Posted by
Andrews on Thursday, September 04, 2008 6:25:28 PM
Back in the 1980's, television was flooded with advertisements telling us that every hours 1000 square miles of rain forest was lost, or some equally absurd number. Once, having too much free time and being rather annoyed at such hyperbolic claims, I sat down with an atlas and took the numbers from a few of those commercials and figured out that, if they were correct, all of Brazil would be a desert by 1989, with the entire world being denuded well before 2000. Another time, watching a similar commercial about losing so many species a day, I figured that man alone (and maybe gold fish) would be all that was left on Earth within three years.
And that is the problem with such hyperbolic claims, they take the worst absolute number possible, perhaps one that is based on very flimsy evidence, and treat it as if it were the average rather than the highest possible outlier.
We have seen something similar whenever Republicans are in office, or even back when they controlled the congress. Suddenly, every day the economy becomes the "worst in thirty years", unemployment numbers increase 10% a day, the homeless gain a million members a week, and all other manner of exaggerations. It is the rain forest or species loss all over again.
The problem is, we can't take such numbers seriously. If the economy were declining as fast as the media claims, we would all be penniless and surviving on nothing but dirt and cardboard by now. If the homeless were growing as fast a some claim, not one of us would have a roof over our head, and unemployment must have been quite a large negative number in 2000 to allow any of us to retain a job considering the growth in unemployment some have mentioned.
Not that the right has not been guilty of the same. Teen pregnancies, unwed mothers and jail populations are often subjected to the same exaggeration. But there is one big difference.When a conservative group publishes such numbers, the press treats it as suspect, sometimes even pointing out that the most extreme possible numbers were used. On the other hand, the exaggerations from the left often come from the media itself. And whether from the press or from politicians on the left, are treated as truth by the media.
That makes quite a difference in how they are viewed by the public.