That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [148]
Sometimes, though, it can be a distraction, or worse. On balance, we think the impact of the new media is positive, but its downside is not negligible.
It can instantly purvey both misinformation and corrections to the misinformation. Put up a lie or a mistaken fact and the Internet will both spread it and correct it at lightning speed. The problem, though, is that the falsehood often draws much more attention than the correction, and the sites that spread falsehoods are different from the sites that correct them, so the corrections often don’t reach the right people.
Senator Bennett told us that during his unsuccessful 2010 campaign for renomination he encountered people who roundly criticized him for positions that he had never taken. He was accused, for example, of supporting the Obama health-care plan, when he had in fact outspokenly opposed it—and made this clear on his official website, where he posted his own innovative alternative. When he asked his constituents where they had gotten their mistaken beliefs, they usually replied, “The Internet”—meaning the far-right-wing sites that had become their sources of news.
“I lost the campaign on Facebook, YouTube, all of the rest of that,” Bennett told us as his staff cleared out his Senate office in December 2010. “I couldn’t penetrate it. It was saturated with Glenn Beck. Glenn Beck is on television every day. The Glenn Beck groupies pick out pieces that they love, and then it’s all over, as they say. It goes viral. That’s where [the Utah state Republican delegates who voted in the primary] got their information. They didn’t get it from The New York Times.”
Bennett told us that an old friend wrote to him out of the blue to ask why he was pushing a constitutional amendment providing that “every member of Congress, after one term, gets full pay for life [and] every member of Congress has a gold-plated medical plan for which they do not pay.” The friend, said Bennett, had apparently heard some such thing from Glenn Beck and shared it with everyone on his Christmas card list—including Bennett. So the message to voters, said Bennett, was “Throw them all out—they raised their salaries while they are cutting Social Security benefits to pay for it.”
How did Bennett respond? He and his wife sat down at the computer and wrote the following reply: “Dear X: Thanks for sending me this to give me an opportunity to comment. Number one, we have frozen our salaries; number two, the Social Security thing is set by law; number three, I wish that it were so that I got full salary for the rest of my life just for serving one term; we do not have a gold-plated health care plan—we have exactly the same as any other federal employee.” And to that voter’s credit, said Bennett, he got a response. The voter sent the following note out to his Christmas card list: “Senator Bennett has been our friend for a long time, and he set the record straight, and I want everybody to know that these are the facts.”
The correction had little effect. Repeatedly during the campaign voters came up to him at rallies, Bennett said, and grilled him: “‘You voted for ObamaCare.’ ‘No, I didn’t.’ ‘Yes, you did. I read it on the Internet. ’ ‘You voted for ObamaCare.’ ‘You voted for the stimulus.’ ‘You voted for TARP.’ I said, ‘Look, I am the guy who changed the proposed law from $700 billion to two tranches of $350 billion, because I wanted to