factoid frenzy

Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller is worried about the long arm of government reaching into the realm of journalism—rightly so: she spent 85 days in jail on principle (so she said, and so, I believe, she did).

Miller said “no one can deny lives haven’t changed since 9/11″ and that national security is a concern, but the federal government has used that fear to justify eavesdropping on phone conversations and tapping into e-mails without warrants and classifying information that once was available to the public.

“More than 15 million documents were classified last year,” she said, explaining that translates into 125 documents a minute. “It’s intimidation by classification.”

And American citizens are paying for it, she said, to the tune of $7.2 billion in fiscal year 2004.

How can an electorate be free and informed if it is denied information? Miller asked. Without a free press, such stories as the torture of prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, warrantless wiretapping and CIA prisons in Eastern Europe wouldn’t have been reported, she said.

She also worries—rightly so—that other reporters and their news organizations aren’t quite as upstanding:

Miller said the American media, however, give the federal government reason to doubt its motives and competence each time it is discovered that an article is plagiarized or gossip is reported as fact.

True enough, as far as it goes. So she goes further—and fingers not the honchos at her former paper, who published national-security information that is useful to America’s enemies, but bloggers:

The blurring of entertainment and news and the relaxing of journalistic standards can be seen in online bloggers who are critical of people without giving them an opportunity to respond or who don’t post corrections when they learn that what they have posted is wrong, she said.

“I’m worried about bloggers,” she said. “(A post) starts as a rumor and within 24 hours it’s repeated as fact.”

Ms. Miller, meet the 21st century. And while you’re at it, remember that your old friend Norman Mailer coined exactly the word to describe this phenomenon (in 1973): factoid.

Factoid can refer to a spurious (unverified, incorrect, or invented) “fact” intended to create or prolong public exposure or to manipulate public opinion. It appears in the Oxford English Dictionary ^[1] as “something which becomes accepted as fact, although it may not be true”, namely a speculation or an assumption, The term was coined by Norman Mailer in his 1973 biography of Marilyn Monroe.^[2] Mailer described a factoid as “facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper”, and created the word by combining the word “fact” and the ending “-oid” to mean “like a fact”.^[3]

Few would have anticipated that spreading factoids (i.e.—lies) would become the primary means of entertaining the public during grim times, but there you have it.

Deal with it.