There is something particularly insidious about the political chain email compared to other forms of political propaganda. Its format makes it almost impossible to trace back to its origin, leaving its creators masked and unaccountable for any misinformation that spreads. Because it travels from inbox to inbox and there’s no permalink for it, the chain email can often remain under the radar for days, making it difficult for others to debunk it publicly. And for whatever reason these factors make most chain emails especially averse to facts, with nearly all their claims plucked seemingly from whole cloth.
Brooks Jackson, director of Factcheck.org, has dealt with these kinds of emails for years, methodically debunking viral memes during the Bush/Kerry election and continuing to do so as Obama rose to prominence. The site’s readers have sent in so many queries asking him to verify these chain emails that he eventually launched a feature called “Ask Factcheck”
“It sort of cropped up as a sideline to what is our original mission, which is looking at TV ads and statements of political figures,” Jackson told me in a phone interview.
He said that these kinds of emails can be “enormously influential,” spreading to millions of people. But when Factcheck readers began forwarding an email making a series of claims about H.R. 3200, the House health care bill, they were slow to act on it.
“In this case we didn’t exactly spring into action,” Jackson said. “There are lots of claims here and we had other stuff keeping us busy that were higher profile than this. We delayed a long time before we took this on. There were so many claims being made, and it was going to be an obvious drain on our time. But the emails just kept coming and coming and coming, and we said we need to do this thing, and if we’re going to do it, let’s not just look at some of the claims, let’s look at every damn claim in this thing. We parceled it out and in the end I think we had three of us working on it.”
The end result was an article titled, “Twenty-six Lies About H.R. 3200.” The subtitle reads, “A notorious analysis of the House health care bill contains 48 claims. Twenty-six of them are false and the rest mostly misleading. Only four are true.”
The piece methodically moves through all the claims, quoting them and measuring them up against the actual wording in the bill. The false ones range from “Mandates audits for all employers that self insure” to “A government committee will decide what treatments and benefits you get.” There are a few that are either true or partly true; for instance, the claim that “Government mandates linguistic infrastructure for services; translation: illegal aliens,”
“It’s true that page 91 says that insurance companies selling plans through the new exchange ’shall provide for culturally and linguistically appropriate communication and health services,” Factcheck says about the claim. “The author’s ‘translation,’ however, assumes that anyone speaking a foreign language or from another culture is an illegal immigrant, which is false.”
Lately, Factcheck has devoted a significant amount of coverage to fact checking the health care reform debate, and the increased interest has caused a higher-than-average level of web traffic for the site.
“We’re getting request for interviews [from journalists], traffic to the website,” Jackson said. “Whether you measure it by unique sessions or page views, it is exceeded only by the traffic we receive in a presidential election year. I’d have to go back to give you exact numbers, but it’s something like 80% of the traffic we’ll receive in the height of the 2008 campaign, and far above what we had seen in the earlier months of the Obama campaign. It’s a real spike. There’s a big increase in the number of letters to the editor, Ask Factcheck queries; instead of dozens or scores of emails a day, we’re getting hundreds, to the point that it’s a chore to keep up with. We read every one, sometimes we’re a few days behind.”
I asked Jackson whether he felt overwhelmed by all the health care reform misinformation floating around in the public sphere. Wasn’t it all just too much?
“I think we’re more exhilarated than we are frustrated,” he replied. “It’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of fun; as a journalist I couldn’t think of anything more rewarding than giving a hot foot to a politician in a public forum. That’s the sort of stuff you live for. It’s a daunting task. We try to pace ourselves. One of the nice things of working for a university-based think tank is that we’re not subjected to the kind of deadline a newspaper or an hourly news program is subjected to. Our standard is, we put something up when we’re sure it’s right, and we have something meaningful to say.”
Follow me on Twitter
