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Candidates victims of disinformation
ByGARYSAWYER - H&R Editor
It's early August, the political conventions haven't even been held and the November elections are still nearly three months away.
But you can tell the political season is heating up because more and more disinformation is being spread about both candidates.
In recent days, we've received several letters to the editor and forwarded e-mails with assertions about John McCain and Barack Obama. Some contain subtle misleading statements, while others are just plain not true.
For example, Planned Parenthood has put out an ad, and some e-mails, portraying McCain as uninformed on reproductive rights. The ad comes from a question at a campaign stop when a reporter asserted that most insurance companies will cover Viagra but not birth control and asked McCain what he thought about that. McCain paused and said he didn't know enough about the subject to answer it.
The scene is misleading because there is little difference in the insurance coverage of Viagra and birth control measures. In fact, both are covered by about 86 percent of the insurance companies in the United States. So, McCain's pause is understandable.
The most popular Obama e-mail contains this alleged quote from his book, "The Audacity of Hope."
"I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction."
But that's not what Obama wrote. On page 261 of his book, Obama includes this comment: "In the wake of 9/11, my meetings with Arab and Pakistani Americans, for example, have a more urgent quality, for the stories of detentions and FBI questioning and hard stares from neighbors have shaken their sense of security and belonging. They have been reminded that the history of immigration in this country has a dark underbelly; they need specific reassurances that their citizenship really means something, that America has learned the right lessons from the Japanese internments during World War II, and that I will stand with them should the political winds shift in an ugly direction."
You should note that the quote from the book never mentions Muslims and is in a much, much different context than the misquote.
Even Abraham Lincoln gets misquoted. We've seen this quote, wrongly attributed to Lincoln several times in the last few months: "Congressmen who willfully take action during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs, and should be arrested, exiled or hanged."
But Lincoln never said or wrote any such thing. The problem comes from a 2003 article by J. Michael Waller in Insight Magazine. Waller admits that Lincoln never made that statement and that the quote appears in the magazine, with quote marks around it, because of an editing error.
Internet and e-mail make these misstatements spread at a rapid pace. At the Herald & Review, if we see one of these e-mails, we're likely to see 20. Many of these misstatements are included in letters to the editor. If we know a statement to be untrue, we don't publish the letter.
It's hard to blame some folks for believing these quotes. They often come from what appear to be reliable sources, and we all have a tendency to believe what is written.
There are a few sources for checking out the facts.
The Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania operates www.factcheck.org. Their research appears to be nonpartisan, and they concentrate a lot on misstatements in political ads.
Another good source for checking out urban legends is www.snopes.
com, which contains reports on all sorts of legends, including political. There is also an urban legends section at www.about.com that debunks a lot of myths.
One rule of thumb is that mass e-mails in particular are usually bogus. A recent study by the Annenberg Center showed that out of hundreds of mass e-mails, usually only one or two were accurate.
Elections are all about choices, and it's important that voters receive information that is as accurate as possible. That requires responsible voters to spend some time checking out the information they receive.
If you're not sure about a political claim or an e-mail, feel free to forward it to Editor Gary Sawyer at gsawyer@herald-review.com or 421-6975.
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