It occurred to me today that the truth is getting harder and harder to find in our world.
On Friday, Jimmy Kimmel tweeted a video of Vice President Mike Pence dropping off supplies to a nursing home. In the video, Pence seemed to suggest that he wanted to carry empty boxes up to the door of the nursing home, for the sake of the cameras that were watching at the time.
Of course, this post by Kimmel set off a storm of people with not-nice things to say about the vice president. Until, Friday afternoon, when it was discovered by fact-checkers that Kimmel doctored the video, originally available from other sources, to make the vice president look bad. This set off a storm of people with not-nice things to say about Jimmy Kimmel. Which then set off a storm of people with not-nice things to say about the people who were saying not-nice things about Jimmy Kimmel. Which set off a storm of people with not-nice things to say about the people who were saying not-nice things about the vice president.
In this midst of it all, it occurred to me that people lie.
Now, this shouldn’t have come to me as a surprise. I lie. You lie. People in the news lie and my neighbor lies and my children lie.
Lying has been going on for as long as people have been talking to each other.
But, as the Jimmy Kimmel episode illustrated to me yesterday, we now have to fact-check things. When did this start? You could make the point that fact-checking has been around for as long as late night television hosts have been making the news by saying not-nice things about others, but I suspect fact-checking has been around for longer than that.
Have you ever fact-checked before? I’m sure you have. Probably not long after you realized how to lie, which psychologists suggest is right around three years of age. You see, it’s at three years of age that children begin to understand that other people are different from them –> they feel differently, think differently, act differently. It’s at that point that children also discover that others don’t know what is going on in the head of the child. This makes lying possible.
Of course, the “bridge too far” when it comes to lying is the lie that is preposterous enough for us to wonder about its authenticity. This is how parents know when their kids are lying. Since children lack practice at lying, they tell some whoppers. And, in the process of doing so, they set off those internal flags in the minds of their parents.
What does fact-checking look like at that early age? When Bobby tells Tina that Suzy called her a poop-face, Tina goes to ask Suzy if she called her a poop-face, and Tina says no, and so the two of them go over to Bobby and kick him in the shins.
Sound familiar? You’ve fact-checked before.
So, considering the fact that fact-checking is something that we’ve been doing pretty much our entire lives, how are people in the media able to “pull the wool over our eyes”?
When Tina goes to Suzy to ask her if what Bobby said was true, there is something in Tina that says, “That doesn’t sound like Suzy.” So, Tina has a reason to do the extra work of fact-checking, and the reason is that she doesn’t believe what she’s heard from Bobby.
Notice that word: ‘believe’.
Jimmy Kimmel convinced enough people that Mike Pence was delivering empty boxes to the front door of a nursing home because those people believed that was a possibility. They wanted to believe it, so it was a lie that was easier to sell.
I used to watch The X-Files back in the late 90s and early 2000s. The main character in the show spent a lot of his time being led around by his beliefs in paranormal phenomenon. Of course, a major theme of the show was Mulder’s desire to believe, and it was this desire to believe that caused Mulder to be manipulated by people who found it easier to sell him certain lies because of his beliefs, and his desire to believe.
Of course, the problem with this is: each of us has a different set of beliefs that determines whether or not we’re willing to believe the lies that people are trying to sell us. Not everyone believed Jimmy Kimmel early in the day on Friday; if everyone had, there would have been no fact-checking leading to the big reveal, later that day.
And, just like anything else, the kinds of lies that people are willing to believe fall on a linear scale. People are unwilling, most of the time, to believe lies that are extreme, and much more willing to believe when the lies are not-too-outrageous. The number of people willing to believe in a government conspiracy to kill JFK is smaller than the number of people that are willing to believe that all politicians are corrupt.
The other thing that occurred to me with this whole Jimmy Kimmel thing was that the fact-checking wasn’t then fact-checked, at least as far as I’ve heard. Why not? Who’s to say that the sources used in the fact-checking shouldn’t themselves be fact-checked?
Where does the insanity stop?
Let’s say someone tells me, and a friend of mine, a lie. I fact-check the lie, because it seemed in my head that it was a lie when I heard it, and I find a source that says that it’s a lie. My friend, who believed the lie in the first place, doesn’t fact-check the lie. Later, with the information that I have on the original lie, I go to my friend and I say, “We were lied to.” Then, my friend fact-checks the source that I used to fact-check the original lie and finds a source that says that my source was a lie. How do we ever reasonably establish whether or not we are hearing lies?
It Occurred To Me Today 