How The Right Wing Rewrites History

Many articles analyzing the midterm election try to attribute the problems faced by the Democrats to events of the last year or two. While these are a factor, the battle has been influenced by events going back to well before the Democrats took control of the White House and Congress. Republican use of misinformation has placed Democrats at a disadvantage, even to the degree that many plan to vote for Republicans despite disagreeing with them on the issues. There are some recent items worth noting on how Republicans rewrite the facts and rewrite history.

Michael Hirschorn has an article in The Atlantic which looks at how the right is has been burying the truth:

Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said (or is famously reputed to have said) that we may each be entitled to our own set of opinions, but we are not entitled to our own set of facts. In a time when mainstream news organizations have already ceded a substantial chunk of their opinion-shaping influence to Web-based partisans on the left and right, does each side now feel entitled to its own facts as well? And thanks to the emergence of social media as the increasingly dominant mode of information dissemination, are we nearing a time when truth itself will become just another commodity to be bought and sold on the social-media markets? Or, to cast it in Twitter-speak: @glennbeck fact = or > @nytimes fact? More far-reachingly, how does society function (as it has since the Enlightenment gave primacy to the link between reason and provable fact) when there is no commonly accepted set of facts and assumptions to drive discourse?

The article provides multiple examples of distorting the facts including right wingers on Digg banding together to bury stories they disagree with, the faked video which destroyed ACORN, distortions from Andrew Breitbart, Shirley Sherrod’s firing, Bush’s use of Jeff Gannon, and the “Ground Zero” mosque.

Tea Party rallies are notable for the massive amount of misinformation being spread and a view of American history which was fabricated to promote right wing views.  Today Terry Gross interviewed historian Sean Wilentz who discussed material in his article in The New Yorker on how Glenn Beck distorts history, recycling conspiracy theories from the John Birch Society:

Wilentz, who teaches at Princeton University, argues that the rhetoric expressed by both conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck and the Tea Party is nothing new — and is rooted in an extremist ideology that has been around since the Cold War, a view that the Republican Party is now embracing.

“I think what’s happening is the Republican Party is willing to chase after whatever it can to get the party back — to get power back,” he tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “This is what’s happening in the Republican Party, so instead of drawing lines, they’re jumping over fences to look like they’re in the good graces of these Tea Party types.”

Wilentz says Beck, who has emerged as a unifying figure and intellectual guide for the Tea Party movement, finds fodder for his Fox News Channel and syndicated radio shows in the ideas espoused by the John Birch Society, an ultraconservative political group founded in 1958 that, Wilentz writes, “became synonymous with right-wing extremism.”

“It’s a version of history that demonizes the progressive era, particularly Woodrow Wilson,” Wilentz says. “It sees it as the beginning of America’s going down the road to totalitarianism, which ends in Beck’s version with Barack Obama.”

Particularly troublesome, Wilentz says, are the gross historical inaccuracies Beck makes on his Fox show, which now reaches more than 2 million people each day.

New media outlets provide people such as Glenn Beck to reach an audience far larger than the John Birch Society could reach. This is leading to extremist views which conservative leaders such as William F. Buckley, Jr. repudiated in the past now becoming the dominant views among Republicans.

22 Comments

  1. 1
    Thers says:

    Hirschorn though takes refuge in the “they both do it” dodge — Glenn Beck is the one side, and the New York Times is the other? Really?

    His thesis is that “both sides do it and social media is the problem,” though the weight of his evidence shows that “the right wing is an ideological movement for whom facts are irrelevant.”

  2. 2
    Brett says:

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  3. 3
    A 99er says:

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  4. 4
    Mona Hussein Obama says:

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  5. 5
    Dinah says:

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  6. 6
    chris.bearde says:

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  7. 7
    Paul Kazmercyk says:

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  8. 8
    DR says:

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  9. 9
    Mike B.T.R.M. says:

    I liked your reference to William F. Buckley Jr. as perhaps an example that it is possible to hold conservative views and not be an extremist. You might find it amusing a line I heard today by Sean Hannity, and this might not be a word for word quote but mighty close:  “…..Right wing ,nut job..ah, ..not  to be redundant.”    I’m not sure if he was trying to make a self effacing joke, but it sure sounded like he was equating “right wing” and “nut job” as redundant terms.   One question from your list of examples, the ACORN video, you could critcize it in a number of ways, but forged?  Is there a claim that those weren’t actual Acorn workers or what makes it a forgery?

  10. 10
    Ron Chusid says:

    Forged wasn’t the right word–I’m going to switch it to faked. They were real ACORN workers but it was selectively edited to give a totally different view of what happened. They got some real film of ACORN workers but the film was edited to invent a faked story as to what went on. The fake pimp was filmed in outrageous pimp clothing in separate shots but when he was with ACORN he was conservatively dressed, and selective editing makes it appear that ACORN workers gave advice that was not actually given.

  11. 11
    Michelle Soule says:

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  12. 12
    April says:

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  13. 13
    David Kennedy says:

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  14. 14
    mbfromhb says:

    » How The Right Wing Rewrites History Liberal Values http://goo.gl/LEYP

  15. 15
    Dennis Sweatt says:

    The Teaparty will gut the GOP but we will still have to clean up after the Teapartiers are found to be insane.

  16. 16
    Leslie Parsley says:

    The very real and frightening thing, though, is that “tell a lie often enough and people will believe it” thingy seems to be working all too well.

  17. 17
    Lucian Dixon says:

    How the Right Wing Rewrites History: (Liberal Values Blog) http://bit.ly/cqUXmD

  18. 18
    macumberledge says:

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  19. 19
    49620 says:

    How The Right Wing Rewrites History http://bit.ly/aqQ27g via http://outside.in/49620

  20. 20
    michael hirschorn says:

    "How the right rewrites history" Ron Chusid builds on my Atlantic truth and social media piece http://bit.ly/cqUXmD #atlantic #breitbart

  21. 21
    DuncanRhys Liancourt says:

    RT @hirschorn: "How the right rewrites history" Ron Chusid builds on my Atlantic truth and social media piece http://bit.ly/cqUXmD #atla …

  22. 22
    edmundlee says:

    the perils of po-mo MT @hirschorn: "How the right rewrites history" Ron Chusid builds on my Atlantic…piece http://bit.ly/cqUXmD

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