABC found no proof that Jesus had a wife, but couldn’t completely discount it, either.

Vargas’ burden of proof on this is “if I can’t completely discount it, it must have some truth to it, even though I can’t find a single bit of proof to back it up”. Hey, I can’t completely discount that Elizabeth Vargas is a cockroach-eating alien from the planet Beezle XI so it must be worth covering in my news special, right?

And that’s the problem with Schiff’s column. He wants to castigate America for accepting bad facts but he never manages to mention that so many of those bad facts were propagated by the very journalists he praises. He never gets around to mentioning Rathergate, Jayson Blair, Janet Cooke, Tailwind, or a host of other scandals where major media outlets played fast and loose with the facts.

You’ll note I used Wikipedia a lot with those citations. I did that for a reason. Schiff appears to hold a particular disdain for Wikipedia because it has *gasp a disclaimer!

[LA Times Editor Michael]Kinsley takes as his model Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia to which anyone can contribute, and which grows by accretion and consensus. Relatedly, it takes as its premise the idea that “facts” belong between quotation marks. It’s a winning formula; Wikipedia is one of the Web’s most popular sites. I asked a teenager if he understood that it carries a disclaimer; Wikipedia “can’t guarantee the validity of the information found here.” “That’s just so that no one will sue them,” he shrugged. As to the content: “It’s all true, mostly.”

So what if it carries a disclaimer? At least you know right up front that you have to be at least a little skeptical with the information that’s there. That’s more than any newspaper or television news department has ever done for us. Don’t you think that, after CBS News swallowed a boatload of forged documents, hook, line, and sinker, that a disclaimer would have been warranted.

Instead, it received an Edward R. Murrow Award for Overall Excellence just this month.

If Schiff, famous prize-winning author, wants to know why so many people distrust the press and hold so many bad facts so closely, he should probably give just a glance to the media itself and apply some of his down-the-nose skepticism to our news outlets.

Heck, as good an author as Schiff is, I bet Stacy could write one hell of a disclaimer for the MSM. It’d be the least he could do, in the interest of facts.

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Category: Oh, THAT liberal media.