“Consider the source,” a former boss used to tell me whenever I pointed something out to her that didn’t make sense. When I asked what she meant, she explained, “You can’t always take something at face value. People have ulterior motives. There’s fact and then there’s manipulation.”
I filed her advice away in the same mental file drawer where I stored “You can’t believe everything you read,” “Some things are too good to be true” and “You don’t really need to wait 30 minutes after eating to get back in the water.” (This drawer is directly above the drawer in which I keep memories of sleeping in the back of my first car, a 1972 Pinto station wagon, after running away one night back in 1978; working for the 45th governor of Michigan from 1983 to 1990; and opening my front door to none other than activist Tom Hayden, one of the Chicago Eight, who stopped by to autograph my copy of his book, Reunion: A Memoir, on his way to dinner with another former boss, Lana Pollack, back in 1998.)
“Consider the source,” I thought to myself.
I’m not the biggest defender of smoking bans – I’m a sympathetic ex-smoker myself, and I’m not comfortable with the “Big Brother” aspect of some government interventions – but I’ve become more sensitive to secondhand smoke as I’ve gotten older so I supported the ban and followed the efforts of conservatives to demonize the proposal as a surefire job killer.
My “friend’s” piece contained the claim that “anecdotal evidence in the form of observations of bar owners supports PPPRM's argument; the group's executive director said the bar business has historically been recession-proof, and that the smoking ban was responsible for the loss of business.”
I find anecdotal evidence based on observations less than persuasive and often specious. Furthermore, I’m aware that the Mackinac Center, which has received funding from the billionaire Koch Brothers – the rabidly right-wing oil tycoons who funded the Tea Party, Herman Cain, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute – is about as nonpartisan and forthcoming as Tricky Dick Nixon.
So I felt obligated to challenge the objectivity of my “friend’s” information sources. When I posted under her Facebook link that I find PPPRM less than credible, I didn’t expect her to respond nastily with “Yawn, Patrick.” She proceeded to point out that she’s not an advocate for the left or the right and no interest group is bias-free, including the one that had employed me for ten years.
I love being treated condescendingly by people who were learning how to walk when I was walking precincts for politicians and still in diapers when I was in meetings at the Capitol.
It would be nice if people questioned things for themselves and knew when to take some assertions with a grain of salt. But some people don’t. Not everyone has stellar critical thinking skills or the time and desire to examine the motivation behind everything they read in the paper or online. It strikes me, therefore, as a responsible journalist’s task to avoid false equivalencies, to distinguish fact from fiction, to admit that a source’s credibility hasn’t been verified or that it’s possible a given truth has been spun to fit a particular agenda.
It would also be nice if supposed professionals refrained from responding like snide, insolent little princesses when challenged with empirical information but it’s easier for me to ignore rudeness in Facebook than to overlook when someone elevates questionable sources to unearned levels of credibility in a story masquerading as news.
It’s not always about left or right. Sometimes it’s about right or wrong.
Another commenter posted, “Smoking still killed more people last year than it did businesses. Just sayin.”
I wonder where he got his information.
We are in our tenth year of the smoking ban here in CT and I can unequivocally state that, the only bar and restaurant businesses that have gone out of business are the ones that have consistently failed to properly market themselves. As an ex smoker, like you, I can tell you that people will still go to the places they have always gone to and make their exits to the "smokers lounge" when they want. And SINCE I'm involved directly in that industry (musicians' agent, you know) I KNOW who is going out and for what reason. Not ONE has ever stated it was because of the smoking ban.
ReplyDeleteI've been around long enough (working for the same Governor as you, Pat), and I think I'm smart enough, to recognize code words when I see them. In this case, I know immediately anything branded by the Mackinac Center is going to be pro-GOP party line, pro-business, anti-union, anti-worker, anti-woman, and contrary to just about everything I believe in. These are tight-assed white guys in suits who have no idea what goes on in the real world, they just create the data to support their assertions, and write OpEd pieces touting their "findings" to all. There is no science behind what they do.
ReplyDeleteI am also a journalist, so I swallow my bile when the Detroit Free Press prints those OpEd pieces, because journalism considers all points of view, and so should we before making up our collective mind. My mind says the Koch brothers and the Mackinac Center are just plain wrong on so many levels, and I could not present their one sided view as "news." It is opinion. Paid for by the (surprise!) people whom it benefits. Your "frienemy" was flat out wrong not to cover all sides of the issue, and in consequence she damages the journalistic demesne for us all.
Now having said that, I would challenge her data publicly, if I had the actual numbers at hand. Every place I've been in the past year is packed with happy people who can taste their food. The places I frequent most often have seen an increase in business, not a decrease, and one even enacted the ban three months in advance of the law, just to get people used to the notion. I can't speak about discontented bar flies buzzing about in the dead reaches of the U.P., but business is up, at least in North and West Oakland County.
As my son says when the Lions score, What up, lady dogs?