Truthiness 101: From Frey to Alito - New York Times
The New York Times

January 22, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

Truthiness 101: From Frey to Alito
By
FRANK RICH

IF James Frey hadn't made up his own life, Tom Wolfe would have had to
invent it for him. The fraudulent memoirist is to the early 21st century
what Mr.
Wolfe's radical-chic revelers were to the late 1960's and his Wall Street
"masters of the universe" were to the go-go 1980's: a perfect embodiment of
the
most fashionable American excess of an era.

As Oprah Winfrey, the ultimate arbiter of our culture, has made clear, no
one except pesky nitpickers much cares whether Mr. Frey's autobiography is
true
or not, or whether it sits on a fiction or nonfiction shelf at Barnes &
Noble. Such distinctions have long since washed away in much of our public
life.
What matters most now is whether a story can be sold as truth, preferably on
television. The mock Comedy Central pundit Stephen Colbert's slinging of the
word "truthiness" caught on instantaneously last year precisely because we
live in the age of truthiness.

At its silliest level, this is manifest in show-biz phenomena like Jessica
Simpson and Nick Lachey, juvenile pop stars who merchandised the joy of
their
new marriage as a lucrative MTV reality series before heading to divorce
court to divvy up the booty. But if suckers want to buy fictional nonfiction
like
"Newlyweds" or "A Million Little Pieces" as if they were real, that's just
harmless diversion.

It's when truthiness moves beyond the realm of entertainment that it's a
potential peril. As
Seth Mnookin, a rehab alumnus, has written in Slate,
the macho portrayal of drug abuse in "Pieces" could deter readers battling
actual addictions from seeking help. Ms. Winfrey's blithe re-endorsement of
the
book is less laughable once you start to imagine some Holocaust denier using
her imprimatur to discount Elie Wiesel's incarceration at Auschwitz in her
next book club selection, "Night."

This isn't just a slippery slope. It's a toboggan into chaos, or at least
war. As everyone knows now - except for the 22 percent, according to a
recent
Harris poll, who still believe that Saddam helped plan 9/11 - it's the
truthiness of all those imminent mushroom clouds that sold the invasion of
Iraq.
What's remarkable is how much fictionalization plays a role in almost every
national debate. Even after a big humbug is exposed as blatantly as
Professor
Marvel in "The Wizard of Oz" - FEMA's heck of a job in New Orleans, for
instance - we remain ready and eager to be duped by the next tall tale. It's
as
if the country is living in a permanent state of suspension of disbelief.

Democrats who go berserk at their every political defeat still don't
understand this. They fault the public for not listening to their facts and
arguments,
as though facts and arguments would make a difference, even if the Democrats
were coherent. It's the power of the story that always counts first, and the
selling of it that comes second. Accuracy is optional. The Frey-like genius
of the right is its ability to dissemble with a straight face while
simultaneously
mustering the slick media machinery and expertise to push the goods. It not
only has the White House propaganda operation at its disposal, but also an
intricate network of P.R. outfits and fake-news outlets that are far more
effective than their often hapless liberal counterparts.

The selling of Samuel Alito is a perfect illustration of how our world
works. From the moment Judge Alito emerged from Harriet Miers's penumbra,
his supporters'
story line was clear: he'd be presented as a humble exemplar of American
values too mainstream to be labeled "out of the mainstream" by his
opponents.
In his first courtesy calls on Capitol Hill in November, we learned, Judge
Alito often cited his father as a proud immigrant who instilled in him
empathy
for minorities and the poor - an empathy not remotely apparent in the
judge's legal record. A particularly poignant anecdote had it that his
father had
once defended a black basketball player from discrimination in college.

Yet
David Kirkpatrick of The Times reported
then that "some colleagues and friends of the elder Mr. Alito, who died in
1987, said they had never heard some of the stories his son has recounted,
including
the episode about his support for the black student and the fact that his
father immigrated from Italy as a child." No matter. If such questions
couldn't
stop an Oprah Book Club selection, they certainly wouldn't stop a nominee to
the Supreme Court.

Once Judge Alito came before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Democrats
decided to counter the Republicans' story by coming up with a fictional
story
of their own, or that's what they did once they stopped bloviating. Their
fictional biography cast Judge Alito as an out-and-out bigot. The major
evidence
cited to support this characterization was his listing his membership in
Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP), a conservative group founded in
reaction
to the upheavals of the Vietnam era, on a job application for the Reagan
Justice Department.

Judge Alito testified that he had joined CAP because it supported the
R.O.T.C. on campus, adding that he did not remember having "done anything
substantial
in relation to this group, including renewing my membership." The Democrats
plunged on, betting the house (or the Supreme Court) on Teddy Kennedy's
insistence
that Judge Alito could be linked to what the senator described as CAP's
"repulsive anti-woman, anti-black, anti-disability, anti-gay
pronouncements." In
one of only two dramatic moments in the whole soporific confirmation
process - a "Sunshine Boys"-style spat with the committee chairman, Arlen
Specter
- Mr. Kennedy threatened to subpoena CAP "documents in the possession of the
Library of Congress" to hunt down Judge Alito's bigotry.

There was only one problem with the Democrats' fictional story line: it had
been exposed as fake on the front page of The Times weeks before Mr. Kennedy
presented it to the nation.
Mr. Kirkpatrick reported
that he had examined the same papers Mr. Kennedy was threatening to
subpoena - as well as some others at Princeton's own library - and found no
trace of
Judge Alito's involvement with CAP as either an active participant or a
major donor. When the Senate committee did Mr. Kennedy's bidding and looked
at
those documents yet again, it found exactly what The Times had in November,
calling the senator's bluff and ending any remote chance the Democrats had
for keeping Judge Alito off the court. It says everything about the
Democrats' ineptitude that when they spin fiction, they are incapable of
meeting even
the low threshold of truthiness needed to make it fly in this lax cultural
environment.

THE Republicans would never have been so sloppy. Indeed, hardly had Mr.
Kennedy's melodramatic stunt blown up in his face than they came up with a
new story
line prompted by the other dramatic incident in the hearings: the departure
of Martha-Ann Alito from the committee room in tears. She fled while a
Republican
senator, Lindsey Graham, was mocking the Democrats, not when the eminently
mockable Democrats were mounting their lame assault. Whatever.
As Time magazine later reported,
a P.R. outfit called Creative Response Concepts immediately pumped up the
media volume of her supposed martyrdom, breathlessly producing a former
Alito
clerk to provide eyewitness testimony of her suffering at the hands of those
Democratic brutes.

Creative Response Concepts did similar work for the Swift Boat Veterans for
Truth during the 2004 campaign. Its roster of clients also includes the
right-wing
Media Research Center, itself the parent organization of something called
the Cybercast News Service. For the new year, Cybercast News has an exciting
fictional project of its own: just before John Murtha, the tough
Congressional critic of the Iraq war, appeared on "60 Minutes" last Sunday,
it started
Swift Boating him by rewriting his Vietnam history to besmirch the
legitimacy of his two Purple Hearts.

If Karl Rove's White House propaganda factory is the NBC Universal or Time
Warner of G.O.P. fictionalization, then the Miramax and Focus Features of
the
right are such nominally "independent" satellites as Cybercast News, the
Lincoln Group (which places fake news stories in Iraqi newspapers), the
Rendon
Group (which helped manufacture the heroic image of Ahmad Chalabi) and the
now-dormant Talon News (the fake Republican-staffed news site whose fake
White
House correspondent, Jeff Gannon, was unmasked last year).

Fittingly enough against this backdrop, last week brought the re-emergence
of Clifford Irving, the author of the fake 1972 autobiography of Howard
Hughes
that bamboozled the world long before fraudulent autobiographies and
biographies were cool. He announced that he was removing his name from "The
Hoax,"
a coming Hollywood movie recounting his exploits, because of what he judged
its lack of fidelity to "the truth of what happened." That Mr. Irving can
return
like Rip van Winkle after all these years to take the moral high ground in
defense of truthfulness is a sign of just how low into truthiness we have
sunk.

To my readers: Starting next week, I will be on a book leave, writing
nonfiction about our post-9/11 fictions. See you in the spring.

Posted by Miriam V.