I've got a problem. OK, so technically, I've got *lots* of problems, but this one is really annoying me. I live in the middle of a small town in the exurbs of Greater Dallas--which is, in essence, its own provincial region. My small town has its own newspaper. It's called the Herald. The Herald is a small, weekly paper that covers local news. It's reliably filled with information about local food and blood drives, church activities, recent deaths, weddings, and crimes, stories about the city council and local politics. It contains lots of advertisements for local attorneys and restaurants and realtors and the rest. It's got a weekly "message from the minister" segment, where a local religious leader will chime in with a down-home churchy message about life, the universe, and everything.
And its got an editorial page.
Now, by and large, the editorial page is of a piece with the rest of the paper. It touches on local concerns, sometimes talks about important life tasks and big transitions like graduating from high school or the value of playing a sport or getting your regular medical checkup or other such. And that sort of editorial is fine, so far as it goes. For the most part, the editorials are sort of inoffensive, well-intentioned pontifications about life. These sort of things don't usually require much work or research or even evaluation, but people like them because they communicate a general sense of community--a marking of the things in life that we share in common and like to celebrate as a community. About the worst consequence a reader could suffer from this stuff is the opportunity cost--the everpresent possibility that the reader missed out on doing something more important by reading the editorial. But that poses very little danger here, since we're talking about what amounts to a three minute task.
But recently, the paper has started a new trend. They've started running regular editorials by a fellow who calls himself a Dr., professor, minister, and sports reporter. Such a profusion of titles should raise its own red flags, but let's leave that to the side for now. This fellow actually works for the paper, and his main job seems to consist of writing about local sports and school activities. And though his writing is plagued by regular grammatical mistakes, for the most part, his news articles are the stuff of a high school sports and education page. They're largely unexceptional.
But then there are his editorials. Now, sometimes, he pens perfectly harmless editorials of the sort I mentioned above, noting the transition that comes with graduation, or the need to find a new (medical) doctor when you move. These are, again, just fine, so far as they go.
This fellow also likes to write about national political controversies. And there's nothing wrong with that, per se. The real problem is that the paper's editor also chooses to publish those thoughts in a semi-regular column. Why is that a problem? To answer that, I need to step back for a moment to consider the value of an editorial page.
As I see it, a published editorial is valuable when it sheds new or interesting light on some controversy. This can be done in a number of ways. An editorial is a form of persuasive argument, and as such, it can accomplish a number of goals. For example, it can give people reasons to support or reject some policy that they might not have considered; it can try to reframe some debate in order to highlight a distortion involved in an alternative view (whether this reframing constitutes a better picture or a worse distortion then becomes a new puzzle to solve); it can introduce fresh perspectives or considerations into an ongoing debate. There are lots of good things an editorial can do.
Here are some bad things an editorial can do. It can misrepresent basic facts; it can make false claims; it can contain fallacious arguments and inferences. Now of course, debates are complex things, even such that one person's facts can sometimes seem like another's lies. But this is largely cautionary. Though there are lots of rhetorical tricks to dress up falsehood as fact, a good editorialist need not make use of outrightly false claims to make her point. Issues are often complex enough that one can make a case by highlighting a set of examples that illustrate a common theme. This procedure often won't settle the matter, but it will give people a data set for consideration.
Even disregarding these complexities, I think we can agree on a common baseline criterion for the good editorial, which I'll borrow from Hippocrates: First, do no harm. If a reliable consequence of *accepting* the claims of a given editorial is that the reader comes away with a larger number of false beliefs about the world than she started with, the editorial is bad. In fact, I would go so far as to assert that the editorial which tends to sow obviously false beliefs constitues a public nuisance.
Of course, critical and well-informed readers come with their own anti-nonsense innoculations, but unfortunately, readers who do not spend a goodly amount of their time actively endeavoring to become more informed citizens are often easily misled by falsehoods parading as facts. This is (I hope obviously) not a comment on their intelligence. It is a simple fact of life that people are most easily misled about the things that they don't know much about.
Now on to our editorialist. The problem is simple: His editorials inevitably contain a litany of false or highly misleading claims. And not false in some nuanced way, just straight up errors of fact and of argument. And if we assume that some of the Herald's readers simply don't keep abreast of political discourse, then we can infer that they will be easily misled by our editorialist's nonsense. Now of course, if they had no reason to take the fellow seriously, they could do with the information what they please. It could still cause damage, but if he were simply any given local reader writing letters to the editor, we'd have no particular reason to take him more seriously than anybody else. But this is the deeper problem. He is a reporter, a regular columnist, and bills himself as a Dr., professor, minister, and sports writer. At least three of these titles tend to evoke notions of trust and authority. This is why I deem our fellow a nuisance.
Now I think it would be sufficient to make my case were I to give a *single* example of a falsehood-filled editorial. But the sad truth is that virtually everything the man has to say about our national political scene is straight-up nonsense. Worse still, he tends to write things that are likely to reinforce the worst prejudices and shoddy reasoning on the right, tea-partying political fringe.
In my next post, I'll take a recent editorial apart, line by line, to give you an idea of what I mean.
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