Birthers, Truthers and Walter Cronkite

“Watch Birther Meltdown on MSNBC!”
Headline on the Huffington Post

In North Carolina, when the Feds moved to arrest a suspected terrorist, they knew his wife was in the house and they had to get her out of harm’s way before they could move in. To do this they sent an agent wearing a blood stained t-shirt to the door to tell her that her son had been in car accident and she needed to come to the hospital. Instead they took her to the police station where they told her her son was fine but they had just arrested her husband on terrorist charges.

Afterwards, the News and Observer ran an article taking the agents to task for their tactics. It turned out a few years earlier the woman had lost a son in a car accident. The FBI knew this and it is why used this particular story to get her out of the house.

The reader reaction on the newspaper’s website was extraordinary. Instead of outrage at the FBI’s heartless tactics, the paper was excoriated for stirring things up. Reader after reader cited the News and Observer’s role a few years ago in the Duke Lacrosse case – where a number of players had been falsely accused of assaulting an African American woman.

The readers all asked the same question.

“During the Duke Lacrosse case the paper had repeatedly maligned innocent people in a witch hunt.” “The paper,” they went on to say, “reported as truth facts that simple, basic legwork could have (and eventually) disprove the victim’s story. So why should we believe the newspaper now?” These comments were much more visceral and far beyond the usual media bashing such stories usually stir up.

While people were busy bashing the News and Observer, the New York Times ran a story from their Standards Editor explaining why the “paper of record” had to publish no less than 8 corrections to their front page obituary of Walter Cronkite. The obituary was written by a television critic who was a good reporter, but who had a history making errors in her copy. This seemed to me like an airline saying “Other than the fact he crashes a lot, he is a really good pilot.”

Despite this reporter’s well known problem with accuracy the three editors in charge of her story assumed that another editor had fact checked the copy.Hence 8 mistakes and 8 corrections in the obituary of the “most trusted man in America.”

Against this backdrop it is no surprise that the “Birther" movement seems to be gaining more traction. This group firmly believes despite all evidence that President Obama was born in Kenya and is not qualified to be President.

They are not alone in fringe groups gaining ground.

The “Truthers” believe the Government staged 9/11 to justify the war in Iraq, even going so far as to plant explosives in the Twin Towers to cause them to fall. Now weird conspiracy theories have been around for a long time – I have had discussions with people who believe the moon landing was staged. But this is the first time in a long time that these theories, such as the “Birthers or the “Truthers” have gained such traction.

People simply do not trust the structures that run the country and give them information. The Right has long since distrusted the media. But there was a sea change after Dan Rather used forged documents to try and prove that Bush had evaded National Guard service. The Right saw Rather’s use of these documents of proof what they had been saying about the media for years.

At the same time the Left lost faith in the news media are information came to light on how Judith Miller and others shilled the Government’s story line on the need to go to war in Iraq, essentially becoming Dick Cheney’s steno pool. The media had for the left gone from “All the President’s Men” to “All the President’s Flacks.”

In this atmosphere people turn to each other for information. They will believe their neighbor or the people in their carpool long before they will believe a reporter. After all they have watched they have spent years watching local TV reporters ask the parents of car crash victims “tell me how you feel” and the national media lie repeatedly for partisan and financial reasons.

So when a neighbor gives them information they are prepared to believe it. After all why would their friend lie to them about whether or not Obama s Kenyan, or the Government blew up the World Trade Center to start the Iraq war? People’s source of information will continue to spiral inward and they will isolate in their own echo ideological echo chambers. They won’t believe or even listen to anything that breaks their insular world view.

This is why the "Birthers" and “Truthers” have a foothold and a following despite all the evidence that contradicts their views. It also makes it harder to rally people behind things that really matter in this country like Health Care Reform and fixing the economy.