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Bill Clinton Suggests Internet Fact Agency
eldavojohn writes "Friday on CNBC, Bill Clinton gave an interview that is causing some unrest on popular news sites today. When asked if there is a role for government in terms of ensuring that the information out there is accurate, he replied, 'Well, I think it would be a legitimate thing to do. ... If the government were involved, I think you'd have to do two things ... I think number one, you'd have to be totally transparent about where the money came from. And number two, you would have to make it independent. ... let's say the US did it; it would have to be an independent federal agency that no president could countermand or anything else because people wouldn't think you were just censoring the news and giving a different falsehood out. That is, it would be like, I don't know, National Public Radio or BBC or something like that, except it would have to be really independent and they would not express opinions, and their mandate would be narrowly confined to identifying relevant factual errors. And also, they would also have to have citations so that they could be checked in case they made a mistake.' His statements have elicited responses ranging from a Ministry of Truth a la 1984 to discussion of genuine concern about internet rumors and falsehoods."
This is a superb idea, the internet is so full of half-truths and outright lies it makes my head spin.
A prime example was the flood of pro-vaccine nonsense that was obviously spread by Big Pharma soon after Dr. Andrew Wakefield's brilliant research into vaccine-caused autism was all but shredded. Alternative medicine caregivers (homeopaths, chiropractors, naturopaths, accupuncurists, among others) have all been treating vaccine induced autism. WE'RE IN THE FRONT LINES! But some well placed lies soon spread as truth.
How about another? The LIES that Chiropractic neck manipulation can cause strokes. How do they know? They don't! This LIE was conceived by BIG PHARMA. They sell all the OtC pain remedies to unsuspecting sheep. Neck (Cervical) manipulation has cured MILLIONS of people of chronic headaches, migraine, sinus blockages and other maladies that BIG PHARMA sells you drugs for.
Sorry if this comes across as a rant, I'm only allowed to post two times a day. This is because of the BIG PHARMA drug pushers who constantly vote me down rather than have a proper, adult discussion with me.
The sooner they get someone in power who can regulate the internet, not some fancy 'scientist', but a true medial professional, the better.
Take care,
Bob
Chiropractic Saves Lives!
Bill Clinton didn't say this.
God is good all the time! -K
Instead of changing people's minds to think that the "fact" isn't true, It would be easier for the government agency to change the world so that the fact becomes true.
... to do so in a manner that was, in the Commission's view, honest, equitable and balanced.
Translation: the federal government/current administration has to approve of the way you handle controversial views. What could possibly go wrong?
I would have thought that radio broadcasting would have somewhat similar rights to the freedom of the press. The "Fairness Doctrine" seems to challenge that idea.
Quite apart from all the other good reasons why this is a BAD idea, it is another way to wase money a broke country dosn't have.
With the Fairness Doctrine in place, the media present the people who hold the opposing viewpoint as being all nujobs because they select as spokespeople for the opposition the nuts rather than the reasonable people. When we had it politics was more civil and less responsive.
When the Fairness Doctrine was in place the media presented Lyndon LaRouche as the face of libertarians.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Yes, obviously, there's the Ministry of Truth aspect to it. However, when I want to find out what the real deal is about the latest flu pandemic, you know where I go? cdc.gov. If I want to find out what the story is around the latest federal budget numbers, I go to cbo.gov. If I want raw country data, I go to cia.gov.
There are already plenty of times where some numbers geeks are holed up in a government office, crunching numbers and nothing but numbers. Is there a risk of political influencing? Sure is. You just have to look at FEMA for one of the most egregious examples of political horse trading. But you can set up an organization in such a way as to minimize political influence.
There are really three areas where I would like to see an official government agency providing a central information clearinghouse: .gov style.
* a history of political events (who said what, where and when)
* a history of detailed public office budgets (down to who makes how much)
* a general list of current hoaxes and misinformation. Think of it as Snopes done
Yes, all of that would obviously be done from the perspective of the government, and with associated biases and perspectives. But it would provide an easy place to get that kind of information, rather than having to trawl through countless soundbites presented by various other organizations.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
1. Known knowns
2. Known unknowns
3. Unknown knowns
4. Unknown unknowns
most issues are more complex than 'for and against.' thus, the 'fairness doctrine' wasn't really fair at all.. all it did was provide a 'sensibility' sandbox that was defined by popularity, not truth. step outside the box, and you were censored anyway.
Bill Clinton talking about what the truth is! I guess it depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is... http://www.slate.com/id/1000162/
Wikipedia? Seriously?
Given that much of Wikipedia is dominated by cliques of editors whose main preoccupation is to keep out competing edits (no matter how sensible those edits may be), and given there's a big difference between neutrality and objectivity, I hardly think Wikipedia is a good example of what Clinton is talking about.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
I've yet to check out your site, but will. As I've yet to judge how successful you are at your mission, I can only say I appreciate that you're trying.
For politics, there's also FactCheck.org.
The trouble is that you have to approach these grains-of-salt sites and the like with a grain of salt. The idea of a "fact agency" sounds very tempting as a quick fix, and I'm certain that if such a thing were created, it would do wonders at the beginning. But once there's a fair amount of public trust in it, that's when the potential for abuse becomes great.
Nothing will ever eclipse thorough research and hard questioning.
Omnes tuae crepidines sunt nobis sunt. Ascendo tuum!
...and in an appropriate way. Say some BS internet rumor gets started. An affected agency will often have a debunking website dedicated to the topic that browsers can easily access. Remember Compean and Ramos, the two border agents the anti-immigration crowd turned into heroes? The DoJ did a great point-by-point debunking of the interwebz myths about their case. Didn't stop a Bush pardon, unfortunately.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
If implemented properly, with actual citations, I think it may be a neat idea. It'd be nice to see relevent facts displayed in context.
This whole story is flamebait. Clinton didn't make the suggestion, the interviewer did, and asked him to speculate on it. He isn't actually advocating for a ministry of truth, nor is he even in government anymore.
Such an agency would be inherently biased, because as Stephen Colbert has taught us, the facts and reality have a liberal bias!
Reality has a liberal bias
You are correct. Ron Paul is not representative of most libertarians. Most self-identified libertarians are much wackier than Ron Paul.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Take what's said by the government, invert it and you probably get something that's rather close to the truth.
> Most self-identified libertarians are much
> wackier than Ron Paul.
And most self-identified democrats are much wackier than Howard Dean, and most self-identified republicans are much wackier than Newt Gingrich.. What's your point?
I have yet to see that Wikipedia. I go to the one with people collaborating on making articles better. Yes, occasionally a jerk comes along and tries to push a particular point of view, but they generally come to their senses quickly or just go away, often after being blocked from editing.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Have gnu, will travel.
Where is that wikipedia? I didn't know there were two of them. What's the url? I can only find the one run by jackbooted, book-burning cliquish friends of Jimbo for their own ends and profit. And that one is pretty useless.
But hold on, "blocked from editing"? Could these be the same wikipedias? Looks like they could be. Are you a friend of Jimbo?
Which is why you need several of them. Some good general fact-check resources include FactCheck,org, Politifact.com, snopes.com, Wikipedia, and the message boards at TheStraightDope.com. It wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea for, say, Voice of America to add another such site.
Sure, but you need a couple of resources that you trust in order to bootstrap your research,
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
and it's got nothing to do with ideology. It's all about practicality. Corporations have massive economic power. So much so that nothing else can stand against that power except the government. Nothing. This is not a false dichotomy, at least as far as I know. I don't know any other way to keep something as massive as a modern global corporation in check.
You can't just say the free market will sort it out, because the same people running one corporation are on the board of directors of the others. You can't stop buying from them and hope that'll keep them in check, because you'll have to buy from a "competitor" and that competitor is owned, through the stock market, by the same people. They're completely pervasive in our economy. In short, they're our ruling class, and we need government to replacement.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Can you point out some specific articles?
I've been pretty happy with wikipedias decisions on contentious issues, although I don't spend any time editing there. For example, they still show the cartoons here :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy
As an outsider, my principle objections have always been when some really awesome & informative article gets scrubbed useless by astroturffers, BLP fags, deletionists, agenda pushing asshats, or simply idiots that don't understand the subject matter. I've usually seen this on more fringe articles however.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
I have yet to see that Wikipedia. I go to the one with people collaborating on making articles better. Yes, occasionally a jerk comes along and tries to push a particular point of view, but they generally come to their senses quickly or just go away, often after being blocked from editing.
Purely in the name of sober second thought, you might want to consider - just for a moment - that you're already on the clique side looking out. I'm certainly not saying you are, but I think it is valid advice to anyone that says they don't see a particular societal problem, to also look in the mirror.
"an independent federal agency that no president could countermand or anything else "
That's funny until you realize he might just believe it, and then it's sad.
And then you realize he really DOESN"T believe it, and it's sadder still.
From Andrew Sullivan at theatlantic.com
"I covered the Clintons for eight years. The one thing I learned about them is that they lie. It's reflexive to them; after decades of the lying that tends to infect the households of addicts, they don't have a normal person's understanding of truth and falsehood."
Well, he's either naive, or lying, when he claims there could even be something like 'an independent federal agency'. For that reason alone this is a dumb, bad, dangerous idea.
Then there's the First Amendment.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
This is wonderful.
It will revolutionize history research. We all know that data is moving more and more to the net. This will centralize it and provide quality control.
You'll just have to consult the official site to determine what truly happened. No mucking about having to weigh the validity of original sources that might have been mistranslated, be biased, or were authored disengenuously to slander someone. No dealing with the vagaries, subjectivity and bother of gathering statements from witnesses to events before they pass away. The savings in travel and time for history, archeology, anthropology and related departments will be most welcome as they tend to be underfunded anyway. They won't have to waste so much time in futile debate over what really happened.
One source and one truth to be written and taught in classrooms.
What a remarkable idea.
Think how easy it makes journalism as well. Why, they'll be able to cut even more of those expensive foreign correspondents that sit around waiting for news to happen.
It certainly will help end the terrible partisanship we have in this country. People will all start from the same set of facts. Why, if we unify the deductive methods applied to them, we can avoid this terrible inefficiency of having people look at the same circumstances and come to different conclusions about it.
Finally, the nation will have clarity rather than this messy confusion.
He is a really good troll. Here are some quotes from previous posts:
"...the more syllables in a chemical name, the more dangerous they are"
"Earth used to be a nice, hospitable place until the invention of radioactivity."
"I'm not sure how Chiropractors could detect subluxations in a robot..."
"Chiropractic maintenance alignments and adjustments scored better on IQ tests."
Chiropractors are quacks but they are educated.