I just don’t see how or why insisting on using objective and verifiable facts in policy-making and public discourse became “conservative bias.” I don’t recall the media’s interest in correcting fake combat statistics during the Vietnam war being regarded as “liberal bias.” I can’t bring myself to believe that only moderates and conservatives care about making sure that the public isn’t deceived into believing things that aren’t true.

But why does this stuff keep happening, and particularly, why does it keep happening under the supervision of Democrats and their supporters during the Obama years? I know I’ve been harping on “Hands Up! Don’t Shoot!” and the deification of Mike Brown as contrary to all evidence, common sense, fairness and rationality, but such cultural embrace of lies is objectively outrageous and dangerous. I also resent being called a “teabagger,” a racist, or a right-wing nut for pointing this out.

One reason resent it, perhaps the main one, is that I’m a lifetime iconoclast, curmudgeon and contrarian (just like Dad!) and while I know that having  people, even friends, angry at me never changed my opinions, words or behavior very much, most people are not like me. Most people, when they are called racists on Facebook or bombarded with dishonest Daily Kos internet memes or realize that their friends aren’t inviting them out for beer because they will object to the conventional liberal wisdom of the nonce, decide its more important to get along than to fight the good fight, so they just adopt the prevalent opinion of their “crowd.” Usually, personal growth and education on the issue stops about then: if you listen hard, you will hear the sound of a slamming door. Soon they’ll be calling others racists on Facebook.

The fake campus sexual assault issue is another area where this phenomenon is occurring. CBS’s Sunday Morning gave one of its gauzy features about it yesterday, beginning with the assumption that for some reason (the reason was already pre-programmed and injected directly into the Democratic Party’s second most reliable “base” group, young single women bloodstream, with its “war on women” convention theme in 2012) campus sexual assault is epidemic. On the show’s website, proving that this was propaganda rather than journalism, was this sentence: “According to the U.S. Justice Department, one in five college women will experience some kind of sexual assault while in school.” (It had been removed by this morning.)

That statement—this is a news show, broadcast by a news organization, overseen by a multi-billion dollar communications corporation, remember—is not only false, but its falsity has been well-documented, and any CBS intern who bothered could have flagged it as misinformation, based on a bad study that was given wide dissemination by feminist activists and irresponsible reporters in an effort to stampede public policy into a full-fledged war on college men. The CBS piece used the hysterical phrase “the scourge of college rape”—there is no such “scourge,” defined as a plague or “a cause of wide or great affliction” — and included this:

“In November, a now-discredited article in Rolling Stone roiled the University of Virginia with a tale of an alleged gang rape at a fraternity party. But while much of it has been called into question, it’s helped fuel a national conversation about sexual assault on campus.”

So, on balance, this not just discredited or “called into question” but completely manufactured out of feminist animus and progressive agenda piece of unethical journalism was worth it, right CBS? Surely readers remember Sen. Claire McCaskill’s angry reaction to being challenged on her use of the false campus assault statistics:  “Frankly, it is irritating that anybody would be distracted by which statistics are accurate.” CBS quotes another female, Democratic Senator, Gillibrand of New York, as saying this:

“We don’t want to hold an innocent young man accountable for a crime he didn’t commit any more than we want a rape victim to not have a place to report that crime.”

Really? Then why did she bring as her guest to the State of the Union address a female Columbia student who has been harassing and accusing a male student of rape after both the campus process and law enforcement determined that her rape claim wasn’t supported by the evidence? You see, I think that is contemptible, just as McCaskill’s statement was contemptible, and I would find it horrifying if only conservatives found them contemptible, because that’s what they are.

The alternative is to concluded that the good people—you know, Democrats, progressives—like fake stats and fake stories: they get people talking, and worrying, and fearing, and believing….and voting.

And voting for their candidates and policies. Wait a minute—I think the logic is dawning on me! Since the point of the fake facts is to advance liberal candidates and policies, anyone objecting to the lies must be right wing, racist, sexist haters. Otherwise, they would understand the essential goodness of those lies.

Well, conservative and Republicans use fake statistics too, although the ones we hear most from the news media are those issuing from activist allies of Democrats–on gun deaths, on global warming, on gender pay inequality, and now campus rape. What is needed is a bi-partisan, ideologically neutral consensus that bad studies, bad data and manipulated statistics, however they are used, and whatever their virtuous and well-intentioned origin, are unethical and wrong, and have no place in public policy debate. It is a citizen’s ethical and civic duty to oppose them and to reject both elected officials and activists who employ them.

Aiding that mission is a new website (now on the Ethics Alarms links), Data Gone Odd, launched at the end of last year, and currently featuring a single post—this one, titled How To Lie And Mislead With Rape Statistics: Part 1. Then send the link to Lena Dunham, Rolling Stone, CBS, Senators McCaskill and Gillibrand, and the last person you read or talked to who used that “1 in 5? statistic.

You right wing misogynist hater.

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Pointer: Simple Justice

Sources: CBS, Department of Justice, Data Gone Odd