And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

--The Bible, King James Version, John 8:32

The truth will set you free. But first it will piss you off. --Gloria Steinem

Memes, Truthiness and Wikiality in the Realm of Public Knowledge

By James Eric BlackDecember 13, 2006

Rhetorical criticism is a glimpse of a moment. A rhetorical critic asks a question about the rhetorical process or phenomenon and how it works. The critic then analyses an artifact or artifacts that might shed clues about the process and then provides a tentative answer to the question (Foss 1989, 8). The problem with rhetorical criticism is the critic examines an artifact from a specific moment of time as if that information is a done deal as soon as it is expressed. It does not take into consideration that meaning from the original artifact can change over time. Speeches, prose and verse maybe static, but then they are circulated and accepted by the public. Information is not an artifact you can hold

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in your hand, but something that is constantly growing and changing. Rather than trying to figure out how people acquire ideas, maybe we should ask how ideas acquire people. This essay argues the need for a deeper, more radical interpretation of knowledge in the public sphere. Since traditional rhetoric studies the intention of communication, another means of observation is needed to justify the metamorphosing of information after it is originally presented. One way of studying a subject is by breaking the subject down to the smallest part. In this case, information originates from individual ideas. Scholars are beginning to deploy socio-biological metaphors to describe the viral nets of influence. This has been accomplished by rethinking survival of the fitness through the concepts of memes. (Dawkins, 1989; Blackmore, 1999). This essay will attempt to provide an alternate explanation for the creation of public knowledge using the evolution of memes through the news media as a case study. An explanation of the metaphor will be provided, and then by applying this metaphor the essay will turn to how information, both factual and nonfactual, can evolve into truths within the realm of public knowledge.

The Smallest Part In science, the basic mechanisms that produce evolutionary change are natural selection and genetic drift. Natural selection is the description of the process that allows organisms with favorable traits a more likely chance to survive and reproduce. Given enough time, this process can result in varied adaptations to changing environmental conditions. (Futuyma 2005, Gould 2002) Knowledge within the public sphere takes on similar evolutionary tendencies. Ideas are shared from one person to another, each person being a generation, in the hopes that the best ideas will prevail. Richard Dawkins (1989)

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named cultural factoids of information as memes in his book The Selfish Gene. A meme is an idea, like a gene, that can replicate and evolve. It is a basic unit of cultural information that can be transferred from one person to another. While trying to reduce the process of biological genetics to its most fundamental unitthe geneDawkins suggested other parallels that might classify as replicators such as ideas in a brain. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool from body to body through eggs and sperm, memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by hopping from brain to brain through oral and written words (206). This can be easily viewed in children. Most children know if you step on a crack you will break your mothers back. Certainly one could doubt the validity that ones maternal parental unit will develop a serious spinal injury if one steps on a pavement fissure, but nevertheless it is repeated from child to child until is accepted as a truthful meme within childhood public knowledge. Dawkins claims slogans, jingles, tunes, catch phrases, and fashions are spread in the same way, but so are ideas such as the making pots and the building of arches. We are not born with this knowledge. In order to know how to build an arch, we must experiment, read or ask. It is not too far of a reach to accept that ideas in the public sphere are also spread in a similar manner. An example of the way memes spread can be found in academic journal articles. A scholar creates a unique understanding of Concept X. This concept is a meme. The scholar spreads the meme through lectures and articles. If the idea catches on, it can be said that the meme has propagated itself by spreading from brain to brain. As others accept Concept X, it mutates to the needs of the new hosts. Concept X can then justify other concepts once it has a firm base within the individual.

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According to Dawkins, typical creators of memes, called memetic engineers, include scientists, artists and religious missionaries (206). The memes are spread throughout the public by means of oral and written communication. Indeed, there is an institutional base for the propagation of knowledge within the public sphere: the education system, libraries, Internet and other forms of mass media. A meme of cultural information spreads through the public sphere in the same way no matter if the meme is true or false, fact or opinion. A meme must first connect either consciously or unconsciously to an already accepted value or fact set within each human and ultimately the public. This essay is an attempt to apply knowledge about genes to knowledge about knowledge. It changes the original meme of memes to fit something else based on prior knowledge in another field.

The News Media as a Meme Pool Focusing on technology, Everett Rogers (1983) revealed a number of factors affecting how far and fast an innovation spreads. According to Rogers, any increased benefit of the new way over the old hastens the innovations spread, as does compatibility with a communitys existing values, but too much complexity slows the memes transmission (Rogers 1983 as noted in Lynch 1996, 32). This observation also can apply to how memes spread through the public. As one might suspect, the news media, an amalgamation of facts and truthiness, is an ideal catalyst for the spreading of individual cultural memes. A meme has a harder time being accepted by the public if connections to public knowledge are not obvious to the casual secondary host. The news media is based on a concept of nonbiased facts. If one accepts this to be true, then memes spread by the

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media should be true as well. The problem with this is that news is only as truthful as the information it has gathered. A well-placed line of spin can spread and be accepted by secondary hosts just as fast as an undisputable fact. According to Asen and Brouwer (2001) the term public implies something potentially open to all such as the bourgeois public sphere, potentially concerning all such as public interest, potentially constituted by all as in the general public, or potentially known to all such as public information (Asen & Brouwer, 9). Benjamin R. Barber (1984) observed that at the heart of strong democracy is talk, but scholars disagree on what nature of civic discourse sustains democracy (173). The meme of misinformation lives on in the public sphere even if it is later corrected because not everyone who read the first factoid would also read the second. One example of this is the idea that Al Gore invented the Internet. He never said he was the sole inventor, but that he introduced legislation critical to its deployment in a speech that was not widely witnessed. Political operatives on national news opinion programs twisted this idea. It was too late to change or correct the joke before the idea became part of the public knowledge. An individual misinformation meme can take hold and become part of the public knowledge if the majority accepts it. Those who participate in the political and public spheres must gain knowledge of public issues somehow. Habermas contends that in an ideal situation: [T]he mass media ought to understand themselves as the mandatary of an enlightened public They ought to be receptive to the publics concerns and proposals, take up these issues and contributions impartially, augment criticism, and confront the political process with articulate demands for legitimating (Habermas, 1998, 378).

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The first provision of The Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethic is to Seek Truth and Report It (SPJ 1996). This provision is the cornerstone of the entire journalistic enterprise and on the surface seems clear cut. In reality, the truth telling task is loaded with complexities in a world where public figures and private citizens alike often twist truths to suit their personal purposes (Barney, 1996, 26). The problem may be in the vague nature of what truth is. Journalists are taught to be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information, but ultimately reporters are human beings who are often presented conflicting information. Reporters learn to use their own judgment in how to interpret facts, but some situations evade even the concept of truth. The porous truth presented by journalists is no more than a shadow cast on a wall by an unseen and elusive reality with the hope for a breadth of information where a discerning public might ultimately find truth. To this day, we do not truly know if O. J. Simpson killed his wife, let alone if he murdered her in cold blood. Most of us have strong opinions we pass on as the facts of the situation. Two trials, one criminal and one civil, produced conflicting versions of whatin the absence of certain knowledgewe must accept as facts. Still there is the nagging feeling the truth has evaded us or has become unrecognizable (Barney, 27). Simpson recently attempted to publish a book about the murders, only to face a backlash from the public. The book and television appearances were canceled because even though he was found not guilty in a criminal court of law, the public has decided his guilt and fate. Thus, public knowledge is not always based on actual facts but truthinessthe quality by which a person claims to know something intuitively, instinctively, or "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or actual facts

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(Rabin, 2006). The problem is reporters, like anyone else, can be wrong, yet their interpretations of facts are cast out into the public as soon as they are published. Attitudes toward information change to the extent that people view a message as being presented as conveying the truth about an issue (Glynn, 1999, 146). News is presented in the traditional media as unbiased and fact driven. Civil War correspondents first developed a cold fact driven style of news writing by imitating the terse, compact press releases of President Lincolns secretary of war, Edwin M. Stranton (Mindich 1993 as noted in Campbell, Martin, Fabos 2006). Adverbs and adjectives were stripped from copy. The questions of who, what, where, when and why were answered at the top of the story in the lead and then narrowed down to less significant details. This way the most important aspects of the story had a better chance of getting through to the publisher when war or weather disrupted the telegraph transmission of theses dispatches. Over 125 years ago, George William Curtis wrote that advocates of reform and other concerned citizens learned not only what was happening in every land, but what to think on every event by reading the newspaper: The unfolding of their paper is the opening of their minds. In our modern civilization, therefore, the newspaper is felt to be the highest power (Curtis 1881, 299 as noted in McGee, Martin 1983, 58). As recently as the early 1980s most people only had access to one or two newspapers and maybe three broadcast networks. The same cannot be said today for concerned and active citizens are constantly bombarded by often-mixed messages from conflicting media. Space and time restrictions often dictate timeliness, quantity and quality of information. Furthermore, it is impossible to discount the influences of private interests in pimping suppression, secrecy and misrepresentation to the news media.

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Stephen Newman (1994) suggests the libertarian market society relies on a faulty psychology that underestimates the range of motives that affect human behavior. The same motives that drive people to seek advantage in the public sphere also encourage them to pursue their ends by political means. Self-interest, that great engine of material progress, teaches us to respect results, not principles (Newman 1994, 125, 158). News can easily fall victim to unscrupulous memetic engineers whose purpose for controlling the media are numerous. The need for democratic participation based on citizen competence is especially crucial in social welfare democracies dominated by forces of late capitalism, nation states where, at their most insidious, the powerful can prevent conflict from arising, not by direct confrontation, but by tacitly shaping political beliefs and ideologies (Gaventa 1980, 57; as noted in Gross 2006) and surreptitiously manipulating sources of information, systematically distorting communication among its citizens (Gross 2006). The news media of today no longer is an extension of the publics use of reason and has become a medium for the transmission of culture and consumption (Allen 1995, 199). The mass media shed its reasoning public role as modern society developed as though the role was nothing more than surplus avoirdupois. The result is a mass media fashioned world as a public sphere in appearance only (Habermas 1996, 171). News is so imposed on matters of fact to the extent that the public sphere itself becomes privatized in the consciousness of the consuming public. The public sphere becomes the sphere for the publication of private biographies. The accidental fate of the person-on-the-street or systematically managed movie stars attain publicity while public relevant developments and decisions are distorted to the point of unrecognizability (171).

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John Dewey (1927, 181) said the smoothest road to controlling of political conduct is by controlling opinion. As long as news is a public opinion generator, those in power have a motive for tampering with the springs of political action. Indeed, lying is an art form to some in power, especially for politicians. Deceitfully spinning the truth in Washington is so common and expected that politicians often go off the record when they want to tell a reporter the truth. The twisting of truth is so perverse that few believe a quote if said in public, but anonymous quotes ring true (Crawford 2006, 43-44). Bitzer argues that in principle, a spokesperson for the public possesses and employs truths, values, interests and principles located in the publics tradition and experience. Political speakers and representatives are thought to err or fail in duty if they present falsehoods in the place of truth or if they speak or act for themselves rather than the public they represent. (Bitzer 1978, 72-74), yet most presidents liemany brazenly and often with impunity. When William Henry Harrison was a candidate for president over 185 years ago he told voters he was born in a log cabin, when he actually grew up in a red brick mansion on the James River in Virginia. Honest Abe Lincoln ran as a country lawyer from Illinois, but by the time he ran for president he represented railroads and other corporations as one of the nations leading attorneys. More recently, Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to persuade Americans to side with the British during the war by claiming a German submarine had launched an unprovoked attack on the USS Greer when actually the Greer had been cooperating with British naval efforts to search and destroy the sub. Harry Truman told the public that the first atomic bomb was dropped on a military base called Hiroshima even though Hiroshima was actually a city with 350,000 people. Dwight Eisenhower claimed we were not sending spy planes over the Soviet

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Union until the Soviet Union produced a pilot and the wreckage of a downed plane. John Kennedy declared the United States was on the wrong side of a missile gap after he had read classified documents that claimed otherwise. Lyndon Johnson lied when he asked Congress for authorization for a retaliatory attack after the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin attacked two American destroyers without provocation. Richard Nixon lied about covert bombing in Cambodia and he lied about Watergate. Reagan may or may not have lied when he swapped weapons for hostages then said it didnt happen. He later said that in his heart he had not, but the facts proved otherwise. It may have been a momentary disconnect with reality for Reagan, but the first Bush could not claim the same. George Herbert Walker Bush said he was totally out of the loop concerning the Iran-Contra scandal, but his personal diaries claimed he was one of the few people who knew every detail. And Bill Clinton really did have sexual relations with that woman. (Corn, 2003, 4). One could argue that it is the job of the president to lie if national security so requires it. It is only when presidents lie to cover up their own misdeeds that they tend to get into trouble. One could also argue that we have lost our ability to distinguish fact from fiction when we expect our politicians to fly blindly with the truth. Facts are elusive and malleable, begging to be forged and shaped. One of the first people to understand the facts in a newspaper could be manipulated for the betterment of a client was Ivy Ledbetter Lee. Called Poison Ivy by newspaper critics and corporate foes, Lee first went to work for John D. Rockefeller in 1914. Rockefeller, who controlled 90 percent of the nations oil industry, once said, It is my duty to make money and more money (Ewen 1996, 47). Lee was hired to help contain the damage when tactics used to stop

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union organization resulted in tragedy at a fuel and iron company in Ludlow, Colorado. Fifty-three workers and their families died during a violent strike. Lee distributed fact sheets to the press that told the cooperations side of the story and discredited the United Mine Workers who had been trying to organize the Ludlow workers. Lee noted the 13 women and children who had died while retreating from the charging company-backed militia had overturned a stove, which caught fire and caused their deaths. Lees PR fact sheet implied that they had been victims of their own carelessness (Campbell, Martin and Fabos 2006, 429). The process of engagement and resolution is the source of solidarity among those in a democratic society, but is solidarity based on managed information and/or misinformation the best thing for a society raised on eight-second sound bites, drive-thru fast food windows and other forms or instantaneous satisfaction? Is todays public sphere simply based on short-circuited public knowledge or what Stephen Colbert calls wikialitytruth by consensus rather than fact? Late July 2006, the satirical host of Comedy Centrals The Colbert Report, explained how facts can be manipulated on Wikipedia, the online contributor written encyclopedia: You see, any user can change any entry, and if enough other users agree with them, it becomes true. ... If only the entire body of human knowledge worked this way. And it can, thanks to tonight's word: Wikiality. Now, folks, I'm no fan of reality, and I'm no fan of encyclopedias. I've said it before. Who is Britannica to tell me that George Washington had slaves? If I want to say he didn't, that's my right. And now, thanks to Wikipedia, it's also a fact. We should apply these principles to all information. All we need to do is convince a majority of people that some factoid is true. ... What we're doing is bringing democracy to knowledge (Wikiality 2006). It is power and will, not understanding and reason, that produces public knowledge in todays perception of the public. Reason is a situational-bound quality of

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persuasive discourse where experts in human sciences do not observe and report facts so much as they present evidence which is more or less persuasive to others (McGee & Martin 1983, 49). Systematically distorted communication acts as probes in the reconstruction of ideologies. By changing and controlling memes within the public sphere, the parameters of discussion and resolution can also change. Citizens have little choice other than the mass media to find the information within the public knowledge they need to be an informed electorate. Few people have the time, money or foresight to investigate every new issue in the public sphere by their own first hand investigation. That is not to say that information is hard to come by. Today the public is made up of trenchermen in an information economy where instantaneous distribution of public information is the norm. Access to information on almost any subject is no longer a concern for those who are the least bit hungry. Anyone who wants to keep up with the news of the day only has to turn on a computer to find a plethora of research on command. Yet while conversation may be the key to a working democracy, it is increasingly difficult for various American publics to determine what to believe, given the information presented to them (Banning 2005, 77). Journalist claim to be the eyes and ears of the publicthe Fourth Estate, the watchdog of the republicwitnessing for the masses who do not have the time to run to Washington D.C. to make sure the government is running as it should. In reality, investigative reporting is a rarity. For those reporters still trying their hand at investigative journalism, fear often motivates a reporter to back off of an important story. Reprisals from powerful lawyers, economic giants and politicians can prevent a reporter from access to power. Only two types of media remain: advocacy media devoted to

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getting politicians of a certain party or persuasion elected to office and bottom line media dedicated to attracting an audience big enough to make lots of money for its owners (Crawford 2006, 121). Newsrooms are consolidating and cutting back staff. Nightly newscasts and morning papers look more and more alike as they depend more and more on news services like AP and Reuters. News reporters rely more on the Internet and a telephone than actual footwork and the cultivation of sources. Fewer reporters are actually looking on their own for stories, relying more and more for sources to come to them. The Columbia Journalism Review scrutinized a typical issue of the Wall Street Journal and found that more than half of its news stories were based on press releases (Rampton, Strauber, 2001, 22-23). If most of what is produced in print and broadcast journalism is not the result of investigative reporting but instead marketing, the consequences for public information are deleterious (Banning 2005, 84).

The Baby Killing Meme Jurgen Habermas said that once violence is renounced, the lifeworld should be the product of communicative action whose sole foundation should be the force of the best argument. In order for successful operation, there must be a vehicle for communication between the system and the lifeworld, what Habermas calls a switching station (1998, 278-79; 409). This is the political sphere; a set of forums where conflicts originating in social and economic systems can be engaged and resolved and public knowledge is exchanged. Lloyd F. Bitzer lists many constituents of public knowledge including: principles of public life to which we submit as conditions of living together; shared interests and aspirations; values which embody our common goals and virtues; the

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accumulated wisdom proffered by our cultural past and personal facts of our public lives (Bitzer 1978, 87). The public serves as an authorizing agent of public knowledge by first recognizing the essential truth, rightness or fitness of facts and inherited knowledge and then continuing to affirm the knowledge which merits continued affirmation because it contributes to public achievements (89). Two problems arise. First, shared virtues and values are not fact based so how can they be a form of shared knowledge? Secondly, if the original information that formed the public knowledge is inaccurate, but continually confirmed by a public, the public possesses not knowledge but ideology; something McGee calls the sham and semblance of truth (McGee 1975). Bitzer argues the distinction between knowledge and opinion or between truth and mere belief is fundamental and real. It is an observable fact that people frequently select knowledge over opinion and deliberate successfully about matters of truth and value (Bitzer 72), but a meme of information only needs internal justification to be accepted as truth. The public sphere is non-monolithic in nature consisting of many often-conflicting spheres of discussion and engagement. McGee (1990) suggests any apparently finished discourse is actually a dense restructuring of all the bits of other discourses from which it is made (279). These arenas of associations comprise a network of discursive connections that may be geographically organized but can also be organized around issues, categories, persons or basic dynamics of the larger society (Calhoun 37). Maximizing the influence of as many people as possible requires memes that can work on many levels within the realms of discussions. Every successful media event has what journalists call the hookthe one meme of information that makes the story newsworthy and will sustain the attention and interest

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of the public. A journalistic hook can also be the basis of myths within the public sphere. For example, baby killing has been used on several occasions to rally not only the troops, but also public sentiment during times of war. The French and British claimed the German soldiers bayoneted a two-year-old and chopped off the arms of a baby that clung to its mothers skirt during both World War I and World War II (MacArthur 1992, 5153). The two Iraqi wars have a unifying baby-killing story in the meme of Iraqi troops ripping babies from incubators in Kuwait in order to take the machines back to Baghdad. This cultural meme helped build support for the first Iraqi conflict in the early 1990s and then once again ten years later for the second invasion. Journalists and human rights organizations concluded the story was false, but many people still believe the story is true for originally it was presented as a news story and then it was presented as a docudrama based on fact. The American government had backed Iraq military forces during the Reagan administration, but made an abrupt about-face immediately following the August 2, 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The hook for the war came two months later when the Human Rights Caucus held hearings that provided the first formal presentation of Iraqi human rights violations. These hearings appeared to be officially sanctioned by Congress since Congressmen Tom Lantos and John Porter chaired them, but the hearings were not in front of an official congressional committee. Few reporters noted the difference. John MacArthur noted in his book The Second Front that since The Human Rights Caucus was not a formal committee of Congress it was unencumbered by legal accountability that would make witnesses hesitate to lie, Lying under oath in front of a congressional

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committee is a crime; lying from under the cover of anonymity to a caucus is merely public relations (58). The most emotionally moving moment of the hearing came when a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl described what she had seen in a hospital in Kuwait City. The panel was told that the girl could not reveal her full name because she feared reprisals against her family in occupied Kuwait. Nayirah sobbed as she told the members of the panel how Iraqi troops, in the first days of the invasion, went into Al-Adan Hospital, tore the sick babies from incubators and left the babies on the cold floor to die. The media kit supplied by Citizens for a Free Kuwait claimed the girl saw this happen hundreds of times. (MacArthur 59). In the three months that passed before the beginning of the war, this story was repeated over and over. President George H. W. Bush told the story. Seven senators referred to the hearings in speeches backing a pro-war resolution. Amnesty International paid for full-page newspaper advertisements that further publicized the incident. Radio and TV talk shows and the U.N. Security Council all accepted the story and repeated it as fact (Rampton and Stauber 2003, 72). Of all the accusations made against Saddam Hussein, none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi soldiers removing 312 babies from their incubators and leaving them to die on the cold hospital floors of Kuwait City (MacArthur 1992, 84). Everything about the testimony was a lie. The 15-year-old girl was not a volunteer in a hospital in Kuwait. Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family who lived in Washington D. C. with her father Saud Nasir al-Sabah, the Kuwait ambassador to the United States, who was in the audience watching her testimony in front of the Human Rights Caucus. The Caucus also failed to inform the public that a vice-president of Hill

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& Knowlton, a public relation firm contracted with the Kuwaiti Royal Family for about a million dollars per month to promote the U.S. involvement in the Middle East, coached her testimony. Several journalists attempted to verify the baby killings after the war, but found no verification existed. Only a few incubators actually existed in all of Kuwait before the war and most of them were still in use (Rampton and Stauber 2003, 79-80). Ideas, like genes, can remain dormant for long periods of time and then come back into fruition. One only needs to study the history of Copernicus and Galileo to see this to be true. The incubator story returned to the public sphere in December 2002, a few months before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when HBO televised a docudrama based on a true story titled Live from Baghdad. The film recounted the adventures of Peter Arnett and other CNN reporters during Operation Desert Storm. Actual videotape of Nayirah giving her false testimony appeared in the film, leaving viewers with the impression the story was true. After complaints generated from the media-watch organization FAIR, HBO later added a disclaimer to the end credits that admitted the allegations of Iraqi soldiers taking babies from incubators were never substantiated, but the message was only received by those people who took the time to read all of the credits (78). In essence, the meme of Iraqi troops taking babies from incubators in Kuwait contributed to American public acceptance to two invasions of Iraq. Central to most rhetorical models of the public sphere and the deliberative rhetoric central to public life is the assumption that spectators and interlocutors command some awareness and authority on the facts that are under review (Banning 2005, 76). However the fittest ideas are not always the truest or the most helpful. What makes an idea potent is the way it out-propagates other ideas within each individual. What is taken

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as fact and shared knowledge ultimately relies on inter-subjective agreement (76). Rather than being a spontaneously created or intelligently designed debouching machination, the evolution of a meme can be traced back to how the idea connects with other ideas already within the public sphere. Several evolutionary pressures on the baby killing meme can be broken down as the following:

Experience: An idea must correlate with an individuals experience or that individual is less likely to remember the meme. In this case, babies are cute. They can bring happiness. Babies are important for the continuation of a family. Other memes already circulating within the American public sphere were the atrocities committed by the Iraqi government, America as a peacekeeper, America as the protector and strength through power. All of these memes and certainly others as well, contributed to an overall acceptance that the baby killings could happen and that something should be done about it.

Emotional Connection: A meme also has a greater likelihood of being remembered if it conjures up emotions such as happiness, anger, or sadness. In this case, we can connect with the happiness of a hospital maternity ward, but we can be angry with the evil Iraqi soldiers and sad for the dead babies. All of these emotions are conjured up with this story.

Fear/Bribery: A meme that constitutes a threat may frighten the host into believing it. Similarly, memes promising future benefit are more likely to be

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believed. If Iraqi soldiers can do this to defenseless babies, what else could they do? Also, if we attack these evil people we can defend the babies.

Censorship: If something or someone destroys any form of retention system containing the meme or otherwise controls the usage of the meme, then that meme may suffer a selective disadvantage. We did not know that Nayirah was a member of the royal family who was coached by a public relations expert until after the war. Had we known this we might have doubted the story and thwarted the meme from the start. Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania was quoted in a Washington Post article reporting this type of practice. She said people judge communication by its source, When you deny people full knowledge of that source of information they are losing something important about evaluating the message (Birnbaum 2006).

Distinction: If a meme enables a hearer to recognize or respect a teller, then the meme has a greater chance of spreading. We had no reason at the beginning of the first Iraqi conflict to distrust this sobbing teenager. She appeared as an eyewitness to the horrible acts in which she testified. Nayirah told her story in vivid detail. Deaths are accepted as collateral damage in war, but children should be protected.

Usually the creation of a new idea requires more than a precursor belief or value. Any one adherent of a singular earlier idea may be quite unlikely to form a lasting meme

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in the public sphere, but as the meme spreads the odds increase that someone will make the creative leap. Therefore a thought contagion can shape creative public knowledge output (Lynch 1996, 10). Women and children accounted for 75 percent of the estimated 5,000 people killed when Saddam Hussein gassed his own citizens in the village of Halabja in 1988a crime that international courts would condemn him to death for ten years later. Why rely on a false story that journalists and human rights officials could easily debunk after the war? The problem was that the use of chemical weapons in Halabja occurred while Iraq received military and economic support from America. During the build-up to the war two years later, this fact was so recent that it would be difficult for the Bush administration to persuade anyone that its moral outrage was sincere (Rampton and Stauber 2003, 75). Government, broadcasters and publishers control the centralized portions of human communication. These information sources must suit their messages to whatever memes already prevail in order to curry favor among voters and consumers (Lynch 1996, 30). Rather than use an example of baby killing meme that could easily be attached to the pro-war administration, it was best to show the atrocities were the sole responsibility of the potential enemy.

Conclusion The use of news as a cash cow is causing a crisis in todays journalism. One only needs to turn to the story morgue of a hometown newspaper to see how few negative stories are written about well-established car dealerships, grocery store chains and department stores. Few editors are willing to bite the hands that feed the publisher.

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Crawford (2006) explains that the news media lost the war against politicians partly because the need for bottom line profits drive too many decisions made in todays newsrooms. Public willingness to blame the messenger aids in politicians never ending quest to keep their own version of the truth in charge. Propaganda becomes conventional wisdom. When propaganda rules the day, public knowledge loses most of all (105-107). Or does it? The development of public knowledge depends more than ever not on its source, but in the discussion of an informed public. An informed public depends on reliable information from the media to create a widespread democratic conversation based on the judgment of individuals. Dewey (1981) said that the formation of sound public policy with a broad citizen base depends on the clear and cogent presentation of the relevance of the past to the present, genuinely public policy cannot be generated unless it be formed by [historical] knowledge (640). Dewey asserts the essential need of a public sphere characterized by free citizen exchange is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion, and persuasion. This is the problem of the public (1927, 208; his emphasis): News signifies something which has just happened, and which is new just because it deviates from the old and regular. But its meaning depends upon relation to what it imports, to what its social consequences are. This import cannot be determined unless the new is placed in relation to the old, to what has happened and been integrated into the course of events. Without coordination and consecutiveness; events are not events, but mere occurrences, intrusions; an event implies that out of which a happening proceeds The catastrophic, namely, crime, accident, family rows, personal clashes and conflicts, are the most obvious forms of preaches of continuity; they supply the element of shock which is the strictest meaning of sensation; they are the new par excellence, even though only the date of the newspaper could inform us whether they happened last year or this, so completely are they isolated from their connections (179).

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In order to apply meaning, Dewey suggests we must be able to take memes spread by the news and apply them to what we already know. Hagerman argues that the press, the public spheres preeminent institution, is important in the creation of a properly functioning public sphere (Habermas 1996, 181). News gives voice to ideas and thoughts of private people who come together to form a public (1989, 231-236 noted in Allen 1995, 199). Thus the news media exists not to inform an inactive public but to activate and invigorate the constitution of a public sphere (Allen 1995, 199). How does the news media jump-start a public sphere? Undisputable facts hamper the flow of information transmission. We no longer discuss if the world revolves around the sun. Galileo has already proved the Copernicus theory. We no longer discuss whether the world is round. All we have to do is take a plane around the world to do that. These theories have already established themselves as undisputable facts within the public sphere. They have become building blocks to lectures, not dialogues or discussions. Memes of political fact are not outside human desire and judgment. Though flawed in many ways, news in its present form remains conducive to the development of an informed public sphere, but it is reflective of its culture. Do powerful public spokespeople use the news to spread propaganda? Of course they do. News is broadcasted. The whole idea of broadcasting the news is to spread ideas like one would spread grass seed on a lawn, whether it is in the electronic media that has adopted broadcasting as a noun or in newspapers that are delivered all over a city or even on the Internet where anyone in the world can see it. Dewey said the power of physical facts to coerce belief does not reside in the bare phenomena of their presentation. No one is ever forced by just the collection of facts to accept a particular theory. Only when the facts

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are allowed free play for the suggestion of new points of view is any significant conversation of conviction as to meaning possible (1927, 3). There is no separation between structures and processes of the part of the body and brain that entertains ideas and the parts that perform the acts. There will always be people who attempt to change and control the political sphere and those who wish to defend it. Both sets of people do this with memes of information. Dewey said the more we appeal to facts, the greater is the importance of the distinction between facts which condition human activity and facts which are conditioned by human activity for ideas belong to human beings who have bodies and brains (6-8). Often this is hard to distinguish in the news media for it is not always the most factual memes of knowledge that spreads through the public, but the strongest and most selfish. Information within the realm of public knowledge, although an olla podrida of fact, opinion, value judgments and lies, still falls within the genre of realism. It is no longer acceptable to expect only one narrative that propels truth into the public sphere. The genre of realism relies on and complies with socially accepted codes of representation (Banning 2005, 81). We are a public embroiled in the narrative. Everywhere we look is another one. We watch movies on DVD, cable and broadcast television. We watch the police bust real criminals on TV. Television comedies show conflict resolution in tidy 30-minute blocks. Al Gore plays himself on Saturday Night Live a few days before withdrawing from the 2004 presidential race. We read magazines, newspapers and detective novels. Even advertising invites us to discover how Daddy uses Tide to get little Jennys grass stains off of her softball uniform. You want to know more about the problems in Iraq? Comedy Central presents The Daily Show with John Stewart

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where instead of helecoptering a reporter in to a war zone they just show a correspondent in front of a war zone playing on a blue screen. Several non-fiction books will be out within the month. The knights on white horses may soon arrive, or a film like Live from Baghdad might be playing on HBO. We are a society that bases truth on evidence presented in narratives. Ultimately, distinguishing between fact and fiction memes may count less than being able to frame a good story when we see one. There is no such thing as a literal interpretation of the public narrative because all interpretations are metaphorical (Lakoff, 2002, 262). A conservative will accept a meme into his or her public narrative differently from a liberal person. The same can be said between gay and straight, black and white or any other public or counter public inside of, intersecting with, or outside of Habermass sacred bourgeois public sphere. We frame our narrative depending on the public or counter public to which we identify. This is the reason why an abortion is both an end to an unwanted pregnancy and means of killing babies. It is both a right to do what one wants to do with ones own body and murder. It is the reason why the media is both too liberal and too conservative. Lakoff (2002) suggests we digest memes of information with the words we choose to use, but this digestion should come down to the counter narrative. The media is the meta-dialogue that activates and invigorates the constitution of public narratives. We learn to accept the memes that best connect to the counter-narrative in which we identify. There is a flaw in Habermass ideal conversation model (1996) of two people tumbling ideas with no threat of violence. It assumes a psychological framework where two people are already sold on the idea of compromise, but one side can poison the discussion repetitively enough so that the other side no longer wants to communicate

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with words alone. Counter-narratives are based on their own selfish memes. Dewey (1927) opened the door to this when he said meaning depends upon relation to what it imports, to what its social consequences are (179). Conversation and discussion may even be an impossibility in todays political sphere. Ron Suskind (2004) recounts a conversation he had with Bruce Bartlett, the domestic policy advisor to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for the first President Bush, shortly before the presidential election of 2004. Bartlett predicted a civil war within the Republican Party if George W. Bush won reelection. He said the nature of the conflict was the same one raging across much of the world: the battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion. Bartlett claimed: [Bush] dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts He truly believes hes on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence but you cant run the world on faith (Suskind, 2004). No wonder Bush is so clear-eyed about the need to kill Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan. He knows you cannot persuade an extremist driven by dark vision because he may be just like them. Both enter into the world stage with a reality forged not by facts, but on faith in ones one instincts. Reason can lay dormant, but it remains the selfish meme that could lead to our survival, and survival of the fittest is never based on social responsibility. It may be the time to return the meme of reason to public discussion.

-Fine-

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