It was just a week ago that White House Communications Director Anita Dunn declared that Fox News was the research arm of the Republican Party and that it would now be treated as the opposition.

In the week since there have been predictable stories.  The Administration is setting a dangerous precedent.  President Obama has more important matters.  Fox’s ratings are up.   Never pick a fight with the media.

This last storyline was the subject of David Carr’s column in the NY Times’ “Week in Review.”  In “The Battle is Joined; Now What?”, Carr catalogs past Presidential attempts to confront media criticism.  He concludes that “trading punched with cable shouters seems to be a fit too common.”

He is missing a point or two.  So I told him in this email just sent:

Mr. Carr,

Your FOX/Obama “tale of the tape” ignores three excellent reasons for the Administration to pick this particular battle.

I could add a fourth, too.  In the current media landscape, it is no longer a problem to pick a fight with someone, as used to be said, buys ink by the barrel.  The media landscape is so fragmented, no matter who is buying the ink, there is a lot more being bought by others.

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The current “noise” about whether President Obama was really born in the United States may seem a view from the lunatic fringe, but we have long been captive to various urban myths, like the Satanic symbolism in a corporate logo or spider eggs in bubble gum.  It makes one wonder, how come?

In an interview this month on NPR, Princeton neuroscience professor Sam Wang, co-author of  “Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life,” offered three reasons why we might believe things that just aren’t true.

According to Professor Wang, we know things — like the capital of Wisconsin — but we don’t always remember where we first heard it.  “As we recall things,” he said,”it’s currently believed that we rewrite them a little bit so that we gradually separate a fact from context.”  He called it “source amnesia.”

And when we begin not with fact — Madison! — but with fiction, things can roll down hill even faster.  There is “biased assimilation” which causes us to accept statements, true or not, that align with beliefs and “we tend to question or be more critical or even reject statements that don’t fit with our beliefs.”

Getting people — as voters, consumers or parents — to act differently may not only be about the facts they are given, but the way they get them and how those facts are reinforced.

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The shooting deaths of Steve McNair and Sahel Kazemi in Nashville early Saturday morning were far more startling than the death days earlier of Michael Jackson.  In context, the King of Pop had long lived a life outside the lines.  The former All-Pro quarterback of the Tennessee Titans had lived well, literally, inside the lines.

McNair’s toughness earned him the respect of his teammates, his commitment earned him the gratitude of his community and the stability of his family made him the envy of people who didn’t follow football.  In a single moment, though, on Saturday morning, that “story” of his life came undone.   The context in which we knew McNair, which we now know was only a partial construction, no longer made sense.

Sports Illustrated’s Don Banks put a finger on the sometimes tenuous link between what we think and reality:  “As McNair’s grisly murder reminded us again over this holiday weekend, the truth is we don’t know (athletes) anywhere near as well as we presume, and our conclusions can often be exposed as woefully uninformed.”

It is not just athletes we don’t know as well as we think.  Politicians (from Vitter to Spitzer to Sanford) and financial wizards (in a line from Greenberg to Thain to Madoff) get the lion’s share of the headlines, but as Garrison Keillor once wrote in an Op Ed in the New York Times, the grandest public monuments are financed as penance.

McNair’s death is a reminder that our adoration (as fans), our participation (as citizens) and our endorsement (as consumers) cannot be given lightly or only once for all time.  They rightly need to be constantly tested and re-evaluated.   This is easy to do thanks to the growing digital web of information available, but it is not easily done.

As we have come to hear in recent reports, the relationship was a secret out in the open.  TMZ has pictures of the two on a vacation,  Kazemi’s nephew had a long story to tell of how his aunt thought she and McNair had a future and neighbors at the condominium where the shooting occurred saw the two often enough to know.

Yet even in the face of contrary evidence, it is hard to discard a story we have come to believe.

McNair’s former Titans head coach Jeff Fisher is a case in point.  This is from a Bloomberg story: “Detectives also said they had been told that McNair, who was married with four children, had been dating Kazemi for the past several months.  Fisher said he decided to focus his initial comments on what McNair would have liked him to say, speaking to McNair’s family and seeking to move past his former player’s imperfections.”

It will serve no purpose to ignore what we know and will come to know, but it would be wrong merely to swap the old context for the new story.  Both are true.  And the story that tells only part of the truth is no story at all, whether for individual, institution or company.  It is an alibi.

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Word came today via blog and cable news that Republicans have determined President Obama to be vulnerable on the subject of deficits. The current conventional wisdom is that the President’s popularity — at 67 percent — seems to leave little room to maneuver, but 51 percent of us don’t like how much he’s spending and 48 percent think him wrong on the size of the debt that spending has incurred.   And from that platform the opposition can make its case  — or so goes the thinking.

No one in this current economy can be happy with debt.  But put in context, the responsibility for the burden might be seen to be on another’s foot.

Under former President George W. Bush, the national debt hit $10.6 trillion.  Under President Obama, the debt now totals $11.4 trillion.  Massive and an increase of $800,000,000; a lot of zeros.

What that means is for every dollar of debt we owe, we owe $.93 to Bush policies and $.07 to what Obama hath wrought.  In this light, one could argue that the Republicans are clinging to a very slender reed, indeed.

It is all in the way you look at it — and present it.  But then we’ve known that since 1954 when “How to Lie with Statistics” first hit the shelves.  Of course, in 1954, the national debt was “just” $280 billion or 2.5 percent of today’s total.

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In recent days I have been engaged in three conversations about the death of the media.

First came a chat with a former magazine editor and a discussion about magazines and their declining ad pages and circulation.  Check this out in the NY Times.  Next came a conversation with a television producer who had just filed an analysis of the public’s appetite for news — cherry flavor is best.  Last came coffee with a public relations executive who is trying to redraft his agency’s mission in the face of a fractious, self-publishing landscape.

Whew.

An answer for all, in particular the media, may come wrapped in the cynical adage of an earlier day:  “It ain’t what you know, it’s who you know.”

Reporters are paid to pay attention.  A beat reporter knows more about his or her beat than anyone.  But reporters cling to an artificial construction of objectivity.  For every point of view expressed, a counter-balance is found; even if the reporter knows the point of view being expressed is bone-headed.

Reporters will have to break this silence and let us know what they know if the profession is to regain credibility in the current day. I was reminded of how far reporters go not to tell us what they know when I saw this story today about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s “numbers” on her handling of the CIA criticism.

It leads with this: “More Americans disapprove than approve of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s handling of the matter concerning the government’s use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects. Majorities approve of President Barack Obama’s and the CIA’s handling of the matter.”  It could have led with:  “Whatever the criticism, more people support Pelosi than support either the Democrats or the Republicans as a group.”

My argument is not with the lead, but in the unwillingness to let readers know what the reporter knows.  That nearly everyone who is raising a ruckus about this story has also accused the CIA of lying, that Congress was tightly managed in the previous Administration and that Pelosi, as were the others who were “briefed”, had her hands tied by laws governing national security.

As long as reporters cling to antique notions, death will come; and at their own hand.

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We have known for 100 years, thanks to Mark Twain’s “Chapters from My Autobiography,” that there are three kinds of lies; “lies, damned lies and statistics.” At the very least, statistics — numbers in general — can be, uh, misleading. Take, for example, the recent noise over tea bagging.

Whether brewed up by Fox News and kept warm in the cozy of MSNBC’s criticism, the grassroots uprising over taxation and federal spending drew a lot of attention because they drew a lot of attendees, didn’t they?

Basking in its election day success with numbers, the political website 538.com became the non-partisan source of just how many people attended the 500 events staged nationwide. Right now that number stands at 311,000. Big.

Unless you consider that the same day there were a mere 14 Major League Baseball games (excluding one rainout) that drew 360,000 people. Bigger; especially in context.

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