Dealing with Falsehood Online
You read a newspaper or magazine and notice that it says something that is not true. Unless the statement is libelous and you are the victim, your only practical recourse is to write a letter to the editor which they may or may not print. That means that when such publications publish falsehoods they can usually, if they choose, prevent their readers from discovering the fact. Convert the magazine to a blog and the letter to a moderated comment and things look very much the same.
But they are not—as I hope to demonstrate in this post.
Not long ago, browsing the web, I came across an article on a libertarian blog. The blog is called "Classically Liberal Student," the article was signed "CLS." Its subject was the Atlas Foundation which, CLS argued, had been becoming more conservative and less libertarian under pressure from a conservative source of funding. To support the claim, he offered examples of purportedly anti-libertarian organizations that Atlas had funded. One was an organization in New Zealand that received money from Atlas, about which CLS wrote:
Maxim was explicitly anti-free market and attacked Milton Friedman when he died. Maxim said Friedman was "simplistic" and said he ignored the "social good". They say that "the individualist view, espoused by Friedman" is just as wrong as the collectivist view mainly because it ignores the desire of theocrats like Maxim to impose Christian morality by the force of law.
For obvious reasons that caught my eye, so I clicked on the link—and discovered that what CLS said was not true. The article was not an attack, it did not contain the word "simplistic," and it did not say that the individualist view is just as wrong as the collectivist view. It also said nothing about the desirability of imposing Christian morality by the force of law. Its central argument was that while the individual freedom Milton Friedman had worked for was a good thing, it was not, by itself, sufficient to produce positive social outcomes—that also required free individuals to act with a conscience, concerned with the common good of society. That claim is not inconsistent with libertarianism.
In my judgment, it would require an extraordinarily biased reader to get from what the Maxim article said to what CLS claimed it said—readers are invited to check that claim for themselves. Whether or not that is true, a purported quote that is not in the text being quoted is not a misinterpretation. It is a falsehood. What the article actually said was not that Milton Friedman was "simplistic" but that "economists like Friedman invariably approach problems with a simplified view of the world… ." That, of course, is true--of economics and of many other sciences.
Checking some of the other claims CLS made, I found further misrepresentations, so posted a comment to the blog (scroll down to near the bottom of the comments) pointing them out. Eventually it appeared, as did a response by CLS. As best I could tell, he agreed that the text from Maxim that he had linked to did not entirely fit what he said it about it and speculated that perhaps it had been changed in the two years since it was written. He explained that "when the article was originally published I wrote an article about it and quoted from it. When I mentioned it, in an article about something far bigger, I quoted my original." He provided a link to what was apparently his original article, written some two years earlier.
Comparing quotes in the earlier CLS article with the text that the later one linked to led me to suspect that there were two different essays along similar lines published by Maxim, one in November of 2006 and one in December, a suspicion I have now confirmed. But unfortunately for the explanation CLS offered, the material I was complaining about was not quoted from his earlier article. Among other differences, his earlier article did not contain the (bogus) quote of the word "simplistic.".
I pointed that out and got a response asking why, if he misquoted Maxim, he linked to them and complaining that I was beating a dead horse.
It's possible that CLS wrote a description of the Maxim article based on his memory of something he had read more than two years earlier and posted it with a link to what was supposed to be the article he was attacking, after glancing at the article he was linking to in order to find something to quote from it; that would explain one real but out of context quote that is in the Maxim article and is in neither the earlier Maxim article nor the earlier CLS article. Alternatively, he read the later Maxim article, wildly misrepresented it, and then tried to defend his misrepresentation against my criticism by claiming—falsely—that it was quoted from his earlier article referring to a different Maxim article.
I wrote another comment. As of several days later, it has not appeared. Presumably CLS has decided that, so far as he is concerned, the argument is over.
{Since this was originally posted, additional comments by me and CLS have appeared on the CLS blog, in part in response to this post}
Posting an inaccurate description of something someone else wrote based on your memory of what you read two years ago is, to put it mildly, irresponsible journalism. That is especially true for an attack, since one's memory is likely to improve the evidence against the target over the intervening years.
Failing to correct a demonstrable falsehood after it is pointed out is more than irresponsible, it is dishonest.
The owner of a blog can control what appears on it, but he has much less control over the information reaching his readers than does the editor of a magazine or newspaper. Hence this post. Given that CLS and I are both libertarians, it is likely that some of his readers are also my readers. They should be warned that, on the evidence of this incident, he is careless about the truth of what he writes. Having discovered that he posted falsehoods he is reluctant to admit them and unwilling to correct them. Any facts he alleges should therefor be viewed with scepticism until they have been independently verified.
CLS is, of course, welcome to respond in the comment section of this blog—which, save for removing spam when I notice it, is not moderated.
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For the convenience of anyone who wants to work through the tangle for himself, here are all the links:
"Friedman, freedom and the legacy of libertarianism," Nov 26 2006, Maxim Institute.
"Kiwi Christianists offer anti-eulogy to Friedman," CLS, Nov 23, 2006.
Friedman's take on freedom, Steve Thomas, 12 December 2006, Maxim Institute
"Conservative money corrupts libertarian thinking,"CLS, 19 Feb 2009
Comments on the above, including comments by me and responses by CLS.
The one confusing thing about the time sequence is that CLS seems to have responded to the first Maxim piece several days before it was published. It's clear, however, comparing the quotations in his Nov 23 piece with the text of the Maxim Nov 26 piece, that the latter is what is being quoted. My guess is that either one of the pieces got misdated or the Maxim piece was posted, slightly revised, and reposted with a later date.
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[Later note]
Presumably in reaction to my comments, CLS has now added at the bottom of the Feb 19 piece a note:
"For the full context of what we wrote about Maxim and their "eulogy" for Milton Friedman, go here."
The link is to the earlier CLS piece.
He has not, however, corrected any of the misstatements in the current piece. Nor has he informed current readers of his blog that a post they read several weeks ago contained assertions he now knows are false.
I happened to be rereading this post recently (10/31/17) and tried following the links. All the ones I tried no longer worked, so I checked the CLS blog. The "Conservative money corrupts libertarian thinking" post does not appear to be there any more. I searched the next few months of the blog for "Friedman" in order to see if there were any references to either the original post or my criticisms of it and found nothing.
So it looks as though the author, to his credit, has removed a post that said things that were not true. To his discredit, he does not seem to have done anything to tell the people who read that post that what they read was not true and he has apparently eliminated, on his blog, the evidence that he first said things that were not true and then declined to admit it.
As always, he is welcome to correct in a comment here any errors in my account of his blog.