This photo orginally appeared on the Drudge Report site, as part of Drudge’s attempt to imply that President Clinton had fathered the child of an African-American prostitute.

The recent controversy over ABC’s The Path to 9/11 has spawned a mini-controversy of its own. As part of his coverage of the miniseries, Judd Legum of the Center for American Progress looked into ABC’s marketing campaign. He found that former Clinton officials who requested advance copies did not receive them, while right-wing media outlets did. Had they received advance copies, the Clinton officials could have caught and questioned errors and fabrications in the original production.

The fact that media outlets received advance copies while people depicted in the miniseries did not is important because it indicates that ABC was more interested in publicity than with accuracy. The fact that relatively obscure right-wing outlets like Hugh Hewitt and Bill Handel got copies while more prominent liberals like Alan Colmes and Al Franken did not is also important, because it shows that ABC knew that the miniseries had an anti-liberal slant.

Legum has done a lot of good work on the story, but he’s also made a significant error. He claimed that ABC was even providing advance copies of The Path to 9/11 to obscure right-wing bloggers:

ABC has been aggressively advancing its inaccurate and politically slanted miniseries, “The Path to 9/11,” to the right wing. Big players like Rush Limbaugh have been provided copies, as have obscure right-wing bloggers like Patterico.

Here’s the thing: “Patterico” is actually L.A. County attorney Patrick Frey, and he was not provided with an advance copy. He published a gushing review of The Path to 9/11 on his website, Patterico’s Pontifications, but that review was written by Justin Levine. How did Levine get a copy? By being a producer for an L.A. talk radio show.

So Legum made a mistake. ABC aggressively marketed The Path to 9/11 through right-wing media outlets, but that campaign was not so extensive as to include obscure right-wing bloggers. And it should be pointed out that Patterico isn’t all that obscure (I, on the other hand, have never claimed to be anything but obscure).

Here’s the thing, though: while the error itself is understandable, Patterico has pointed out the mistake on more than one occasion. If Legum was interested enough in Patterico’s blog to mention it at all, then he should have been interested enough to either contact Patterico before publication or checked back to see if there was a reaction from Patterico. Comments on Legum’s piece include pingbacks from Patterico, so Legum should be aware of the inaccuracy in his story. But as far as I can tell, Legum has made no attempt to correct the record.

This sort of thing goes right to the heart of the problem with The Path to 9/11. As one of Legum’s colleagues points out, fabrications in the miniseries have already been used as talking points by right-wing commentators. Similarly, the Legum piece mentioning Patterico was cited by more than a dozen liberal websites, many of which repeat the inaccurate claim that advance copies were sent to right-wing bloggers (link link link link link). A couple of the websites picking up the story are quite popular, and as far as I know, only Glenn Greenwald has made an attempt to correct the error.

In other words, when mistakes go uncorrected, or when information is outright fabricated, it can have the effect of creating an alternate reality. In the case of ABC, they’ve added another piece of “evidence” for the notion that the 9/11 attacks would have been prevented if Clinton had been more aggressive and more willing to break the law. In the case of Judd Legum’s piece, the idea that’s reinforced is the notion that the mainstream media conspires with obscure conservative bloggers to create an echo chamber for right-wing talking points.

I understand the impulse stand by a statement, even when it’s inaccurate, if you believe that it reflects a larger truth. I know of few people who are more unwilling than I am to back off from an assertion. And I’m not saying that Legum’s original error puts him in the same league as ABC, which appears to have proceeded with absolutely no regard for the truth. But if we fail to correct our errors, people on the left run the risk of creating a sort of parallel, counterfactual universe.

Inhabitants of that universe will have no effective way of communicating with either the inhabitants of the right-wing parallel universe or with inhabitants of the real world. All of their arguments will refer to demonstrably false premises, and we’ll wind up with a national political discourse in which people are entitled not only to their own opinions, but to their own facts as well.

Obviously, this would make it virtually impossible for the nation as a whole to make informed political choices.

Of course, this creation of alternative universes has been underway since before there was a United States of America, and there will always be people who adhere to one or another school of thought that depends on getting the facts wrong. My point is that when we fail to correct errors when they’re pointed out to us, we become complicit in the creation of a false reality.

(cross posted at Liberal Avenger)

This entry was posted on Monday, September 11th, 2006 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.