My first consultation on Friday after lunch was with Diogenes Pangloss, principle Washington lobbyist for the International Association of Fact Checkers, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. Flustered, disheveled and exhausted barely described his condition, as he flopped down on the couch in front of the picture window in my office.
“Tom, I don’t mind telling you,” he fretted, “it’s been a terrible couple of weeks for professional fact checkers in the United States.”
“Well,” I allowed, “with back-to-back Republican and Democratic national conventions, I can certainly sympathize. But don’t your members here in America have to put up with a virtual Niagara of fabulism at those same party conventions every four years?”
“This year, Tom,” Pangloss sighed heavily, “it’s been an order of magnitude worse than ever before. The IAFC Disraeli Index for the 2012 party conventions is nothing short of shocking! White lies have jumped up by nine hundred percent, damn lies have skyrocketed eleven hundred fifty percent and statistical lies have gone through the roof – up two thousand three hundred and twenty-five percent. Our members report that political con games doubled; malicious exaggerations tripled, half-truths have gone up by a factor of four point seven-five; fibs hiked by a factor five point two; material fabrications are running at six times previous rates; misrepresentations of salient facts reached seven point three times its historical high-water mark; willful prevarications are topping earlier peaks by a factor of nine and a half; and… and… Tom, do you have anything… to drink?”
“Sure,” I replied as I rose to open the credenza-mounted refrigerator behind my desk. An eerie silence ensued as I prepared him a Talkiser 21 over Evian ice cubes.
“Thanks,” he gasped as he accepted the scotch and took a what amounted to a rather large sip for one-thirty in the afternoon. “Tom,” he continued, “when it comes to respect for the truth, things have gone completely beyond the Pale. During the second day of the Republican National Convention, Mitt Romney announced, and I quote, ‘We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.’ If it had ended there, then maybe the truth would have been a chance, even in this election, but that’s not all, no, not by a long shot. The Republicans had our members working eighteen hour days, just to keep up with all their distortions, ambiguities, equivocations and tall tales. And when Paul Ryan delivered his speech, for the first time in thirty-eight years, the adjusted coefficient of shameless mendacity broke the Nixon Barrier! And what’s worse, it’s stayed there, Tom, right up through Obama’s acceptance speech last night! Our members thought they might catch a break with the Democrats, but what a fool’s dream that turned out to be. With the exception of ambiguity, bluffs, fallacy, misconception and nonsense, they matched the Republicans lie for lie in every category the GOP established new records for at the RNC in Tampa. And then the Democrats went on surpass them in misinformation, pretense, obliquity, defamation, humbug and canards. As a matter of fact, when Antonio Villaraigosa asked for – and got – three separate, obviously equal voice votes on including God and Jerusalem in the Democratic Party Platform, and then declared, ‘the Ayes have it,’ the Democrats blew the doors off the Republicans in the duplicity, equivocation, fraudulence and falsification categories. And now, there’s still sixty more days of this kind of stuff before the elections. Got any more of that scotch?”
“Of course,” I assured him as I prepared a refill. “I can certainly appreciate how arduous this must be for the American IAFC membership, and for you, too, no doubt, since, among other things, you have to listen to them complain. And I. myself, can also sympathize, since Gretchen and I put in some very long hours ourselves, running this consulting business. But your clients are professionals – sure, they’re frazzled and perhaps a bit snowed under with work at the moment, but that happens to all of us professionals once in a while, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, it’s not a work load solution that I’m here after,” he corrected, taking a rather less desperate swallow of his Talkiser this time. “It’s that remark Romney made about not letting fact checkers dictate his campaign. Tom, from where I sit, the situation is obvious and you don’t have to be Niccolò Machiavelli to figure it out – nobody, on any side, in any political contest this year is letting facts dictate anything about their campaigns. No Tom, the problem I’m here about isn’t too much work for fact checkers – on the contrary, I’m here because, if present trends continue, my membership is concerned that their profession is in danger of becoming completely extinct!”
“Isn’t that,” I wondered, “a somewhat extreme view of the possible future, though?”
“Oh yeah?” Pangloss challenged. “Tell me, Tom, how many people are employed in America today making buggy whips, dirigibles, slide rules, typewriters, vacuum tubes, vinyl records and eight-track tapes?”
“Not many,” I conceded.
“Damned few indeed,” he nodded. “And now, facts are going out of style faster than the Blackberry. We’re looking at a situation where, by as early as the next presidential election cycle, there will be about as much demand for fact checkers as there will be for milkmen and DeSoto mechanics.”
“So,” I inquired, “have you given any thought as to how the IAFC might address that problem?”
“The most promising thing we’ve been able to come up with so far,” he confided, “is an advertising campaign.”
“Advertising?” I repeated, so as to confirm I had heard him right the first time.
“Yeah,” he affirmed, “you know – hire an ad agency to market fact checking. We were thinking of a commodity market approach like ‘Got Milk?’ Maybe it could be, ‘Got Truth?’ We think that has a nice ring to it. Actually, the whole Goodby, Silverstein and Partners milk campaign works pretty good if you substitute ‘truth’ for ‘milk’ – and sometimes use another word or two – in those slogans, you know. ‘Truth – It Does a Conscience Good,’ and so forth.”
“Okay,” I gamely responded “In that case, how about, ‘Good Mothers Choose Truth,’ ‘Snap Into the Truth,’ ‘When You’ve Got Truth, You’ve Got Everything,’ ‘If You Like Chocolate, You’ll Love the Truth,’ ‘Truth – It’s So Good You Need It Bad,’ ‘The Only Thing Better than Kittens and Puppies is Truth,’ ‘You Deserve Truth,’ ‘Truth is Forever,’ ‘Where’s the Truth?’ ‘Absolute Truth,’ ‘Real Dads Go for the Truth,’ ‘Yo Quiero Truth,’ ‘Tough on Lies, Kind to the Truth,’ ‘Protector of Truth,’ ‘Put Truth in America,’ ‘We Do Truth Right,’ ‘Wouldn’t You Rather Have the Truth?’ ‘Full of Truth,’ ‘The Truth – Have Some,’ ‘Now, It’s Time For The Truth,’ ‘The Truth – Because You’re Worth It,’ ‘The Truth Shall Make You Smile,‘ ‘Feel the Truth Again,’ ‘Happiness is a Thing Called Truth,’ ‘Semper Truth,’ ‘Ask for Truth, We’ll Do the Rest,’ ‘Truth Love – Catch It,’ and oh, when was the IAFC founded, by the way?”
“In 1947,” he told me, between sips of Talkiser.
“Okay, then,” I pressed on, “that gives us, ‘Good Honest Truth Since 1947;’ or, ‘Truth – Our Middle Name For 65 Years.’”
“Looks like maybe,” Pangloss opined, “the IAFC won’t need to hire Goodby, Silverstein after all.”
“Regardless of what slogans you use, though,” I advised, “it’s not like the average consumer can just pick up a package of IAFC brand Truth the next time they stop by the local Safeway. You need to get your customers – which is to say, the public – to demand Truth as an ingredient in the products; demand it from the manufacturers of the goods the public actually does consume – which is to say, the politicians and the statements they make when they run for office. It’s sort of like… um… like BASF saying ‘We don’t make a lot of the products you buy, we make a lot of the products you buy better.’ The truth content of the political statements consumers see and hear is really a value-added issue, essentially and… oh… I’ve got it… it’s like the USDA Organic label you see on food at Harris Teeter. It’s a value-added, ingredient-based, quality-goods commodity sell!”
“Okay,” Pangloss prodded, “so how do we create and preserve jobs for fact checkers with something like that?”
“Combine your advertising campaign,” I advised, “with an IAFC-branded product, namely, a subscription-based, membership-oriented service offering – something like, when the customer watches a politician giving a speech, they get an IAFC-logo bug displayed on their screen with a color-coded Truth Rating. For additional fees, they can buy an IAFC Rating Meter display, and for a bit more they can get a crawl at the bottom of the screen explaining all the details involved in the parts of the statement that aren’t true.”
“Is all of that… um… technologically feasible?” Pangloss wondered.
“Absolutely,” I vouched, “for anyone with digital cable service, and fortunately for the IAFC, people in digital cable markets are the ones most likely to buy a service like that.”
“Yeah!” Pangloss exulted, leaping up, spilling a bit of scotch. “And you know what I like best about that? Fact checkers won’t be entirely dependent on media companies for their incomes anymore! Tom, my membership is going to love this idea, I’m sure of it. Use the rest of my consultation to work on documenting everything we’ve talked about here today. Then prepare a complete proposal and send it to my office by close of business tomorrow!”
“Tomorrow,” I reminded him, “is Saturday. My friend Cerise has bought us box seats for a matinee concert, reservations for dinner at a restaruant with a two month waiting list, and tickets to the theater afterward. If I cancel, she will be very disappointed. Furthermore, until you said that, my work schedule tomorrow was completely full from seven in the morning until noon.”
“And we,” he reminded me, “as you said, are professionals. Remember?”