The Power of Images

In the same way, the New Yorker cover, now being displayed endlessly on cable TV, speaks louder than any efforts by Obama supporters to stop the smears (though it doesn't help that barackobama.com makes it hard to navigate to the truth-squading). As the author Drew Westen has shown, negative images burn their way into the consciousness of voters in ways that cannot be erased by facts. With one visual move, the magazine undid months of pro-Obama coverage in its pages.

Apparently, the New Yorker is losing some subscriptions over this flap. That's silly. It's hardly a crime to let a clever idea for a magazine cover (rare) trump political sensitivities (common). Getting too huffy about cartoons is something we should leave to extremists. But let's not pretend the cover doesn't play into a lot of garbage that otherwise smart and reasonable people actually believe, and in places far beyond Dubuque.

For a while, I thought only rightwingers and other Obama haters bought into the lies being spread about him. Then I got a call from Ross Perot, who was trying to plant some dirt about John McCain leaving live POWs behind in Vietnam (untrue, by the way). In the course of the conversation, it became clear that Perot thought Obama was a Muslim. When I informed him that Obama was actually a Christian, Perot was 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.

In this, alas, Ross Perot has plenty of company, and among people with a much less conspiratorial bent. Americans have become so distrustful of the mainstream media (MSM) that they instinctively disbelieve much of what they read and hear from us. But if misinformation arrives online from someone they've never heard of, they figure it must be true. It's our newest form of cognitive dissonance.

To give you an idea of how far these distortions about Obama have spread, I offer the case of my cousin Paul, a smart and successful Californian now in his 80s. He doesn't read the New Yorker, but does include Newsweek, Time, the Los Angeles Times and such rarefied publications as the American Scholar in his media diet.

Paul, a lifelong Democrat, is truly undecided about whom to vote for, and it's not hard to see why. To get a fix on the truth about Obama, he recently sent me a letter with a series of things he'd heard about the man. He asked me to answer "true" or "false" to each. Sorry to walk you through this, but this is the sort of thing the press needs to do more often. So here are a few of Paul's Internet rumors, with my answers:

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). When CNN and other news organizations investigated whether this was a "madrassa" (religious school), the answer was a clear "no." Girls did not have to cover their heads, prayers were not required, students came from many different religious backgrounds and the school was recognizably "public."