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December 5th, 2021 (Permalink)

Fact Checking the Future and the Future of Fact Checking

Last month's entry in this series discussed the important but poorly understood distinction between facts and opinions1. It's generally agreed by experts that fact checkers should avoid checking opinions but, unfortunately, the temptation to do so seems irresistible. As I argued in that entry, predictions are a type of statement of opinion, and I predicted that I would examine an example of such opinion checking. This entry is the fulfillment of that prophecy.

Predictions are expressions of opinion because, unlike the past, the future is not fixed, and there are no facts about it. There are, of course, some claims about the future that are highly likely, even so likely that they are almost certain and one could be forgiven for calling them "facts". For instance, is it a "fact" that the sun will rise tomorrow? Based on past experience, as well as scientific knowledge about the rotation of the Earth and the life spans of stars, it's so probable that the sun will rise that only a philosopher would doubt it. However, such exceptional predictions are unlikely to be the targets of our fact checkers, so let's examine in depth a prediction that they actually checked.

Last year, President Donald Trump claimed that a vaccine for COVID-19 might be available before the end of the year. Despite the fact that this was an expression of opinion, and that Trump as president was obviously in a position to take steps to speed the development of a vaccine, both The Washington Post's Fact Checker and NBC News chose to "fact check" it. Here's the cautiously worded start of The Post's "fact check":

President Trump has adopted a new refrain: A vaccine for the novel coronavirus will be completed in record time. On several occasions, the president has bragged about the speed with which experts and pharmaceutical companies are working on a vaccine. Trump is not wrong in saying that scientists are rapidly developing a vaccine to combat the novel coronavirus. However, he seems to be overstating when a vaccine will be available to the public.2

The Fact Checker carefully hedges its claim that Trump was wrong: he "seems" to be "overstating" it. What, specifically, did Trump claim? A couple of days before The Post's article in early March of last year, Trump held a roundtable with representatives of pharmaceutical companies and members of the coronavirus task force. At the end of the meeting, Trump answered questions from unnamed members of the news media, and his answers seem to have inspired the "fact check":

Q: Mr. President, do you accept that this will take longer probably than you would like?

Trump: I don’t know what the time will be. I don’t think they know what the time will be. I’ve heard very quick numbers—a matter of months—and I’ve heard pretty much a year would be an outside number. So I think that’s not a bad range. But if you’re talking about three to four months, in a couple of cases, and a year in other cases—wouldn’t you say, Doctor, would that be about right?

Q: Is it realistic to think, really, that a vaccine could be ready in three or four months?

Trump: Well, you have the greatest companies in the world sitting around the table. I mean, Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer and all of the companies—Gilead—you have all of these great companies and that’s what they’re saying.

Anthony Fauci: Would you make sure you get the President the information that a vaccine that you make and start testing in a year is not a vaccine that’s deployable. So he’s asking the question, “When is it going to be deployable?” And that is going to be, at the earliest, a year to a year and a half, no matter how fast you go.3

This is a confusing exchange. The first question is itself unclear: what does "this" refer to? Vaccine development? Treatment development? Both were discussed during the previous roundtable discussion. The follow-up question is clearly about vaccines, and Trump may have been confused about the difference between when a potential vaccine would be at the testing stage as opposed to being ready for vaccinating people in the population, as Fauci's intervention suggests.

NBC News' "fact check" was over two months after The Post's, and NBC had additional statements to check:

President Donald Trump has suggested multiple times that a coronavirus vaccine could come within months, an accelerated timeline that prominent health experts and veteran vaccine developers say is unlikely absent a miracle. "We're looking to get it by the end of the year if we can, maybe before," Trump said Friday during in [sic] a Rose Garden event centered on his administration's efforts to fast-track a vaccine. “Vaccine work is looking VERY promising, before end of year,” Trump tweeted on Thursday. … “I think we’re going to have a vaccine by the end of the year,” he told reporters later in the day.4

Only the last of these is a prediction, but it is also qualified by the word "think" indicating that it is an opinion. How could you check such a prediction, aside from waiting until the end of the year to see whether it comes true? Predictions are opinions, and they cannot be checked against the facts, since the facts that will make them true or false don't yet exist. The only approach available is to check the opinion against other opinions, and this is what both The Post and NBC News chose to do: asking experts for their opinions as to when a vaccine would be available. For example, here is NBC's "fact check":

[E]xperts say that the development, testing and production of a vaccine for the public is still at least 12 to 18 months off, and that anything less would be a medical miracle. …

“I think it’s possible you could see a vaccine in people’s arms next year—by the middle or end of next year. But this is unprecedented, so it’s hard to predict,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a professor at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. …

Dr. Walter Orenstein, a professor at Emory University and the associate director of the Emory Vaccine Center, said a vaccine in less than a year would be “miracle.” While technically possible, he added, it is unlikely. “There’s a lot of things that could go wrong,” Orenstein said.

Dr. Stanley Plotkin…said developing a vaccine in a year to a year and half was “feasible,”…. “In the best of circumstances, we should have a vaccine—or let's say vaccines—between 12 and 18 months," he said. …

…Dr. Anthony Fauci, told the "Today" show that January 2021 is the earliest a vaccine could be ready, but cautioned that that timeline is "aspirational" and depends on companies producing a vaccine before researchers are sure it will work. …

Rick Bright…testified at a House hearing Thursday that an accelerated timeline might paint too rosy a picture. “A lot of optimism is swirling around a 12- to 18-month timeframe, if everything goes perfectly. We’ve never seen everything go perfectly,” Bright said. “I still think 12-18 months is an aggressive schedule, and I think it’s going to take longer than that to do so.”4

Like NBC News, The Post's Fact Checker pits expert opinion against Trump's prediction:

Experts have emphasized that actual deployment of the vaccine is more than a year away, not a few months, as Trump has suggested. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said at a White House news conference on Feb. 26: “So although this is the fastest we have ever gone from a sequence of a virus to a trial, it still would not be applicable to the epidemic unless we really wait about a year to a year and a half.” …

Peter Jay Hotez, the dean of Baylor’s National School of Tropical Medicine, said…“I doubt very much that we’ll have a vaccine in time for this epidemic, maybe if this virus returns on an annual basis. … But unfortunately, I think for now, we have to look at the realistic prospect that we’re going to have to battle this virus without the benefit of a vaccine.”2

The Fact Checker, to its credit, didn't give a Pinocchio rating to Trump's prediction, but here is what it calls "The Bottom Line":

Trump appears to be expediting the vaccine development process, misrepresenting how fast a vaccine will be available to the public in fighting the novel coronavirus [sic]. Fauci has repeatedly corrected the president’s comments on the vaccine to put forward a more accurate timeline. As the United States and the rest of the world prepare for the novel coronavirus to continue spreading, it’s important to share factual information about the virus and methods to combat it.2

Here's the real Bottom Line: The first vaccination against COVID-19 was given in mid-December of last year5, and by the end of the year news outlets reported that "only" 2.8 million Americans had been vaccinated6.

I don't mean to criticize the experts who were consulted by the fact checkers7: I assume that they were sincerely expressing their opinions―expert opinions, no doubt, but only opinions and not facts. However, experts are no more prophets than anyone else. Their predictions were presumably based on experience with past vaccine development, but this was a situation in which such experience could be misleading. The fact that it had taken at least a year-and-a-half to test and deploy past vaccines obviously did not mean that the process could not be speeded up.

If fact checking is to have a future, and not be laughed into extinction, fact checkers need to have the intellectual humility to recognize the difference between their own opinions and the facts. If journalists want to argue against the opinions of presidents or others, they should do so on the editorial pages where such argumentation belongs. Fact checks are not, or at least should not be, battles of opinion between experts. Is there a better way to debase the coinage of fact than to confuse it with opinion?

Neither news outlet issued a correction to their mistaken "fact checks", but The Post did update its report with an Emily Litella-style "never mind":

Update: A coronavirus vaccine was administered to the first U.S. citizen on Dec. 14. The vaccine development was faster than scientists expected, in part due to the high caseloads in the U.S.2

What do high caseloads have to do with faster vaccine development? The Fact Checker might as well have blamed its error on sun spots. I suppose that The Post just could not bring itself to admit that Trump might have been right about something, or that he could deserve some credit for a "medical miracle".

Paul Offit made a wise observation in NBC's article that's a good final judgment on the whole affair:

“It’s all very humbling. If you learn anything from all of this, it’s be humble. Because nature is humbling.”4

So is the future.

Notes:

  1. "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.", 11/23/2021.
  2. Elyse Samuels, "Fact-checking Trump’s accelerated timeline for a coronavirus vaccine", The Washington Post, 3/4/2020. Some paragraphing suppressed.
  3. "Remarks by President Trump and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Meeting with Pharmaceutical Companies", The White House, 3/2/2020. I've edited out some repetition.
  4. Jane C. Timm, "Fact check: Coronavirus vaccine could come this year, Trump says. Experts say he needs a 'miracle' to be right.", NBC News, 5/15/2020. Some paragraphing suppressed.
  5. Peter Loftus, Melanie Grayce West & Jared S. Hopkins, "First Covid-19 Vaccine Given to U.S. Public", The Wall Street Journal, 12/14/2020.
  6. Rebecca Spalding & Carl O’Donnell, "U.S. vaccinations in 2020 fall far short of target of 20 million people", Reuters, 12/31/2020.
  7. In particular, I respect Paul Offit, who wrote a book on the anti-vaccination movement that I've reviewed favorably; see: Book Review: Deadly Choices, 7/21/2013.
New Book
December 2nd, 2021 (Permalink)

Getting Polling Wrong

Quote: "Over the past eighty years or so, polls and poll-based forecasts have misfired in many ways in the U.S. presidential elections, leaving pollsters, journalists, and pundits baffled or humiliated, and often without immediate explanation as to what went wrong. Polls in presidential elections do not always go wrong. Or dramatically wrong. But they have been wrong often enough to invite skepticism and wariness. Indeed, it is a rare election that does not produce polling controversies of some sort."1

Title: Lost in a Gallup

Comment: Clever title!

Subtitle: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections

Comment: Nice subtitle: it tells you exactly what the book is about.

Author: W. Joseph Campbell

Comment: Campbell is the author of the previous book, Getting it Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism, which I've read and recommend if you're interested in that sort of thing. He also writes the website Media Myth Alert, which mostly tracks recrudescences of the myths debunked in the book. Campbell is a professor of communication studies, whatever that is―I guess it's either a fancy name for what used to be called "rhetoric" or perhaps journalism, or some combination of the two. Based on his previous book, he's a careful and reliable historian, which is important for a debunker of pseudohistory. Since he's not a pollster or statistician, the book doesn't focus on the technical aspects of polling, but is a history of polling failures in American presidential elections instead.

Summary: This book was written and published before last year's polling failure, so it's perhaps even more timely now. Judging from the Introduction and chapter titles, its chapters discuss the following elections:

  1. 1936: The year of the famous Literary Digest "debacle", to use Campbell's word for it.
  2. 1948: When Dewey did not defeat Truman, despite the polls.
  3. 1952: Republican candidate Eisenhower wins in a landslide unforeseen by the polls.
  4. 1980: Republican candidate Reagan wins in another landslide unforeseen by the polls.
  5. 2000: This election was really too close to call, so it's not surprising that the polls got it wrong.
  6. 2004: Exit polls falsely showed Kerry winning.
  7. 2016: This time it was the polling models that falsely showed Clinton winning.

Excerpt: "In a way, polling failure in presidential elections is not especially surprising. Indeed, it is almost extraordinary that election polls do not flop more often than they do, given the many and intangible ways that error can creep into surveys. And these variables may be difficult or impossible to measure or quantify. … Opinion polls can never flawlessly reflect the views of the entire population. It's a statistical fact of life that some amount of error resides in every poll taken of some portion of a target group. This is true even when rigorous and reliable polling techniques are applied…. The inevitable distortion in sample surveys is called the margin of error (or, more precisely, the margin of sampling error).

"…[P]ollsters have developed various ways of estimating who among the respondents to pre-election polls are most likely to vote. Weeding out nonvoters is essential because many poll respondents fail to follow through on assurances that they will vote. … Even now, after many years of testing, pollsters do not agree on the best method for deciding who will vote. 'There are as many "likely voter" models as there are pollsters,' Kyley McGeeney, a polling expert in Washington, DC, noted…. The distorting effects of screening for likely voters were strikingly demonstrated in 2016, when Nate Cohn of the New York Times arranged for four well-regarded pollsters to calculate the results of a pre-election poll in Florida in which voters pronounced themselves in favor of Trump or Clinton for president. The pollsters were given the same raw data to analyze, and their results differed markedly, ranging from a four-point advantage for Clinton to a one-point lead for Trump."2

Comment: Likely-voter models are the suspects in the polling problems in both last year's and this year's elections, as just about every other source of bias seems to have been ruled out.

Fact Check and Copy-Editing: I didn't notice any factual errors in the parts of the book that I was able to read, namely, the introduction, the first chapter, and part of the second. The copy-editing is also first-rate as I noticed only a few typographical errors.

The Blurbs: The book is positively blurbed by Joel Best, whose books on the sociology of statistical errors I highly recommend.

Date: 2020

Disclaimer: This book is from last year, so it's not brand new, but I just heard of it. I haven't read all of it yet, though I intend to, so I can't review or recommend it. However, its topic interests me, and may also interest Fallacy Files readers.

Notes:

  1. P. 3. Page numbers without further citation refer to the New Book.
  2. Pp. 12-14.

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Recommended Reading
November 30th, 2021 (Permalink)

Acknowledging Reality & Living by Lies

Notes:

  1. Chris Conley, "Kenosha damage estimate: $50-million", WHBL, 9/10/2020
  2. Here's the suppressed article: Nellie Bowles, "Businesses Trying to Rebound After Unrest Face a Challenge: Not Enough Insurance", The New York Times, 11/9/2020

Disclaimer: I don't necessarily agree with everything in these articles, but I think they're worth reading as a whole. In abridging them, I have sometimes changed the paragraphing and rearranged the order of the excerpts in order to emphasize points. I have also de-capitalized the word "black" in the excerpts from McWhorter's article, since this is itself racist newspeak given that "white" is not also capitalized. Either both should be capitalized or neither; I choose neither, since that's the way it's been done until very recently. I wonder whether this was McWhorter's choice or that of the editors of The New York Times. If the latter, it's further evidence for his thesis.

Puzzle
November 25th, 2021 (Permalink)

Thanksgiving Dinner at the New Logicians' Club

For Thanksgiving, the New Logicians' Club held a dinner party for its members. During dinner, the club played its usual truth-tellers and liars game in which every member was randomly assigned the role of a liar or a truth-teller, and was required to answer every direct question accordingly throughout the evening*.

I was seated at a table with three other members. The name tag of the one to my immediate left read "Euler". I always like to know whether I can trust what the other members say, so I asked Euler what the status of the three members was, that is, whether the three were liars or truth-tellers. However, he mumbled something inaudible because his mouth was full of turkey.

I turned to the first member to his left, whose name was "Frege", and repeated the question.

"At least one of the three of us is a liar", he replied.

I asked the same question of the last member, whose name tag read "Gödel".

"At least one of the three of us is a truth-teller", he answered.

Was what Euler said true or false?

Extra Credit: What were the first names of the three logicians?

* For previous meetings of the club, see:

  1. A Meeting of the New Logicians' Club, 5/30/2021
  2. A Second Meeting of the New Logicians' Club, 7/4/2021
  3. Halloween at the New Logicians' Club, 10/31/2021
November 23rd, 2021 (Permalink)

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."1

As is the case for most words of philosophical importance, "fact" is both vague and ambiguous. I argued in a previous entry in this series on fact-checking2 that a fact is not a belief or a type of statement, but a situation in the world. Yet, in an earlier entry, I defined it as a "true factual statement"3. Both are possible meanings of "fact", as well as simply "true statement"4. For the rest of this entry, I'll use the word "fact" in its "state-of-affairs" sense.

"Opinion" is not so ambiguous as "fact", but it is vague. An opinion is, of course, a belief, but opinions are usually distinguished from knowledge, and the borderline between opinion and knowledge is notoriously blurry.

Given that both "fact" and "opinion" are vague and ambiguous, it's no wonder that the distinction between them is fraught. It's generally agreed that fact checkers are not expected to check statements of opinion; for instance, in a section on checking opinion pieces, The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking states: "…[I]n general, fact-checking the writer's opinion in a piece isn't necessary as long as the opinion is based on facts.5" Nonetheless, the guide has nothing to say about the difference between an opinion and the facts that it is based on. Similarly, The Fact Checker's Bible, discussing how to check an author's work, warns: "Be careful not to check the author's opinion6", which assumes that the checker already knows how to tell the difference between opinions and what should be checked. "Deciding what to leave unchecked and deciding what to check require equal care6," it concludes, but offers little guidance as to how to do so.

Perhaps the authors of both books assumed that the difference is obvious, or that the checker will have learned it elsewhere. I don't blame them for avoiding the task of explaining it, since it's difficult, but the distinction is crucial to fact checking and, in this entry, I'll try to clarify it.

As I'm using the words in this entry, facts and opinions belong to different categories of thing: the former to the objective mind-independent world, and the latter to the subjective mental world. This is why Moynihan's statement, used as the title of this entry, is true. We all have our own opinions, in that they belong to our private mental worlds, but nobody owns the facts, which are part of the physical world we share. This is also why we are able, at least some of the time, to agree on the facts despite differences of opinion on religion, ethics, politics, and the like. These days it seems to be getting harder to reach such agreement due, in my opinion, partly to the loss of an understanding of the difference between fact and opinion, which is why this is an important issue for all of us, not just fact checkers. So, what fact-checkers need to distinguish is not facts and opinions, which are deeply different, but statements of fact and statements of opinion, which are superficially similar.

What makes a claim a statement of fact rather than one of opinion is that there is objective evidence that it is true or that it is false. For instance, if I say that peanuts are legumes, I make a factual claim; but if I say that cashews taste better than peanuts, I state an opinion. That peanuts are legumes is true because of certain objective facts about them7, but the only evidence available that cashews taste better than peanuts is the subjective evidence of taste. Cashews may taste better to me, but worse to you. If you do not like the taste of cashews but do like that of peanuts, then there is no evidence that would convince you that the former actually do taste better than the latter. So, the claim itself is an expression of opinion, and not of fact.

Both factual statements and statements of opinion can be classified into different subtypes, and the way that I've come to understand the differences between the two types of statement is by thinking about those different subtypes. So, let's look at some of them, starting with factual statements. I don't claim that the following classification is exhaustive, but these are at least some important types of statement of fact―keep in mind that such statements are not necessarily true:

You can see that what these different types of statement in common is that there is some way in which their truth or falsity can be objectively established to the satisfaction of all reasonable inquirers. In contrast to factual statements, there is no way to establish the truth or falsity of statements of opinion to the satisfaction of all, which is part of what makes them opinion. Here are a few prominent types for comparison:

As is the case for most important philosophical distinctions, the difference between these two types of statement is not an absolute one, but one of degree. There is a continuum with logico-mathematical statements at one end and expressions of taste at the other, and all other statements fall somewhere in between.

The failure of professional fact checkers to understand this difference has led some to try checking statements of opinion with which they disagree. This is not just a waste of time, it's also a source of reputational damage. One of the charges made against them is that they are just pundits in disguise, and checking opinions is a sure way to confirm the charge. I predict that I will write a future entry in this series critiquing an example of a professional fact checker doing so, but that's just my opinion.11

Notes:

  1. This statement has a long history, but this was the wording used by Daniel Patrick Moynihan to whom it is usually credited. For the full history, see: Garson O'Toole, "People Are Entitled To Their Own Opinions But Not To Their Own Facts", Quote Investigator, 3/17/2020.
  2. What is a Fact?, 4/29/2021.
  3. Fact Vs. Opinion, 6/22/2018.
  4. Monroe Beardsley used "fact" in this sense, see his: Thinking Straight: A Guide for Readers & Writers (1950), p. 5.
  5. Brooke Borel, The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking (2016), p. 56.
  6. Sarah Harrison Smith, The Fact Checker's Bible: A Guide to Getting it Right (2004), p. 54.
  7. Editors, "Peanut", Encyclopedia Britannica, accessed: 11/22/2021.
  8. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem proved that there are arithmetical statements that are undecidable, that is, they can be neither proven nor disproven. These are rare types of exception to the factuality of mathematical claims. See: Melvin Henriksen, "What is Godel's Theorem?", Scientific American, 1/25/1999.
  9. Eric W. Weisstein, "Goldbach Conjecture", Wolfram MathWorld, accessed: 11/22/2021.
  10. See: "It’s Difficult to Make Predictions, Especially About the Future", Quote Investigator, 10/20/2013.
  11. I found the following article very helpful when researching this entry: John Corvino, "The Fact/Opinion Distinction", The Philosopher's Magazine, 3/4/2015. Of course, Corvino's opinion at the end is not acceptable to fact checkers, who must maintain the distinction between checkable factual statements and uncheckable statements of opinion.
New Book
November 12th, 2021 (Permalink)

First, the Bad News

Quote: "Bad News is a populist critique of American journalism. But I write this book from the Left, from a deep-seated dismay with rising inequality and the way the global economy has decimated the American working class, depriving them of the dignity of good jobs in a culture that sneers at them and their values. … Still, this is an optimistic book. Although I am deeply critical of the direction American journalism has taken, I am also convinced that it's not too late to change course. That's why the book is so tightly focused on the media powerhouses that have seized upon and further capitalized on this trend; it is they that set the tone for the rest of the industry. "1

Title: Bad News

Subtitle: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy

Comment: I don't like the word "woke". I assume that it started out as propaganda promoting the idea that the "woke" folks were somehow awake while the rest of us were sleeping, when the truth is the opposite. It's reminiscent of the slogan in 1984, "freedom is slavery"2, which is almost literally what the woke are trying to make the rest of us believe.

Like all euphemisms, however, "woke" seems to be losing its ability to conceal the reality it stands for. People are waking up to the fact that what is hidden behind the benign label is poison. For that reason, some of the wokeys are now declaring it the latest taboo word, at least for the rest of us3.

While in ordinary circumstances my distaste for the word and dislike of doublespeak would lead me to avoid using it, I'm going to use it at least for the rest of this entry. It seems to have lost its power to fool people, and it may irritate those trying to fool them.

Author: Batya Ungar-Sargon

Comment: I assume that this is the same Batya Ungar-Sargon whose article I recommended last month4. That article may have been an excerpt from the book, though it didn't say so. It described the ravages of the woke invasion of The New York Times (NYT), specifically, but the book appears to be more general in its treatment of the subject. In addition to writing the article and book, she's a journalist and deputy opinion editor for Newsweek. Other than the article and what I've read of the book, I'm not familiar with her work.

Date: 2021

Summary: I've only been able to read the introduction, first chapter, part of the second, and the brief epilogue. Moreover, the titles of subsequent chapters are not very revealing about their subjects. For this reason, I can't really summarize the book. However, I get the impression that its theme is how reporting went from a working-class job in the 19th and early 20th century to the profession of an upper-class, college-educated elite in the late 20th and current century. Specifically, after a mostly theoretical Introduction, the book starts with an historical chapter on the rise of the penny press in the nineteenth century, and the career of newspaperman Joseph Pulitzer, for whom the most prestigious journalism prizes are named.

This history is relevant because wokeness is mostly a disease of upper-class whites, though Ungar-Sargon didn't seem to be so clear on this fact in the article I recommended last month. My one complaint about that article was that she seemed to believe that the moral panic she described at the NYT had created a "social consensus" in favor of wokeness. However, as I showed, there is no such consensus in the country as a whole. Perhaps she meant only that there is now a consensus at the NYT, which may be true, but if so it's due at least partly to the purging of dissenters and intimidating into silence of those who remain.

Comment: My main concern about wokeness is what it is doing to the institutions that serve an essential function in a democracy. Democracy is impossible without a largely free press, and practically every day now brings a new assault on that freedom. Moreover, the press needs to be free from both censorship and propaganda, since democracy cannot work even in theory if the public is kept ignorant and misinformed. This is how wokeness is "undermining democracy", to quote the book's subtitle. The NYT and other major newspapers, while never perfect, at least made an attempt in the past at reporting the news accurately, whereas they are increasingly becoming a "Ministry of Truth" for woke propaganda. Anti-social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are also increasingly censoring users at the instigation of woke mobs.

One thing that Orwell did not foresee in 1984 is private businesses willingly offering their services as censors and propagandists to the woke mob and government bureaucrats. As you may remember, Winston Smith worked for the Ministry of Truth, largely as a censor, rewriting old newspapers to bring them into alignment with current propaganda. The ministry was, of course, a government agency, not a giant business like the NYT or Twitter. Nonetheless, there's now a small army of Winston Smiths laboring away to produce propaganda or to censor alternative sources of information. Moreover, many of them are amateurs, providing their "services" for free because they're woke.

The good news is that, while the NYT is pretty far gone, America still has a largely free press. The NYT is, of course, worrisome because it is the most prestigious American newspaper, and sets the example for much of the rest of the news media. However, awareness of the threat to freedom of thought and speech by wokeness is itself spreading. As mentioned above, the very fact that the word "woke" is changing from a euphemism to a dysphemism is a sign that people are catching on. So, like Ungar-Sargon, I am optimistic that we can still save democracy from wokeness.

The Blurbs: The book is favorably blurbed by, among others, Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and Jonathan Haidt.

Disclaimer: This is a new book and I haven't read it yet, so can't review or recommend it. However, its topic interests me, and may also interest Fallacy Files readers.

Notes:

  1. "Introduction", pp. 16-17.
  2. Irving Howe, editor, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: Text, Sources, Criticism (1963).
  3. See, for instance: Sam Sanders, "Opinion: It's Time To Put 'Woke' To Sleep", National Public Radio, 12/30/2018. This was written almost three years ago, and Sanders was unhappy that affluent white liberals―the very people who listen to NPR―were starting to use the word.
  4. Remembering the Sokal Hoax & Another Sign of The Times, 10/29/2021.

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