think locally act globally

As I was reading the reactions to Rachel Sklar’s original Huffington Post item about this week’s New Yorker cover, an eloquent comment by TheAdviceWeAllNeed jumped out at me:

I am so pissed I can’t even contain myself.

I just forward this picture to all my friends and family so they can be on notice.

They are trying to prevent him from being President of the United State of America

I am on fire

Haha, I thought. “I’m so mad someone might take this cover seriously that I’m going to forward it to everyone I know!” Idiot.

Then I read Jonathan Alter’s Newsweek column, in which he earnestly explains the dangers that people will think the New Yorker picture is real. Alter trots out an old chestnut of a story, one that has been told so often it has over 30,000 Google hits, about ex-CBS White House Correspondent Lesley Stahl:

One day in 1984 she broadcast a five-minute (extremely long for TV news) blistering report on how President Reagan was cutting funding for public health and for children with disabilities. After it aired, the late Richard Darman, a top Reagan aide, called and said, “Congratulations! We loved it!”

Stahl was dumbfounded. The piece had been a hatchet job.

“Nobody heard what you said,” Darman told her. The pictures Stahl had used to “cover” her story were of Reagan cutting ribbons at hospitals and speaking at the Special Olympics. The White House knew that these warm images spoke a lot louder than anything Stahl was reporting.

Side note: what’s funny about this perennial story is that there’s no evidence for what Darman told Stahl, other than his say-so. How could he possibly know that “nobody heard what you said” on a national news broadcast? Wasn’t he perhaps just trying to psych her out, tough-guy style, after she ran a critical story?

But she believed it, and repeated it, and far be it for Alter to ever deflate a cliche. We get the point: it’s always about the pictures, not the words.

Last winter, Alter authored the most heavy-handed, humorlessly pedantic early calls for Hillary to pull out, just days before she won Ohio and Texas and launched the most impressive near-comeback since Jerry Ford in 1976. His columns made a difference: they helped jell the delegate-math-uber-alles climate that made it impossible for superdelegates to factor Hillary’s late wins and Obama’s problems with blue-collar voters into their calculations.

I saw him booed by the audience at the 92nd Street Y at a panel discussion. At least he showed up. Talk about walking into the lion’s den. Alter is one of those weepy-eyed boomers whose main agenda for 2008 is fixing all the wrongs of 1968, and he’s not interested in having the smart-aleck ironists at The New Yorker louse it up.

So to further his point, Alter lets drop that he’s recently had another call from Ross Perot. This is news! Ross Perot is still alive! He’s not too senile to call reporters. Though he’s been trying to get Alter to write about how John McCain left behind live POWs in Vietnam. Amazing. This crackpot was at one time polling ahead of both George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton during the 1992 election.

And, Alter reveals, Ross Perot believes Obama is a Muslim. Polls show only about 12% of Americans think that, but Perot is one of them. Alter sets him straight, and Perot is “relieved”:

He didn’t hate Obama; he just had an instinct to believe whatever he happened to see online over what he read in reputable newspapers.

I guess we have reached the point where the possibility of someone being Muslim needs a Seinfeld disclaimer: “… not that there’s anything wrong with it.” Perot didn’t hate Obama, he just thought he was a Muslim.

Then, Alter introduces us to his friend Paul, “a smart and successful Californian now in his 80s” who reads Newsweek, Time, the LA Times, and American Scholar. And, Paul has received some emails about Obama! Which he tends to trust.

It’s a good thing Perot called too, or Alter’s entire column would belong on One Person Trend Stories. But he’s decided it’s time for some reader service, to address the email rumors and put them to bed. So he lists each one in bold, followed by a one-paragraph debunking. For example:

His stepfather sent him to a Muslim school.
False. When Obama lived in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, his mother and stepfather sent him for a time to a Catholic school, and for a time to an Indonesian public elementary school, where he had a class in Islamic studies. (as required by the state)…. [he goes on.]

And:

His father gave him the Muslim name Barack Hussein Obama.
True, but meaningless. Obama’s father, whose name was also Barack Hussein Obama, was born to a Muslim family in Kenya but become an atheist long before he came to Hawaii in 1959, where he met Obama’s mother.

And so on.

Go to Alter’s second page and scroll down through the third. He puts the scurrilous Barack rumors in bold. The dense fact-checking is in plain text. After he just got done telling us people notice pictures, not words. What do you notice when you quickly scan his article, as usability research shows is common? Just this:

His stepfather sent him to a Muslim school.

His father gave him the Muslim name Barack Hussein Obama.

He changed his first name to Barry, and when he got into politics, he changed it back to Barack Hussein Obama.

Barack’s step-brother stated, “Barack is a Muslim.”

D'oh!