thedianerehmshow.org/…
I try not to listen to Diane Rehm any more especially when she has her false equivalency hat on, but yesterday there was nothing else worthwhile on the radio while I was having a long drive. I caught this little tidbit from the self-described “classically-trained journalist” Scottie Nell Hughes who barged in on the so-far reasonable discussion:
Well, I think it's also an idea of an opinion. And that's -- on one hand I hear half the media saying that these are lies, but on the other half there are many people that go, no, it's true. And so one thing that has been interesting this entire campaign season to watch is that people that say facts are facts, they're not really facts. Everybody has a way, it's kind of like looking at ratings or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true. There's no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts. And so Mr. Trump's tweet amongst a certain crowd, a large -- a large part of the population, are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some -- in his -- amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies, and there's no facts to back it up. So...
Glenn Thrush from Politico had to literally pick up his jaw from the floor after that comment. Hughes then proceed to quote some “facts” about Trump’s tweet on noncitizens’ voting (something completely made up from studies that showed no such thing), and of course the panelists couldn’t rebut her right away.
A caller later had this to say:
I can't hope to improve on the comments of your illustrious panelists, I just wanted to suggest that the job of journalists going forward needs to be recognizing and rejecting false equivalencies. In this era of science denial, it's important to recognize that anecdotal evidence is not the same thing as empirical evidence. And the most important one to me is that it's important to recognize that Fox News is not the equivalent of the organizations that your panelists work for.
It’s a little late, but he was on point on everything that just happened between Hughes and the panelists. (She’s from CNN, but she might as well have been from Fox News). James Fallows summed it up nicely:
There was a really interesting essay a day or two ago by Ned Resnikoff of the Think Progress Site. And I'm sure on your website and mine at the Atlantic, there will be specific relations to it, talking about the deliberate political strategy that Steve Bannon and others have advocated over the years of trying to attack the idea of reality itself, of knowable fact. Of anything that actually is true. If we go back 200 years plus, to the documents of the founders, there was some idea that you'd have to have facts and reality and public knowledge and ways that people can engage.
How do you fight an enemy who lies and makes up “facts” constantly? How do you regain the sense of trust that people had before Facebook and the internet destroyed quantifiable facts and science? You can write articles that state the facts but they won’t work if people that need to read them don’t want to acknowledge those facts.