Proofiness - Charles Seife [88]
Time and again, military briefers in Viet Nam have “proved” that the war was being won with the help of impressive “body counts” of enemy dead that were impossible to verify, let alone dispute. With the aid of computers, U.S. officials were equally sanguine about stating to the decimal point how many villages were “secure” in Viet Nam.
No matter how indisputable the mess-up, no matter how obvious it is that somebody has screwed the pooch, a statistic can put a happy face on failure. Say you’re a general who’s just tested a very expensive missile and it has failed to hit its target for the sixth time in a row. Do you tell the press that the test was a failure? Of course not! Simply say that the test was a success because the missile had successfully achieved sixteen out of seventeen objectives. (Of course, the seventeenth objective was actually hitting a target.) That way, you can say with a straight face that you were “encouraged” by the test.84
At times, the Pentagon’s attempts to use bogus statistics—Potemkin numbers and other forms of proofiness—to spin unpleasant facts might seem almost comically inept. But they’re a surprisingly effective tool for controlling the press. Proofiness uses a reporter’s greatest strength, his reverence for objectivity and truth, against him.
“If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”
It’s an old journalistic saying, often attributed to the Chicago City News Bureau, repeated over the years by editors and journalism professors all around the country. It encapsulates a journalistic ideal: a mistrust of anything that isn’t observable or verifiable, a rejection of hearsay. Responsible reporters must take nothing for granted—only by basing every single sentence of your story upon observations or verifiable facts can you be assured that you’re reporting the truth. Everything that isn’t bolstered by an observation or another sort of fact should be set aside. As a Columbia Journalism School professor puts it:
I was trained to believe in only what is observable and quantifiable. . . . Journalists feel most secure with the batting average, the stock price, the body count, the vote tally (well, maybe not in Florida in 2000). We feel comfortable watching the Rose Bowl game or the ticker-tape parade unfold before our eyes.
Journalists are supposed to retreat into a fortress where we admit nothing but the information that we get from our own senses and the verifiable truths that statistics seem to represent. This sort of information is the raw fuel of journalism. It is what gives journalists their voices; without hard facts to pin our words to, we are powerless to express ourselves.
The Pentagon realized this long ago. During Vietnam, it would toss out Potemkin numbers and fruit-packed data week after week, providing raw material for journalists who needed to produce stories for their editors. Though many accomplished journalists scorned the five o’clock follies and got their information by talking to troops in the battlefields, others were content to stay in Saigon and regurgitate the phony statistics that the Pentagon spoon-fed to them. What’s more, these statistics didn’t even need to be terribly believable for them to serve their purpose. The reason is counterintuitive: the lies are not meant for ideological enemies, but for allies.
Weekly body counts and monthly hamlet evaluation numbers were never likely to convince the war skeptics in the journalistic community—they were intended to be used by hawkish journalists and pundits, the ones who were already convinced that the war was being won, such as Joseph Alsop. Alsop’s “Matter of Fact” column would occasionally showcase the Pentagon-created numbers that proved that the war was being won—harvest statistics, body counts, numbers of captured documents. Alsop deployed even the Hamlet Evaluation System to paint a rosy picture of the war:
One would like to cite countless facts about this process