"The Propaganda Professor" pt. 2

Another technique:
Throw crap, force you to dig out;
They hope you get tired
--CheeseFlap


A big part of the attraction of doing a more detailed take down of "The Propaganda Professor" comes from the absolutely staggering irony that gushes from his posts.  I've heard it called "log-eye syndrome."

In the post welcoming "The Propaganda Professor" to the Bad Blogs' Blood Bad Blogs Blogroll, I reviewed a promise from the professor to demonstrate my supposed inclination to box in Jon Stewart with an unlikely interpretation of his claims about the supposedly misinformed Fox News audience.  If I insisted on an unlikely interpretation of Stewart then a straw man fallacy would result.  Let's let "Professor Thynzcken," as I've dubbed the professor for the purposes of these posts, explain how it works, from the commentary section of his post on Jon Stewart:

Note: This individual wants you to believe that Stewart’s claim should only be interpreted comprehensively rather than (as obviously intended) cumulatively. If you’re not sure what I mean by that, stay tuned.

And the August 7 update in that same thread:

Okay, the new post on Stewart/ PolitiFact/ Fox is up. And by they way, here’s my tally of Bryan’s rhetorical sins above:

False Conclusions: 9
Misreading: 7
Patronizing/ Presuming Control: 7
Tangents/ Straw Men/ Red Herrings: 9
False Claims: 8
“Witty” Juvenile Ripostes: 4
Projection/ Transference: 3

(There is some overlap.) There are probably more that I overlooked, and if you’re a serious student of forensic flimflammery, you might find it useful to do your own tally. Some of these tricks are tried and true propaganda tactics that we’ll be examining in more detail in the future.

My heart fairly fluttered in the anticipation that Thynzcken would attempt to provide specific evidence in support of each and every claim made above about my supposed rhetorical sins.

No such luck.  The cupboard of evidence was again left bare.  But it's worth looking at what Thynzcken put in the cupboard instead of evidence.

Shooting the Messenger: More on Stewart/ PolitiFact/ Fox

That's just the title.  As a result, we'll be on the lookout for Thynzcken's evidence of attacks on Stewart rather than attacks on Stewart's message.  Pop quiz to follow.

One of the occupational hazards of telling people what they don’t want to hear is that it invites attacks. Particularly if you’re telling them that certain beliefs they cherish, and perhaps have cherished for years, are erroneous. I’ve already fielded a few attacks on this rather young and mild-mannered blog. So as you can imagine, a public figure like Jon Stewart is going to receive his share of harsh backlash. And when he dared criticize fairandbalanced Fox “News”, it’s not surprising that there were people out there who wanted to question his credibility. It’s worth taking a look at some of the techniques they used, since this is by no means the only time you’ll ever see them.

Yeah, not much evidence in this section, but at least we're additionally cued to look for "attacks" and "harsh backlash" as well as supposed efforts to question his credibility.  Let's move straight on to those techniques:

The Singular Standard
For one thing, some of his critics seem to have forgotten that Stewart is a humorist, and instead treated him like a journalist. Which is to say that rather than looking at his larger point that Fox “consistently” misleads viewers, they focused on whether his claim that this is reflected in “every poll” on “every issue” is literally accurate. Perhaps this is because they were under the mistaken impression he was speaking on a bona fide news program, rather than as a guest on Fox, where anything goes. In any case, fair enough, I guess. After all, Stewart, though he (to the best of my knowledge) has never painted himself as a journalist,  is considerably more accurate than many who do. And if you think I’m nodding in particular toward the TV network he was commenting on, you must be psychic.

I'll give points for the alliteration in the section title.

Poor Jon Stewart is supposedly treated as a journalist instead of as a humorist and the manifestation of that harsh treatment is the fact that they check Stewart's statement as to its literal truth, particularly his words citing "every poll" in support.

I'd call Thynzcken's distinction here silly.  Regardless of Stewart's job designation, the context suggests that he was making a serious statement of truth.  In newspaper reporting we might expect a journalist to adopt the objective voice.  But during an interview with Fox News' Chris Wallace we appropriately place the same standard for truth-telling on everyone regardless of profession.  We just need to maintain our sensitivity to differing modes of expression (genre, if you will).  A joke is a joke.  A statement of fact is (we hope) a statement of fact, and we can certainly allow latitude for differing levels of precision (don't tell PolitiFact!).  But even a journalist can tell a joke, so the standard of judgment is actually the same.

The section from Thynzcken ends up not really having much to it.  But it's interesting that Thynzcken ended up making a comment somewhat parallel to something I wrote a few weeks ago:

Hey ... maybe Stewart spoke false because he was appearing on Fox News ... ?

As defenses of Stewart go, this is pretty weak.  If it's fine for Stewart shed his dedication to the truth while on Fox "News" then by the same token the supposed non-journalists on Fox "News" should receive the same allowance.  If Thynzcken makes the argument seriously then it probably suffers from a problem of internal consistency.  We will charitably take the argument as snark.

Bait and Switch
Trouble is, PolitiFact’s criticism didn’t exactly address the same thing that Stewart’s remark did. Stewart said Fox’s viewers were the most MISINFORMED. Politifact

Stewart's defenders can put whatever spin on his words they like.  No reasonable interpretation of Stewart will allow him to claim reasonable support from existing poll or survey data.  The misinformed/uninformed distinction is weaker than Stewart's defenders would make it (look it up in a dictionary/thesaurus), but it's fine by me that they make the attempt.  I'll accept it as reasonable, if tad strained.

Oh, and if you were looking for evidence from Thynzcken that I was guilty of any of this bait-and-switch behavior, look elsewhere.  The most likely spot you'll find it is in Thynzcken's imagination.

Selective Reading
In addition to a misreading of the word “misinformed” there was a selective reading of the word “every”, which can be interpreted in at least a couple of different ways. I call them the comprehensive (Every state has its own flag.) and the cumulative (Every time I forget my umbrella, it rains.).  In other words, “every” may mean either “all” or “each”. Did Stewart mean all polls on all possible issues? Not bloody likely, since he surely realizes that it would be virtually impossible to devise a poll covering every possible issue – and if you did it would be so damn lengthy no one would sit still to answer it. Most likely, he meant that each poll conducted reveals Fox viewers to be among the most misinformed on each topic covered. But some, apparently having intimate knowledge of the inner workings of his psyche, insist that not only did he mean the first sense, but he was deliberately misrepresenting the facts; in other words HE was the one lying! It’s somewhat like saying, “Every skunk I smell causes me to throw up”, and then me saying, “Liar! You haven’t even smelled every skunk.”

The above section was apparently designed to fulfill the promise of showing that I insisted on understanding Stewart's claim in Thynzcken's "comprehensive" sense. Certainly between his comment in the first Stewart post and this one Thynzcken unmistakeably implies that I insist on the "comprehensive" sense. Unfortunately for that argument, my approach has consisted of taking the arguments liberals use to defend Stewart and showing that they fail even granting different ways of interpreting Stewart's claim. True to form, Thynzcken provides no evidence that I insist on the comprehensive understanding of Stewart's claim. The reader is left to trust in Thynzcken's accusation sans the supporting evidence.

As for the idea that those who attack Stewart accuse him of lying, the good professor appears to have succeeded in expunging the following from memory:

Your question offers an irrelevant premise (a time-honored propaganda technique in its own right). It isn’t that Stewart is lying for claiming that Fox News has knowingly and/or deliberately repeated lies. He’s lying because he claims poll support that doesn’t exist. Or, more properly, he’s just wrong.

The comment remains visible under the first Stewart post, at least until somebody decides to delete it.  That won't be me.

Sleight of Hand
As you well might expect, another ploy has been to question the credibility of the polls themselves. Well hey, that’s not such a bad idea. Sometimes polls are untrustworthy because of faulty methodology or deliberate bias or both. But this becomes considerably less likely when a number of polls stack up in the same direction. One critic of Stewart found one poll particularly questionable because it gauged Fox viewers’ misinformation on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But, notes this commentator, Iraq did possess such weapons once upon a time, and furthermore, they still had some just before the U.S. invasion. (How do we know this? Because he says so!)

My apologies.  I forgot that this piece of common knowledge isn't as prominent for those who do not regularly consume Fox News.  We know that Iraq possessed WMD at one time because UNSCOM and UNMOVIC documented their destruction (I did touch on that fact in my post).  We know that not all of the WMD were destroyed because at least one deadly munition survived to be used in 2004:

The statement by the US military spokesman in Iraq that an improvised bomb made up of a shell containing nerve agent was discovered by an American convoy raises some disturbing questions.

BBC News

I don't always provide documentation for statements that amount to common knowledge.  If the sarin bomb was not present in Iraq when the invasion occurred then we have to assume it was either smuggled into the country or manufactured within Iraq subsequent to the invasion.  I can't imagine Thynzcken wants to go there.  My thanks to the professor for helping to make my point.

We haven't quite exhausted the "Sleight of Hand" section ...

It turns out, however, that the poll he references actually asked whether WMD’s were FOUND in Iraq AFTER the U.S. invasion. The correct answer, I suppose, is that it depends on what the definition of “is” is.  I suppose that if the Iraq Survey Group had found thousands of skeletons in body armor, Fox could have argued that they constituted a mighty army. What they found was nothing that qualified as an active WMD, nor as evidence that a WMD program was still in place. They only found impotent remnants of chemical weapons that had been stashed for a decade or so, and which the ISG and the CIA determined were of no military value. But Fox, of course, knows better, and so do its viewers.  Just as they do on numerous other issues, including some covered in that very same poll.

Speaking of "Sleight of Hand," I did not reference any particular poll when I made the observation about the ambiguity of questions about WMD in Iraq.  Rather, I was dealing with the way Chris Mooney phrased the issue during his defense of Stewart:

Mooney:

What Stewart obviously meant—and what I mean—is that when it comes to politicized, contested issues where the facts have been made murky due to political biases, it is Fox viewers who are the most likely to believe incorrect things—to fall prey to misinformation. A quintessential example of such an issue is global warming, or whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction or was collaborating with Al Qaeda. There are many, many others.

I suspect that the segue from "politicized, contested issues where the facts have been made murky" to "most likely to believe incorrect things" is not as clean as Mooney appears to suggest. The WMD issue serves as a case in point. It is absolutely undeniable that Saddam Hussein's Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Possessing them was one of the prerequisites for the ceasefire condition requiring their destruction.

What? Mooney is talking about immediately prior to the invasion? Even then, Iraq unquestionably possessed weapons of mass destruction, albeit old, small in number and of very questionable effectiveness.

It is exactly that type of ambiguity that renders the PIPA studies and their like relatively worthless as a measure of individual and group misinformation

Thynzcken succeeds in producing the false impression that while I was talking about the ambiguity of claims about WMD in Iraq that I was applying that principle specifically to the PIPA study that asked the question about the discovery of WMD during the period after the invasion.  Instead, I was making a point about ambiguity in survey questions generally and applying it to both of the PIPA studies and similar ones cited by Mooney.

Quite the sleight of hand by Thynzcken, and we can also count the attempt to hand wave the ambiguity problem by assuring all of us that any WMD found subsequent to the invasion were useless.  I'm pretty sure I had already conceded that point (third paragraph in the green box just above) but Thynzcken found it better for his argument to present it as his fresh observation.

Bottom line, Thynzcken failed to address my point about ambiguity, though arguably an attempt was made to bury it under a pile of thrown crap.

Next:

Red Herrings and Straw Men and Tangents, Oh My
Oh yes, and there was even the suggestion that Fox shouldn’t be given credit for the lies it relentlessly promotes if someone on its payroll didn’t actually originate them. C’mon, do I really need to comment on that??? True, Fox didn’t invent the Death Panel rumor. Nor, for that matter, did one of Fox’s specific components, one Sarah Palin. That honor apparently belongs to Betsy McGaughey, a former director for (Surprise!) medical supply corporations. But she only said it a few times, and how many people have even heard of Betsy McGaughey? Fox has repeated it dozens if not hundreds of times, and how many people are familiar with Fox?

Again, Thynzcken has succeeded admirably in veiling the truth.  I'm fine with letting Fox News have the blame for any falsehood that it transmits.  Thynzcken is producing his own red herring in order to try to protect Stewart from my charge that his "New England Patriots of lying" line was itself a lie.  Stewart gave PolitiFact's annual "Lie of the Year" awards to Fox News and proclaimed Fox News a repeat champion.  As I've said before, call it funny if you want.  Just don't call it true.  Fox News has never been awarded PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" award.

I realize that's some harsh backlash to throw Stewart's way ...

Just one more bit from Thynzcken:

This is probably not an exhaustive list of the smear tactics used against Stewart, mind you. It’s just a suggestion of a few things to look for as you hear this thing they call a debate.

Time for the pop quiz:  Was anyone able to detect evidence in Thynzcken's piece of anybody "shooting the messenger"?

There's no smear of Stewart anywhere in there.  Thynzcken made it up.  PolitiFact may be guilty of interpreting Stewart too narrowly.  That charge doesn't fit my criticisms.  But even if PolitiFact interpreted Stewart too narrowly it remains an attack--albeit a slightly misguided one--on Stewart's argument rather than a "smear tactic used against Stewart."

This exercise reveals Thynzcken as a spectacular hypocrite, creating varieties of false and misleading statements in a misguided attempt to tar others with the charge of producing false and misleading statements.

And CheeseFlap helps out in the irony department.  We have this string of haiku poems trailing the "Shooting the Messenger" post:

Another technique:
Throw crap, force you to dig out;
They hope you get tired
--CheeseFlap

That’s a frequent nail
you’ve hit squarely on the head.
Remember Bryan?
--P.O.P (aka Thynzcken)

One question remains
What better propaganda
Than your voice alone?
--Bryan


"The Propaganda Professor" is propaganda.  One of the favorite tools of the propagandist is the ability to silence dissenting voices.  There's a good chance my poem will join other comments I've made in censorship oblivion.  I likewise doubt that any of the many points where I've shown Thynzcken flat wrong will last for any substantial length of time in visible form at "The Propaganda Professor."  The threat of censorship has been made and carried out, though it seems I can still get comments to appear for a limited time.

"The Propaganda Professor" would more aptly wear the name "Professor Propaganda."