Farhad Manjoo

Information is all around us. From the Internet to 24-hour news networks to experts to neighbors, every place you look, there is someone with information. But what transforms information into fact, and what exactly are facts? How do we interpret them? How do we separate “Fact” from “fact”? When does truth become Truth? Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough explores the delicate areas between facts and truth to help us see how we deal with new information and ideas that challenge our beliefs.

Manjoo plods through many areas of selective truth: the 2000 and 2004 US presidential elections, the 9/11 attacks, and the Kennedy assassination. Each of these events is ingrained enough in our collective memory that everybody thinks they have a hold of the truth of each event. But, then, why are there still pockets of individuals who contradict the collective memory? How does their version of the event shape ours? Manjoo incorporates many elements of social and cognitive psychology (such as naïve realism, selective perception, and weak dissonance) to show how new information interacts with personal ideas and beliefs.

He also looks at broadcast news and media presentation and how presenting information with the je ne sais quoi of truth is enough to make it believable. There’s the usual digressions into Steve Colbert’s truthiness campaign and James Frey’s fictional autobiography. The problem with all this talk of half-truths and almost-lies is that it seems to the reader that nothing can be trusted. Every picture in the newspaper could be manipulated; each news account could be potential propaganda. This book makes the reader feel as they’ve been catapulted down the rabbit hole with no hope of escape. Luckily, it’s a quick tidy volume that doesn’t get too bogged down with itself. The trick here is to think critically and trust your judgment when it comes to information. All in all, an interesting read.… (altro)

Manjoo has compelling stories to tell—how the Swift Boat Veterans defamed John Kerry, how theories that the 2004 elections were stolen persist—and persuasive science backing up his arguments that we mostly believe the facts we want to believe. The book is ultimately defeated, however, by two related things: First, despite the title, Manjoo has no good advice for dealing with this problem; one could infer that “maintain a healthy skepticism about claims that support your side” could help, but that’s not exactly attacking the problem at its core, especially since the real damage occurs when we’re certain that we’re perceiving reality absolutely unvarnished. Second, implicit throughout (and often all but explicit) is the idea that, before the internet, when there were few mass media sources of information, we (in the US; he doesn’t cover elsewhere) got the Truth. When in fact, because of the psychological phenomena Manjoo covers and the nature of power, what we got was what a bunch of white men thought was the truth. What would Malcolm X say to the claim that Walter Cronkite was the voice of neutrality? What about Betty Friedan, or Angela Davis? The line “A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on” is over a hundred and fifty years old; Manjoo claims that the internet makes things worse because now everyone can find an outlet for/apparent confirmation of their own wacky theories, but never persuasively makes the case that it was better for only powerful white men to get mainstream confirmation of their wacky theories.… (altro)