unSpun

by Brooks Jackson

  www.opensecrets.org

  The Center for Responsive Politics is a private, nonprofit group that collects official data on political donations and lobbying and provides useful analyses of which interest groups gave most.

  www.cbo.gov

  Lawmakers of both parties rely on the Congressional Budget Office for analysis of economic trends, federal spending, and the deficit, and of the likely impact of any new legislation.

  www.kff.org

  The Kaiser Family Foundation, whose stated mission is to “help improve health policies and programs for people in greatest need,” provides a wealth of nonpartisan information about Medicare, Medicaid, private health insurance, AIDS, and women’s health.

  www.bls.gov

  The Bureau of Labor Statistics collects official statistics on unemployment, jobs, inflation, and wages.

  www.census.gov

  The U.S. Census Bureau site supplies official statistics on population counts, poverty, household income, health insurance coverage, and home ownership.

  www.eia.doe.gov

  The Energy Information Administration has official statistics on all sources of energy, including gasoline prices, sources of crude oil, nuclear power, and solar power. The “Kids Page,” more sophisticated than it sounds, provides basic summaries.

  www.quackwatch.org

  Dr. Stephen Barrett’s respected and thoroughly documented “guide to Quackery, Health Fraud, and Intelligent Decisions” about medicine.

  www.gao.gov

  The Government Accountability Office is a hard-nosed, nonpartisan watchdog agency set up by Congress. The site contains reports on “high risk” programs vulnerable to fraud, waste, and mismanagement. A page on “our nation’s fiscal outlook” explains why GAO believes policy changes are needed to avoid “unsustainable federal deficits and debt” in the future.

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  We like to think that FactCheck.org falls into the category of trustworthy websites such as those cited in the box above. Remember, however, that even the best websites can make mistakes. In fact, one way to test whether a site is trustworthy is to note how it treats errors. Does it correct them quickly and openly? Never rely on only one source for important information; look for two or three that are independent of each other.

  A word about the very popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which we have not listed as one of our trustworthy sites. We’ve found it to be a convenient place to start researching an unfamiliar subject, and we refer to it often ourselves. But we would never rely on it as an authoritative source because anybody can edit Wikipedia at any time, and there are numerous documented instances of mistakes or deliberate misinformation appearing there. Any information found on Wikipedia must be used with caution and considered subject to verification.

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  A Guide to Websites

  A great online guide to finding reliable websites is the Librarians’ Internet Index, www.lii.org. It links to thousands of websites that have been screened by professional librarians—people who look things up for a living. Its more than 20,000 entries are organized under 14 main topics and nearly 300 related topics.

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  Even wholly biased and partisan sources can be trusted in some respects. The website of a political candidate can tell you exactly what the candidate’s current TV ads are saying, or what his or her current position is on a particular issue. It won’t, however, tell you whether those TV ads are true or false, or whether the candidate previously took a different position and then flip-flopped. By the same token, the website of a product’s manufacturer might be a good source for the product’s list price, its technical specifications, and perhaps even reprints of independent reviews of the product—positive reviews, that is. But don’t expect to find information on safety defects, or independent reviews that recommend a cheaper, better product made by another company.

  Blogs can also be useful, but, not surprisingly, they tend to reflect the biases of their creators. In its simplest form, a blog is a personal diary posted for all to see. Anyone can start a new one in minutes at little or no cost, using any one of several services. And many have done so. Technorati.com says it detects 1.6 million new blog postings per day. Blogging is just a pastime for most; 84 percent of bloggers surveyed by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in 2006 called it either a “hobby” or just “something I do, but not something I spend a lot of time on.” Only about one in three consider their blogs a form of journalism, and 42 percent say they “never” or “hardly ever” spend extra time trying to verify statements that appear on their blogs. So never accept something as fact just because it appears on somebody’s blog; check it out for yourself.

  It’s true that some blogs have had a big political impact. Daily Kos, a site founded by Markos Moulitsas, was a force behind Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, and it claimed to have raised more than $1 million for a dozen liberal congressional candidates running in 2004. It’s also true that a number of bloggers offer opinion and commentary as well written as any you’ll find in the opinion pages of major newspapers and magazines. Some mainstream journalists also blog. The best bloggers read widely and bring to their journals a collection of links to the most interesting items they’ve found, making some blogs a fine place to keep up on what’s being said about certain subjects in a lot of different places. That’s especially true for politics. The Pew poll found that 11 percent of bloggers say they deal primarily with politics and government.

  However, it’s rare to find solid, original reporting on a blog. The most celebrated example is still the 2004 coup scored by the conservative website Little Green Footballs, whose owner, with help from other like-minded bloggers, quickly exposed as likely forgeries some documents used by CBS News’s Dan Rather to back up a report that President Bush had shirked his duties as a young pilot in the Texas Air National Guard. The memos were supposedly written by Bush’s commanding officer in 1973. Within hours of the CBS broadcast, LGF’s Charles Johnson produced a seemingly exact match for one of the memos using the standard settings on Microsoft Word and a computer printer, technology that didn’t come into widespread use until the 1990s. The memos included effects such as proportional spacing and a superscript (the “th” in “187th”), and even today we know of nobody who has reproduced the CBS memos using the office technology of 1973. Nearly all experts believe the documents were fakes.

  Sometimes an individual blogger can go places and see things that news reporters can’t; notable for this were the Iraqi and U.S. military bloggers who posted personal journals of life in Iraq, and the bloggers who were on the scene of the earthquake and tsunami of December 26, 2004. Other blogs have evolved into mini–news organizations, employing small staffs of professional reporters and writers. We found TPM Muckraker a fine place to follow Washington corruption scandals as they unfolded during 2006, for example. The site’s staff cast a wide net for bits of new information—an exclusive interview in a San Diego newspaper, a little-noticed affidavit from a government investigator filed in a Washington, D.C., courthouse—and presented them in one place along with thoughtful and careful speculation about the possible implications. Even though it was established by a liberal website, Talking Points Memo, the Muckraker site was equally vigorous in following the legal troubles of both Republicans and Democrats. It provided more detailed and up-to-the-minute coverage of the congressional scandals than we found in any other place. But unbiased, professional-quality news blogs are rare, and the unwary blog reader can still be taken in by spectacular mistakes such as truthout.org’s “exclusive” report of Karl Rove’s “indictment,” mentioned earlier, or the rumor-has-it style of “reporting” favored by Matt Drudge (the Drudge Report) and his imitators.

  It bears repeating: something stated as a fact on a blog might be true, or it might not. Verify it elsewhere. Often bloggers provide links to the source of their information, which can be helpful. But sometimes those links just lead to another blog, which may or may not have provide
d a link to the original source.

  Due Diligence

  There’s more to evaluating a website than figuring out whether it is sponsored by a government agency, a university think tank or scholar, or just some crank, however. As we’ve shown, even a government site can turn out to contain little more than the talking points of the political party that controls it, and a lone blogger can—sometimes—have better evidence than an entire network news organization. Weighing the trustworthiness of any particular website requires a bit of what investors and lawyers call due diligence. That means checking out the management and finances before you buy. It’s like checking the reputation of a prospective date, or running the statistics on a prospective player for a fantasy football team. Due diligence is usually just a matter of answering a few questions.

  Take, for example, the growth hormone scams that litter the Internet. Perhaps you have received an e-mail message like one sent in 2005 that touted a dietary supplement, HGH 5000, claiming it could “Reduce Body Fat and Build Lean Muscle WITHOUT EXERCISE.” Skeptical, you want to dig for the facts about this seemingly miraculous product. How would you do that? What questions would you ask? Typing “HGH” into an Internet search engine would be the first step, and that would bring up scores of websites, some of which claim to be “buyer’s guides” or “consumer reviews” giving out unbiased information about this product. Some quote medical doctors praising the “clinically proven” benefits of HGH, and many cite an article in The New England Journal of Medicine as proof. All this sounds pretty good—until you start asking questions.

  • What are they selling? Scroll down the page on any of these pro-HGH sites and you quickly find they are actually just online stores selling an expensive product. (HGH typically costs $30–$60 or so for a one-month supply.) You can order the “recommended” product directly. That should be a tip-off that the site’s information is biased. After all, you wouldn’t expect a political candidate’s site to give you a fair account of the opponent’s virtues. Websites that are selling something, whether it’s a product, a candidate, or a public policy, are necessarily one-sided at best, and often downright misleading.

  • What’s their reputation? At the Federal Trade Commission’s website, we find a “consumer alert” warning us about HGH products. It says that while there “may” be some benefits from real, prescription-only human growth hormone, “FTC staff has seen no reliable evidence to support the claim that these ‘wannabe’ products [advertised on the Internet] have the same effect as prescription HGH.” The FTC is a federal agency with a good reputation for protecting consumers from false advertising, and so we should trust this mild warning much more than the sites that stand to profit from selling us this product. And the FTC is being bureaucratically cautious. Search a bit more and you may find the independent website Quackwatch, one of our favorites, which tells us that the thousands of physicians marketing themselves as “anti-aging specialists” are really practicing an unrecognized specialty, that shots of real HGH for normal people “appear to be a very poor investment,” and that the products being sold without prescription are outright fakes. We trust Quackwatch because it has been working to expose various medical frauds since 1969 (before there were even websites) and was listed by The Journal of the American Medical Association in 1998 as one of nine sites providing “reliable health information and resources.” With a reputation like that, we’d accept anything Quackwatch says over the word of anybody trying to sell us a modern Fountain of Youth.

  • Can I verify? Look for footnotes and links to original source material. These allow you to “drill down” to find out more and to verify claims for yourself. Huckster websites tend to make claims that the reader can’t check independently. They refer vaguely to “studies,” without saying who published them or how they were conducted, and they provide “testimonials” by unnamed persons who can’t be contacted. Politicians likewise love to cite “studies” to prove their points, but a closer look often shows that the studies don’t really provide the support claimed, or that they come from a hopelessly biased source. HGH provides a perfect example of why one should verify important claims at their source. The product’s hucksters cite a 1990 article in The New England Journal of Medicine to support their claim that real human growth hormone has been “clinically proven” to have all sorts of anti-aging properties. But they generally don’t provide a link to that article, and for good reason. Find it for yourself: search the Web for “New England Journal” plus “human growth,” and up will come a warning that “this article has been cited in potentially misleading” advertising. You find that the original study involved only a dozen men who actually got injections of the hormone, all over sixty years old and all with unusually low levels of the insulin-like “growth factor 1.” They got injections of real, prescription-only hormone three times per week. This is no proof that younger people, or persons with normal levels of the substance, would see any benefit. The online article now includes a link to a 2003 editorial in which the Journal calls that study “biologically interesting” but “not sufficient to serve as a basis for treatment recommendations.” In other words, a closer look shows the hucksters are simply misrepresenting the published research. President Ronald Reagan once said famously of the Soviet Union, “Trust, but verify.” When it comes to the Internet, we advise an even tougher attitude: don’t trust unless you can verify.

  • Who’s behind it? If you’re unfamiliar with the organization sponsoring a website, start with the “About Us” link and learn what the group says about its mission, political leanings, and finances. An anonymous website should be treated just like an anonymous e-mail: don’t believe a word you find there unless it’s verified independently. If you are looking for information about whether raising the federal minimum wage benefits workers or costs jobs, you quickly find that torrents of information pour out of two organizations with the same initials and very similar names, the Economic Policy Institute and the Employment Policies Institute. One EPI is pro-labor; it cites statistics about how inflation chips away at the buying power of a minimum-wage paycheck and how many families would benefit from an increase. The other EPI is pro-business; it posts studies estimating the number of low-wage workers who will be laid off, or not hired in the first place, if businesses are forced to pay more. The Economic Policy Institute says of itself that it “stresses…a concern for the living standards of working people,” and it lists as its chairman Gerald W. McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The other EPI is less forthcoming, calling itself “a non-profit research organization dedicated to studying public policy issues surrounding employment growth.” The word “growth” is a tip-off, however. It’s a favorite buzzword among free-market groups. And the group’s executive director is Richard Berman, who (we can discover by plugging his name into our search engine) is a Washington public relations man who was once an executive vice president of the Pillsbury Restaurant Group, owner of the Burger King chain, which employs thousands of low-wage workers. The fact that one of the EPIs is labor-backed and the other is business-backed doesn’t make either of them right or wrong, but it does mean that neither is a neutral source. Knowing which is which helps us evaluate their one-sided information and arguments. In general, the less a website tells you about itself in its “About Us” section, the less you should trust it.

  • Who’s paying? Where an organization gets its money can tell you a lot about its leanings. The Progress and Freedom Foundation, for example, describes itself straightforwardly as a “market-oriented think tank” studying the “digital revolution,” and it openly lists the many corporations that support it financially, including Apple, Microsoft, Comcast, and other computer, cable TV, and Internet companies. The Clean and Safe Energy Coalition was launched in April 2006 by a co-founder of Greenpeace; it argues that more nuclear reactors would be good for the environment because they don’t put out smoke or greenhouse gasses. In the fine print, you’ll find th
at the “coalition” is funded by the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade group for the industry. Industry funding doesn’t mean a group’s information is wrong, but it is likely to reflect the business side.

  • Who are the people? Sometimes the people at an organization are a clue to what’s up. The Center for American Progress describes itself as “a nonpartisan research and educational institute,” for example, but the people behind it amount to a Democratic administration in exile. CAP’s president and CEO is John Podesta, who was Bill Clinton’s last White House chief of staff, and top positions are filled almost exclusively by Democrats, including former aides to Clinton, Senator Ted Kennedy, and former House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt. That doesn’t look very “nonpartisan” to us. Contrast that group to the Institute for International Economics, a leading think tank on the global economy. It professes to be “nonpartisan” and really is. Its board of directors includes many big names from both major parties: its chairman is Peter G. Peterson, a Republican who was once secretary of commerce under Richard Nixon, and another member is former senator Bill Bradley, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000. The same goes for Resources for the Future, an environmental think tank headed by former Democratic congressman Phil Sharp of Indiana, but which also has a genuinely bipartisan board including such well-known Republicans as R. Glenn Hubbard, former head of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, and former representative Jim Greenwood of Pennsylvania.

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  False Quotes

  The Internet teems with unverified “quotes” supposedly uttered by famous people. Some of these attributions, perhaps many, are false.