Is the best defense always a good offense?

Eric Boehlert (a Salon editor who now writes for Media Matters) is getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere right now because of the ferocity of his defense of the MSM's phony "Jamil Hussein" story. Rick Moran in particular delves into Boehlert's thinking with a great post in which he concludes that "Boehlert is so busy trashing conservative bloggers and trying to demonize their motives that he's missing a great story...."

I think the making up of "Jamil Hussein" is the story, because the controversy surrounding it goes to the heart of a greater human problem -- how ideology corrupts thinking to the point where facts are seen as subordinate, incidental, even irrelevant.

The last time I discussed "Jamil," the details were still hotly debated, and I was reminded of my relatively meaningless battle over "George Harleigh" (a fictitious professor science professor who had worked for both Nixon and Reagan, and who could always be depended on to sound off about the horrors of Bush).

I soon noticed that there's a downside to debunking fraudulent people or claims. The people who make them up -- and most of those who agree with them -- simply don't care. Because the characters and claims are invented to support what they already believe fervently, debunking them does not "count."

Lies presented in furtherance of a greater "truth" are not really considered to be lies, at least not in the moral sense. The idea is to persuade people, and if fictional people or incidents have to be used, that's OK, as long as it's in the interest of the greater truth.

The problem I have with this approach is that I don't like being lied to. Even when I agree with the cause the lie is intended to support. I don't find lies emotionally fulfilling because they pollute the process of thought. When lies are presented as "news reports," it's even worse, because it makes me distrustful every time I pick up the paper or turn on the television.

I'm sorry, but I think Eric Boehlert's "might as well be true" defense is not helpful to the cause of honest journalism, and I agree with Allahpundit:

He's written two columns about Jamilgate now; there are enough links embedded in both to show he's done his homework. Which means he knows very well this wasn't the only story the AP's used Jamil Hussein for. The actual number, as Michelle notes, exceeds 60. He also knows that the AP originally claimed four mosques were burned and that that claim has since disappeared into the ether without so much as a clarification. Just like he also knows, courtesy of Robert Bateman, that it's unlikely in the extreme based on Hussein's location that he'd be a credible witness for the wide variety of attacks sourced to him by the AP. All of which make this story highly dubious, yet none of which Boehlert sees fit to mention anywhere in his piece. Why?

Because he doesn't care if the story's bogus or not. He'll say en passant that he does because he knows, as a journalist and media critic, that he has to. But it's strictly pro forma. His position seems to be that the story's true in the Larger Sense, as a microcosm of the brutality in Iraq, even if it's not, you know, technically true ("as if an AP retraction would change a thing on the ground in Baghdad, where electricity remains scarce, but sectarian death squads roam freely"). In other words, "fake but accurate." That's his bottom line here and that's why it's dishonest of him and his pals to even pretend to care whether the report's accurate. As far as they're concerned, if Jamil Hussein turns out to be real, the story's true; if he turns out not to be real, the story's True. They can't go wrong. Meanwhile the AP, if it's guilty of bad facts to whatever greater or lesser degree, gets an almost completely free pass.

Boehlert's approach is to minimize the seriousness of the fictional character and reports, and mount ad hominem style ideological attacks against those who debunked them. While the debunkers' primary crime is simply that they are "warbloggers" whose pro-war ideology is wrong, he also misleadingly splices selected fragments from quotes (whether this is "Dowdifying" or Issikoffing I'm not sure) to make JunkYardBlog's SeeDubya and the Anchoress look like heinous opponents of free speech. What they actually said -- along with the context -- are as unimportant to Boehlert as whether or not Jamil Hussein exists. As Boehlert concludes, it is only the larger truth matters:

despite the hundreds of stories AP files from Iraq each week, and the thousands posted annually since the invasion, warbloggers can only find fault with a single story, yet insist that one is enough to tarnish the AP's Iraq reporting and all mainstream news reporting from Baghdad.

It's not going to work. If warbloggers want to prove that cowardly American journalists are being duped by local Iraqi stringers pushing a terrorist agenda, or that the AP is guilty of chronically manufacturing bad news, they are going to have to do more than flush out Jamil Hussein.

By this logic, I was wasting my time debunking the fictitious George Harleigh. Because, even if there was no such professor, there are many more who would have said -- and did say -- the same thing. That Bush was bad.

What difference does one little fiction make? And what difference does it make if some impudent warbloggers are quoted out of context? Serves their little chickenhawk candyasses right, doesn't it?

That last sentence was sarcastic, OK? Would it then be fair to quote me as calling SeeDubya and the Anchoress "chickenhawk candyasses"? About as fair as it would be for me to quote Boehlert as saying this:

Biased American journalists, too cowardly to go get the bloody news in Iraq themselves, are relying on local news stringers who have obvious sympathies for insurgents. The result of the AP hoax? Americans have been duped into believing there is a civil war raging in Baghdad today.

Or am I being too obsessive about this? Actually, I think I'm being rather sloppy, because compared to the "warbloggers" Boehlert accuses of "poring over the AP's dispatches, feverishly dissecting paragraphs in search of proof for their all-consuming conspiracy theory," I've done very little. I don't even think I've ever earned the title of warblogger, and that 101st fighting keyboardist logo thingie over there, yeah, I joined the group, but the truth is, I really don't consider myself much of a "fighting keyboardist." (Using my keyboard is often a fight in itself.) The truth is, while I support their cause, I don't write much about the war. I mainly liked the logo.

Sometimes I wish I had the time to be, like, a really obsessive, frenzied warblogger, of the kind envisioned by Media Matters with titles like "RIGHT WING BLOGGER FRENZY ON BOEHLERT." If I whipped myself into a frenzy, I might actually take the time to do the kind of digging -- and it would take real digging -- to find "Air Force Regulation 160-23." Boehlert described it as a drug testing rule written in 1972, and speculated that it was a reason Bush failed to report for duty. I spent many hours trying to find the regulation he quoted, but came up dry.

The problem is that my failure to find Air Force Regulation 160-23 does not mean that it didn't exist in 1972. And even if it could be shown not to have existed, under the same reasoning Boehlert advances now it would make no difference, because Bush avoided duty anyway, and those who argue against false facts are simply "bloggers for Bush" or something.

Damn, this is tedious, and much as I need a frenzy, I am unable to come up with one.

But maybe my failure to whip myself into a frenzy is a good thing.

I mean, much as I hate having to play devil's advocate, suppose Boehlert is right? Suppose it makes no difference whether people or facts turn out to have been made up. Fake smoke, fake ambulance attacks, fake people, even fake regulations.

Wouldn't it be a better world if reporters made up people and facts and no one cared? Why should anyone care?

Because, like, we all have our own realities, right? And doesn't every reality depends on its own reality-based facts?

No matter how inconvenient they are, or how false they might be alleged to be, what we call "facts" have to be always be subordinated to greater truths.

UPDATE: My thanks to Glenn Reynolds for linking this post, and for quoting what I actually said!

Welcome all!

Glenn links Michelle Malkin who continues to search and dig, and continues to not find "Jamil Hussein."

Searches for things that aren't meant to be found tend to turn up nothing.

Sigh.

I guess sometimes nothing can be something.

MORE: My thanks to Jules Crittenden for linking this post.

UPDATE (01/07/07): I just got back from vacation, and I see that while I was away, the existence and identity of "Jamil Hussein" was established to the satisfaction of all who expressed skepticism. (New post here.)

Obviously, this means that I was wrong in calling Hussein a fictional character. I jumped to conclusions based upon my suspicions, and I retract my characterization of the AP as having made up his name.

Again, it is very difficult to prove that someone (or something) does not exist. The onus really should be on the people who assert that it does exist, and I'm at a loss to understand why it took six weeks for the AP to prove the existence of their source. It was their inability to do so for so long that led me to conclude they couldn't.

I am of course someone who blogs from home, and I am in no position to know whether what I read is true or not. I need proof, and if it isn't forthcoming, my skepticism grows.

While I should have hesitated before saying the AP made up Hussein, any such characterizations in a blog post are by their nature tentative. (Hell, for all I know, there still might be a "George Harleigh" -- even though I'm 98% sure there isn't.)

(Similarly, if Eric Boehlert can provide a link to the location of the language in the regulation he cites, I will retract my tentative conclusion that he made the regulation up.)