Reality and Spin in the Media

In a speech this fall, Al Gore spoke of the "strangeness" in our political discourse. He bemoaned the "new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time," and the lack of desire for accountability in American journalism. On top of all this, the idea that perception is far more important than reality has become the principle of our broadcast politics, debasing our political discourse to a game of controlling the spin.

Larry Beinhart has thought long and hard about the nature of message-based politics. Beinhart, author of the bestselling novel, "Wag the Dog," recently waded into the nonfiction world of 21st-century communications with his new book "Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin."

AlterNet caught up with Beinhart outside of Woodstock, New York, in the cabin in the woods he shares with his wife and son.

What are "fog facts?"

Fog facts are things that have been published or are easily known but have disappeared in the fog. And there are lots of facts that should disappear in the fog; they're trivia, they're nonsense, and we don't need to know them. I'm talking about things that are important -- that once you bring them to the foreground it changes your picture of reality.

How does a fact become a fog fact?

With certain exceptions, news is not automatically big news. The exceptions are dead popes, the World Series, tsunamis, volcanoes, wars the wars that involve us anyway -- but most news actually becomes news -- including wars -- because of press releases. The example I always use -- because we're in the small town of Woodstock -- is the little league schedule. If the little league schedule is going to be in the newspaper, it's only because the coach or the coach's wife sends it to the newspaper.

Most news originates as a press release or a press conference or an announcement. And if it's going to stay in the news, it has to get new press releases and new stories. Someone has to work at that, someone has to invest effort and time to make it a big story. And if nobody does that, it may not be a story at all, or it may be a one-time item. You know, page 12 of the New York Times, page 26.

And part of what happens is that people in the media -- especially print people -- think that if they're reported it they've done their job. Their job is not to determine what effect it has on the population, how well we absorb it, how excited we get about it -- that's not their job. Their job is to get the fact and put it in the paper. They're done. Then if the fact comes back again, as a new press release or a new twist, they go with it.

Two great examples are the Oil-For-Food money. Everybody in America knows that there's some kind of weird scandal about what the U.N. did with the Oil-For-Food money. They don't know exactly what it is but they know there's something scandalous, that Kofi Annan is a little dirty. Now, as far as anybody's been able to tell so far, the corruption and malfeasance involved several hundreds of thousands of dollars at most, excluding those moneys that Saddam Hussein was able to hold onto, which was generally approved by all parties or permitted by all parties. But however much the U.N. did wrong was fairly minor.

After the U.S. conquest of Iraq the Oil-For-Food money was transferred to a new entity, the CPA -- the Coalition Provisional Authority run by Paul Bremer. And about $9 billion dollars of oil money went into the CPA, plus about $10 billion dollars of other funds went into the CPA. And this money was essentially being held in trust for the Iraqi government. Now they ripped through about $19 billion dollars of it -- it has essentially disappeared.

If I remember correctly out of 20 billion dollars there was about half a billion left. And it surfaced in only about three isolated stories. The reason for that is that there is no constituency that has influence in the American media that gives a damn about Iraq's money. There's a very big constituency in the United States that hates the U.N.. And they hate the U.N. because the notion of any restraint on America's sovereign, unfettered authority is something that just disturbs them to no end. So they were eager to find things that would tarnish the U.N., so they worked that story very hard -- the right wing -- they pushed that story and we heard a lot about it.