Speaking of untruths spoken as fact, a few weeks ago I mentioned some counts of the Denver homeless population were probably bogus but were being used to decide matters of policy. David Kopel noticed the same thing and mentioned it in his weekly Rocky Mountain News column. Yesterday he had an update:
I guess there must be some people at the News who don't read my column. On Nov. 22, I wrote about the factoids of exaggerated numbers of people living on the streets in Denver. Then, on Dec. 13, the News' Extra! feature announced that there are "6,885 people living on the streets in the Denver area." The cited source for this statistic was the "Metro Denver Homeless Initiative survey."
[...]
Did the survey report that all 6,885 of these persons were "living on the streets," as the News asserted? In response to the question, "Where are you staying now?" 620 people said they were staying on the streets, and 263 said they were camping out or sleeping in a car.
The rest of the people whom the News claimed were "living on the streets" were actually (in descending order) staying with family or friends, staying in an emergency shelter, living in a hotel or motel, or in a domestic violence shelter.
Those numbers are in line with what I wrote November 23rd. At least 6,885 is a smaller lie than 10,000.
I have it in my head that it was Joseph Geobbels who coined that famous phrase about how a lie, repeated often enough as the truth, will be taken as such.
This phenomenon is pervasive in this country. And people do it all the time, without thinking ... as you mentioned, some probably believe whatever it is they're parroting.
How many times do we run across the claim that the U.S. acted "unilaterally" in Iraq? Consider too, the "guns are bad" theme which is trumpeted repeatedly by the Gun Bigots. (Props to Geek With a .45 for the "Gun Bigot" term, BTW)
I think it's part of our new culture of "media news" — the culture of the sound bite. Very little of the mainstream coverage is actually in-depth, and people are all to willing to just believe what comes out of the talking heads.
Posted by: jed at December 21, 2003 09:55 PM"Gun Bigot." Pithy. Accurate. I'm stealing it.
Posted by: Walter at December 22, 2003 10:23 PM