We Hold This Truthiness to Be Self-Evident

By Michael Winship, BuzzFlash. Posted February 8, 2006.

There's an old saying that politicians use statistics like a drunk uses a lamppost -- more for support than illumination. Increasingly, it seems all manner of facts and figures are manipulated, massaged or just plain made up to fit an existing set of beliefs, regardless of the actual truth.

Last fall, Stephen Colbert, of Comedy Central's Colbert Report, came up with a word to describe this phenomenon: "truthiness."

"I'm not a fan of facts," he pronounced, in his best, Bill O'Reilly-like persona. "You see, facts can change, but my opinions will never change, no matter what the facts are."

"Truthiness" touched a nerve. The American Dialect Society proclaimed it their 2005 Word of the Year, and a Google search turns up 2.5 million references to "truthiness," from play-by-play analyses of the president's State of the Union Address and NSA shenanigans to attacks on James Frey's pseudomemoir "A Million Little Pieces."

Now, even columnists, those ink-stained knaves of the media, have stolen, er, embraced it as a subject. Truthiness, after all, is what we're all about.

Colbert explained further in a recent issue of the satirical newspaper The Onion, itself a bastion of truthiness: "It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the president because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true? "Truthiness is 'What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true ' There's not only an emotional quality, there's a selfish quality."

In politics, manifestations of truthiness are nonstop, ranging from the childish to the insidious. The Feb. 4 New York Times reported that aides to New York State gubernatorial candidate William Weld had "significantly altered" two newspaper articles running on Weld's website, removing anything that was perceived as negative: cutting paragraphs, headlines like "Campaign May Be Down, But Weld Certainly Isn't" and such phrases as "dogged by an investigation."

Although the Times could find no evidence on other campaigns' websites to support his claim, Weld spokesman Dominick Ianno insisted, "every other candidate is doing the same thing." Now that's truthiness.

A front page article in that same day's Washington Post detailed problems Wikipedia, the popular internet encyclopedia written and edited by volunteers, is having with congressional staff members and other government employees tampering with its website entries.

An intern removed a reference to Massachusetts Congressman Martin Meehan's pledge to limit his service to four terms. He's now in his seventh. Someone changed venerable West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd's age from 88 to 180. Another claimed Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn "was voted the most annoying senator by his peers in Congress." And those are just three of the more benign examples. Wikipedia had to block certain Capitol Hill email addresses to prevent further vandalism, or, if you will, petty truthiness.

But when it comes to truthiness in the third degree, preparations for the trial of former Cheney chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby for perjury and making false statements are providing a mother lode of factual phantasmagory.

Michael Winship, Writers Guild of America Award winner and former writer with Bill Moyers, writes this weekly column for the Messenger Post Newspapers in upstate New York. Copyright 2006 Messenger Post Newspapers

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »