Who verifies the verifiers?

[subplotkudzu]

Semi-public musings here. It seems to me that the big problems were facing right now have to do with trust, or, more specifically, the lack of it.

 

Yes, there were big financial shenanigans that led to the current economic problems (too many factors for me to get into here). The most immediate problem, however, is that of trust, which is the social compact that lets one person lend another money and believe that they will get it back. Right now no one is lending anyone else money because they don’t trust that they’ll get that money back – that the other persons books are clogged with other debt, that they’re not about to go under and take the loan with them. In theory companies should be able to send auditors to look through the books of anyone they want to loan money to, full transparency, to see if they’re likely to be good for the loan.

Unfortunately, that’s not likely to work. After the last round of financial collapses with Enron, WorldCom and the like it became commonly believed that the auditors were involved in the shenanigans. Auditing companies collapsed under the weight of the scandal. This time around the structure of the collateral is designed through highly complicated financial mechanisms that only a few people really claim to understand (and were then misapplied on a scale broader than was ever intended). The remaining auditors don’t even understand what they’re supposed to be verifying. So people don’t trust them.

Of course, people are also afraid that the whole system is about to collapse. The US Government, in its bailout package, was hoping to make people trust that the government would prevent such a collapse so they would feel safe loaning money. One of Paulson’s aides pointed out that the 700 billion dollar was picked because it sounded nice and big and would let people trust that the government had the funds and wherewithal to solve the problem. It wasn’t about the plan, it was the appearance of a plan producing sufficient trust to make people start extending credit again, which would help resolve the problem without even needing a plan.

That didn’t work, so now Paulson is modifying the initial “our plan is to have a plan” plan for a different plan that might work better. As a result of that some legislators to whom Paulson insisted that he had a plan that we had to vote on right now are finding that they no longer trust Paulson. And the markets, seeing that the government didn’t really have much of a plan, don’t have a lot of trust in the Fed to solve the problem.

In the election we have, among other things, the Bill Ayers imbroglio, which has several factors which aren’t in dispute (Ayers was a member of the Weathermen, Obama did attend a meet and greet at his house that his political mentor arranged for him and the two served on the Annenberg Challenge Fund board together for several years). The question is whether you trust that this was the extent of the relationship, and does the relationship reveal something other than what Obama says it does – that Ayers is just another member of the Chicago education scene who almost everyone working in that area, republican and democrat, has had contact with.

[If you think I’m being unfairly biased to Obama, take out Obama and Ayers and replace it with McCain and his campaign manager Rick Davis being paid by Freddie Mac for years simply because he was McCain’s friend. Again, this isn’t really in dispute (Freddie Mac spent the money, it went to Davis’ coffers, and later to his business, Freddie Mac’s executives concluded “you couldn’t say no” to Davis’ request for a retainer). Is this the extent of the relationship between Freddie Mac and McCain, and does it reveal something other than what McCain says it does?]

In past days we would turn to the free and fair press to resolve this, but that hasn’t worked. Oh, various press services have gone over the situation for months and not turned anything up, but we’re at the point now where people don’t trust the press. They’ve screwed up in the past, sometimes big time. Some outlets are clearly bias such as [name the outlet you don’t like here], and the whole Main Stream Media is more of a commercial venture then a truth finding organ. It becomes easy to think that just because no one has turned up anything else connecting Ayers and Obama (or McCain and Freddie) is no sign that there isn’t something else, right? Or that the connections that are there aren’t a much more important window into their psyche than the press wants to discuss. They could be “in the tank” for Obama or McCain, and even if they’re not they just might not be putting the necessary time to research it and discuss it, and you can trot out a dozen instances on either side where the press clearly favored the other guy.

There is solid evidence to back up that people put more weight behind evidence that back their own beliefs and give less credence to evidence that runs counter to it; there’s disturbing new research indicating that counter-evidence will directly reinforce the belief being refuted. The more research fails to turn up deep connections between Obama and Ayers (regardless of who did the research, as two campaigns worth of political oppo research teams who have no reason to hide anything have yet to turn anything up) the more one knows that the conspiracy of silence and corruption in Chicago is massive. The more research fails to turn up evidence that McCain ever did Freddie Mac any real favors the more we’re sure that his whole organization is opportunistically corrupt.

Reagan said of Soviet nuclear weapons reductions that we should “trust, but verify”. Lately we don’t even trust the verifiers. And apparently we can’t even trust ourselves to be able to clearly evaluate the information we do get. And where does that leave us?

More to come, but one warning: if anyone decides to turn my comments section into a litany of examples of why their side is more pure than the other side they will just be deleted. I’m not trying to assign purity or seeking validation of past offenses. I’m trying to figure out how to get past that to a point where we can start trusting again.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

One simple suggestion: close the journalism schools. College-trained journalists have turned the whole profession into advocacy rather than reportage. They actually believe that damned greeting-card slogan that their job is to "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." Their job, last time I checked, was to report the facts!

The caliber of reporting and writing has not improved since the days when reporting was what you did if you were too skinny to become a cop or a pipefitter. Perhaps that's why fewer and fewer people subscribe to newspapers or watch the evening news.

Cambias

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

Interesting.

I've not seen the idea to close journalism schools, but I am familiar with how Journalism changed from a blue collar to a while collar job in the last few decades. And that clearly changes how the process works. Journalism isn't something you do because you love the truth, but something you do because you want to get paid big bucks and/or advance your existing positions.

I also wonder about re-establishing the idea that the ariwaves are being given to broadcast media as a public trust and they have to provide a certain amount of non-partisan content. I doubt it would work - no one really trusts who would be making the decisions on what to report on, after all - but the slide away from that is also a part of the problem.

The TV news was for years considered to be a socially required money loser. Now it's big business on cable channels, with each channel catering to its own demographic with its own advocacy, and the broadcast channels are constantly cutting back the fact based news, expensive in depth reporting and foreign bureaus to replace it with "breaking news" about individual bloody or scandalous things that will be forgotten tomorrow in favor of new bloody, scandalous things. (Plus the weather, where it is always the storm of the century.) It's moving people from what they need to hear - facts, and cogent analysis of those facts from actual experts - to what they want to hear - splashy stuff and the proof that their side is right and the other side is not to be trusted.

Some newspapers were always in this camp, of course, even before the journalism schools. Not for nothing do we have the Democratic Register and Republican-American as a newspapers, and Hearsts willingness to pervert the facts for a specific outcome are pretty well established.