News You Can Abuse

News You Can Abuse

News You Can Abuse

TWA Flight 800 shot down by friendly fire.Bill Clinton's cocaine habit. The Net is doing more for paranoia and conspiracy than anything since J. Edgar Hoover's infamous FBI files. It's the golden age of "secrets." But the truth will out.

This is not political coverage as usual. Wired magazine and HotWired have joined forces to produce The Netizen, a comprehensive magazine/Web site that appears daily, weekly, and monthly. You'll find ongoing investigations into the ideas and global realities that are transforming the fundamental structure of our national politics. Check out Rewiring www.netizen.com/rewiring/,a regular series of interactive forums mind-bombing the new millennium.

I have a casual acquaintance here in Austin, Texas, who voted for Bob Dole in November. It wasn't because he felt particularly compelled to support Dole's "risky tax scheme," as the president called it ad nauseam during the final month of the campaign. It wasn't school vouchers or abortion or gays in the military. No, he'd read secret information about Bill Clinton on the World Wide Web.

One of my acquaintance's many email girlfriends, it seems, had steered him to Skeleton Closet www .realchange.org, a clearinghouse for hot dish - some of it well corroborated, some not - on all the presidential candidates. There's Dole's "money laundering" and "illegal campaign financing." Ross Perot ("How crazy is he?"), Ralph Nader ("secret luxury home"), and Harry Browne ("a sellout") all get their due. From there my acquaintance moved on to sites like Truth At Last (www.stormfront.org/truth_at_ last/clinton.htm) and others, which offer the purported "full and complete" contents of the president's medical records, including - you really want to know this - "residual traces" of several venereal diseases, a bloodstream coursing with (ye gods!) Prozac, and the shocking (!) existence of a perforated septum from years of heavy cocaine use in the governor's mansion in Little Rock during the 1980s.

Personally, I don't have much interest in the condition, real or imagined, of Bill Clinton's septum. Still, you have to admire someone so determined to make his decision based on information he gathered himself. At least he was trying! Here was a fellow who, as far as I know, rarely reads newspapers or magazines, never watches the network news, and demonstrates only the most cursory knowledge of what we're all supposed to know are "the issues." But damned if he didn't sit down nightly and on weekends and catch up on the many "scoops" to be found on the Web.

Lord knows, secrets - and their fellow travelers, paranoia and conspiracy - are no strangers to the American political landscape. In George Washington's day, it was the Illuminati. Turn-of-the-century Populists got halfway to the White House denouncing "the secret cabals of the international gold ring." In the 1950s, there were Reds under every bed. Richard Nixon had his "enemies." And yes, Virginia, Bill Clinton really does take his orders from the Pope. But you've never heard Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, or Dan Rather talk about that. Or about Clinton's nose. Because haven't you heard? The media are part of the conspiracy too!

Thirty years ago, historian Richard Hofstadter identified what he called "the paranoid style in America politics": "the sense that all our ills can be traced to a single center and hence can be eliminated by some kind of final act of victory over the evil source." Single sources of anything are emphatically not what the Net is about. And yet perversely, the Net is doing more for paranoia - a veritable Heinz 57 varieties of it - than anything since J. Edgar Hoover's infamous FBI files. It's the golden age of "secrets."

The Net is opening up new terrain in our collective consciousness, between old-fashioned "news" and what used to be calledthe grapevine - rumor, gossip, word of mouth. Call it paranews - information that looks and sounds like news, that might even be news. Or a carelessly crafted half-truth. Or the product of a fevered, Hofstadterian mind working overtime. It's up to you to figure out which. Like a finely tuned seismograph, an ever more sophisticated chain of Web links, email chains, and newsgroups is now in place to register the slightest tremor in the zeitgeist, no matter how small, distant, or far-fetched. And then deliver it straight to the desktop of anyone, anywhere who agrees with the opening button on the National Enquirer Web site www.nationalenquirer.com "I Want to Know!"

In the most recent election, that electronic grapevine has flourished, even as the much anticipated mainstreaming of Net politics raised barely a ripple. As my Netizen colleague Jon Katz recently noted, campaign 1996's most telling online landmarks were "big political sites, looming out of the ether like rudderless ocean liners, offering slick graphics, static information and worthless propaganda." And then in the middle of that, suddenly a screaming comes across the sky: The CIA imports crack. The Navy shot down TWA Flight 800. Clinton's on drugs.

Is this good news? Sort of. "The Net is terrible at propaganda, but it's wonderful at conspiracy," says Esther Dyson, who runs New York-based EDventure Holdings and chairs the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If you don't know Esther, she's being ironic: she'd rather it were bad at both. But at least now everyone can get the reality they want. And it can be as edgy as they like.

In a world of a thousand dueling realities, a mere two-party system starts looking about as compelling as three-network television. But when party platforms are perceived as mere propaganda, when Skeleton Closet offers truth and traditional media are cast as either dupes or shills, voting one's conscience becomes voting one's subconscious. It's Hofstadter country: Who will promise me my dream? Who'll protect me from my nightmare? Rationality doesn't have a lot to do with it.

Still, there's a more immediate problem: what counts as "news" on the Net can be pretty much anything, regardless of provenance. And predictably, the bottom of the barrel is attracting most of the comment. It's a (slightly) more sophisticated version of the old bombs-and-kiddie-porn slander - the Net as cesspool for raving paranoid nonsense. The stuff is certainly there, but believers hope that the Net's informative powers will carry the day. Truth will drive out nonsense, or at least people will learn to recognize the difference. If only to protect themselves.

But there's also a pessimistic view: that the Net is Hofstadter's thesis writ uncomfortably large. That when the barriers come down, when people cease to trust the authorities, they - some of them, anyway - become at once more skeptical and more credulous. And on the Net right now - hell, in America - there's plenty of evidence for that.

Consider J. Orlin Grabbe, whose homepage www .aci.net/kalliste is a one-man monument of do-it-yourself conspiracy theory. Grabbe's no fool: he's got a 1981 PhD in economics from Harvard and a résumé that includes extended stays at Barclay's Bank, the Wharton School of Business, and the National Bureau of Economic Research. Through his homepage, you can order a copy of his B-school-standard textbook, International Financial Markets (Third Edition, Simon & Schuster). Or you can read "The Phosphorus-Headed Missile and TWA Flight 800" and "Join the IRS: Deal Crack with Pay!" Here's the first nose again: "Our President does five lines a day." And Grabbe knows who killed Vince Foster - the Mossad!

At least he's original. Just as often, what you get on the Net are standard-issue Oliver Stone discards, dusted off and buffed to shine like actual journalism. Stunning revelations, for instance, that read like a wire service version of Pat Robertson's The New World Order, complete with references to the Illuminati and the Rothschilds. There's also David Duke's infamous rant (www.duke.org/bilkmov.htm) about the movie Sgt. Bilko. His complaint: the motor pool that Bilko runs "is not made up of the majority elements" of the likes found in the original 1960s TV show. "Other than Bilko," the instant film critic says, "they were especially stupid, slovenly, weird, and unappealing as possible." So now you know.

That's family-values stuff, of course, compared with the neo-Nazi posturing of sites like Stormfront and Aryan Nations, which do everyone a favor by wearing their pseudo-swastikas like a Surgeon General's warning. No question where they're coming from.

Thrillingly "secret" rumors that arrive with the FYI plausibility of email are more difficult to parse. The purest kind of paranews was September's "friendly fire" eruption about TWA Flight 800. Ostensibly

written by a high-ranking official of the FAA, the much-forwarded message - some versions changed hands half a dozen times in one day - made a suitably attention-getting claim: a US Navy guided missile cruiser had accidentally shot down the jet, and a cover-up was under way.

Here was news you could use! Mainstream papers right up to The New York Times wrote serious stories about it. French and German TV crews fought for videotape of an FBI spokesperson discussing the theory. At one briefing session, after the fourth consecutive friendly fire question, the FBI's mild-mannered agent in charge, James Kallstrom, exploded: "The notion that this did happen and that we, hundreds and hundreds of FBI agents and police officers and all the other folks, are covering this up is nonsense. It's just not true." But then he would say that, wouldn't he? Said one skeptic, quoted in the Times: "The reason you haven't heard this is it's an election year." And whether or not you believed the message the first, second, or ninth time you received it, you had to think, at least once: "Now wouldn't that be a kick in the ass, if it turned out to be true ..."

That's where trusty brand names are supposed to help. Right, like retired ABC News correspondent Pierre Salinger? In November, two months after the initial furor, JFK's former White House spokesperson announced in a speech to French airline officials that - guess what - he had obtained a secret document confirming that Flight 800 had been brought down by a US Navy missile. Another global media alert ensued - at least until an alert CNN film crew amazed Salinger by showing him an email printout that matched his word for word. Which didn't stop CBS News from using the story to lead its Evening News - "primarily to knock it down," Dan Rather said later, in an interview.

One of the interesting formal properties of multiple email forwards is that there can be dozens of authoritative-looking addresses in the header fields, including .mil. But did anyone ever manage to find the "friendly fire" ur-poster? It could literally have been anybody with an email account and a 2400-baud imagination:

Fr: tdowe@whitehouse.gov
Date: 1 December 1996
Subj: FWD>re Silencing Wired Magazine

Thomas Pynchon, in one of the more brilliant passages of Gravity's Rainbow, suggests that this type of essentially authorless divulgation prompts in readers "the self-induced orgasm." And indeed, a lot of paranews - regardless of its truth - functions like a skin mag at a sperm bank: something to mentally beat off with. Pornographies of deduction, Pynchon calls this: "ahh,that sigh when we guess the murderer ..." The Net invites you to extend Hofstadter's list as far as you want. The Illuminati did it. Or maybe the Freemasons. Catholics. Bankers and corporations. Communists. Fluoride. White devils. Politicians. OPEC. Trilateralists. Aliens. Democrats. Narcotraffickers. Religious cults. More aliens. The media. More bankers, more corporations. Militias. Republicans. More aliens.

The CIA.

Those three little letters, bursting with paranoid promise, were at the heart of another, more serious Net-based story that erupted in Washington in late October. Bruce Kletz, ex-marine and novice publisher, was working with two former CIA analysts on a book, Gassed in the Gulf, that accuses US officials of covering up proof that more than 20,000 American troops were exposed to Iraqi chemical weapons during the Gulf War. Some of that proof, Kletz says, was contained in 226 declassified documents that had been posted on Pentagon's Gulflink Web site - until they were quietly removed, Pentagon officials say, at the CIA's behest.

Kletz, who had his own copies of the missing documents, jumped in and announced he would post them on the Web site run by his company, Insignia Publishing (www.insigniausa.com). The mainstream media piled on: feisty publisher takes on the Pentagon and the CIA. When I called him, Kletz's saga was in The New York Times and the top story on AOL. "I'm a relatively inexperienced publisher sitting in my basement doing this," said Kletz, more than a little awed. "In the past 36 hours, I've appeared on or been approached by every major television network."

The story has a happy ending - sort of. Tail between legs, the CIA and Pentagon quickly relented and within hours put the contested documents back. Kletz got some useful mileage. "We were handling more than 100 hits per second," he says proudly. But then came the Oliver Stone touch: the morning after, someone hacked Insignia's Web site, erasing not just the famous documents, but hundreds of new orders for Gassed in the Gulf. Whodunit? "No evidence," Kletz says, "except that it was probably not a casual effort."

Not all Web-based news acquires that kind of extradigital life. Other than Lamar Hunt's 15-minutes-of-fame online declaration of his candidacy for president - and maybe one or two of the swarm of "unofficial" parody sites - it's hard to think of anything of significance in campaign 1996 that played out on the Net. Contrast that with television's billion-dollar slugfest. As Esther Dyson points out, in this new medium, propaganda simply falls flat.

What works much better is a category of news that is spilling into - and out of - the Net with a velocity that's probably directly proportional to the number of people, and news outlets, coming online. It's often news that is so hotly disputed (or in some cases, disputable) that the continued retransmission and discussion quickly give it a life of its own - one that may say more about the people passing it on than about the original source. It is, in short, paranoid news. News you can abuse.

That's what some people say The San Jose Mercury News was doing when it splashed a three-part series in late August, detailing, as a dramatic prolog put it, "how a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the street gangs of South-Central Los Angeles in the 1980s, sending some of the millions in profits to the Contras, a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency." The story was simultaneously uploaded to the Mercury Center Web site www.sjmercury.com/drugs , one of the first and busiest newspaper sites on the Net - it is Silicon Valley's hometown newspaper, after all. Headlined "Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion," the series caused an immediate uproar, especially among black Americans eager for some explanation of the long-standing scourge of the country's inner cities. The furor was not exactly an accident: as they often do with hot stories, Merc Center staffers diligently posted electronic teasers for the series across Usenet, including alt.conspiracy, alt.politics.org.cia, soc .culture.african.american, and, for good measure, the always busy alt.current .events.clinton.whitewater. Back again to the president's nose.

To call "Dark Alliance" paranoid news is not necessarily to question the imprimatur of its source. The Mercury News, after all, is not some fly-by-night webzine run by journalists with microscopic CVs and a lust for tall dollars. It's a Pulitzer-winning bulwark of the decidedly mainstream Knight-Ridder chain, the biggest and arguably best paper in the Bay area.

And indeed, at least before "Dark Alliance" came under withering fire from its even bigger-gun competitors, Merc editors admit the word Pulitzer floated before their eyes.

But you didn't need to be William Casey's ghost to notice that the online version of "Dark Alliance" was deliberately hyped, including the made-for-TV title - widely mispresumed to be the supposed operation's code name - and an opening-screen graphic (quickly yanked under fire from critics) that had a photo of a man smoking crack superimposed over the CIA's logo. Along with a trove of clickable supporting documents (selectively edited, the paper later admitted), the Merc Center helpfully provided busy discussion groups and live chat shows, with reporter Gary Webb jumping in to stoke the fires. Outraged black radio talk-show hosts - some of whom read downloaded copies of the "Dark Alliance" over the air - pushed the story over the top, and three separate official investigations were quickly ordered in Washington. The "Dark Alliance" site eventually acquired a strange front-page warning label: "The series never reported direct CIA involvement, although many readers drew that conclusion." But it certainly touched a live wire - and not coincidentally, pushed up the Merc Center's daily traffic by 100,000 hits, including its most active day ever.

The irony, of course, is that behind all the shouting, serious work was, and is, being done online. Slipstreaming on "Dark Alliance," The Consortium - "the Internet's first investigative zine" www .delve.com/consort.html launched last year by veteran Washington reporter Robert Parry - began posting its own periodic updates, including one that said Massachusetts governor Bill Weld, then in the midst of a heated race for US Senate, had "stonewalled Contra-cocaine allegations" when he was chief of the Justice Department's criminal division a decade ago. Parry, who also directs *The Nation'*s investigative unit, states the obvious: The Net gives him a unique chance to "use traditional journalistic standards and solid documentary evidence to produce investigative stories on important issues that the mainstream press downplays or ignores." So let me be clear: paranoid news, considered an extension of Hofstadter's paranoid style in politics, isn't only about hype and unfounded conspiracy theories. It's also a reflection of bigger things going on, both on the Net and in society. Indeed, a little paranoia may not be a bad thing, especially if you believe that the surge in Net-based news presages a sea change in American democracy. If garbage doesn't swamp legitimate stories, the Net could conceivably restore real meaning to the concept of civic vigilance.

Paranoid news is compelling in part because it turns ultimately not on truth but on complex matters of belief and self-identification. Believe it or don't - maybe O. J. Simpson is guilty, maybe he isn't - but what you think probably says something about your experiences with race, racism, and the police. Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, or he didn't - but what you think probably says something about how much you trust the government and the ruling class. "Dark Alliance" struck a chord with old-line CIA foes, but its driving force came from black Americans: someone has to be behind the plague decimating inner-city youth.

Trust is one of those metaphysical concepts the Web has already thrown into high relief. Am I chatting with a man or a woman? A person or a bot? Most netizens are already well aware of the problem: the medium itself isn't geared - right now, anyway - for easy verification. One can agree, to paraphrase free speech advocates, that the best antidote to bad information is more information. But amid the surfeit of potentially dubious data, a lot of people learn very quickly to be unselfconsciously, even involuntarily, suspicious. Because the bar for presenting things honestly on the Web is pitifully low, suspicion is very nearly hardwired into the nature of netizenship.

It's always worth pointing out that the Net hardly invented bad information. Back in the Second Wave media world, public service outfits like Project Censored, Essential Information, and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting beat their collective brains out every year trying to draw attention to flagrant distortions, hypocrisies, conflicts of interest, and deliberate omissions in TV and print journalism. They don't even waste their time with the National Enquirer - let alone Area 51 Digest. Yet all such organizations together do little more than shatter a few windows in a veritable Sears Tower of media cynicism.

There's not much question that the Net opens up new horizons for hype and opportunism. It's still in the early days, and no one knows for sure which sensational Net-borne story is going to set off the right bells and whistles and follow "Dark Alliance" into the national headlines. It's a sure bet, though, that a lot of people are staying up late trying to figure that out - and not just in basements.

Now that virtually all major American newspapers are online, they are all, willy-nilly, national newspapers. In fact, they're global. And in a very real sense - hit counts and advertising dollars - they're competing for readers. All readers, everywhere. That's a novelty, coming out of an age of fat, bland monopoly newspapers, and an unsettling one at that. Worse, the Net's TV-like qualities - which will only increase - make it ideal for spectacular "revelations" and melodrama. In other words, newspaper-level density of information, as presented by Your Eyewitness News Team. Or two clever kids in a garage. That could still be good news: like in the movie The Front Page, "scoops" and banner headlines are how hard-charging newcomers to the news business move up. But for anyone interested in pure truth, the result isn't necessarily edifying.

What uniquely drives much of Net-based news, though, is something less palpable: the brute passion of people, filling email in-boxes and Usenet's tribal bulletin boards, often with posts that don't say much more than "FYI" or "Hi, I'm here." Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski calls this phatic communication - the social grunts and greetings that compose much of daily intercourse with fellow human beings. In the real world, phatic communication can be as simple as sharing a grimace with a stranger when someone cuts in line at the grocery checkout. Online, though, unless you're still one of those foppish few who are still using emoticons, phatic gestures are more often things like "Thought you'd enjoy this" or just "FWD." Being social literally means "spreading the word."

The question that begs, of course, is what happens when the Net moves out of its current toddler stage - when 90 percent of Americans, instead of barely 12, are online? When instead of a couple of strange emails a week, it's a dozen (or a hundred) a day? And when the Net has all the bells and whistles of television - in fact, it is television - and you've got the Oliver Stone channel coming at you, 24 hours a day? It may not be that far off - look what's hot in prime-time television: shows like Millennium, Profiler, and Dark Skies with plot lines straight out of the deep end of alt.conspiracy. Yahoo! lists 405 X-Files Web sites. How long before some bright-eyed, would-be media mogul starts offering a special X-Files "news service"?

Perhaps there will come a point of crisis - a crisis of confidence, if not conscience - when all those who are having fun with the Kooks Museums and Skeleton Closets and Area 51 sites wake up. After all, when everyone is getting their own news and no one's getting the same news, it doesn't do much for consensus. This may be the moment when we collectively agree on the need to find some way to separate information from entertainment. How many parents really want their kids to study the movie JFK or The Turner Diaries in history class? Or Orlin Grabbe's homepage in current events? Maybe this should be a policy issue, in the synergistic universe of what The Nation has dubbed the "national entertainment state." Oliver Stone can chair the committee.

The problem, of course, is that a lot of people like things that fit their reality - in fact, the closer, the better. And the Net is more than happy to oblige. "People who aren't looking for truth but for confirmation will find it," Dyson rues. To flip that around, we've all got our versions of Ernest Hemingway's "bullshit detector," a personal reality compass. Normally, it works online, too. "If what someone tells you is remotely close to the truth as you know it," says Dyson, "that will be a sign of reliability on other matters." Net developers call it branding. In English: trust.

Anatole Broyard, the late New York Times book reviewer, once wrote, only half in jest: "Paranoids are the only ones who notice things anymore." The Net gives them 20/20 vision - more like infinitely powerful binoculars, in fact. That's not necessarily bad, especially if and when everyone becomes more or less equally wired - at least we'll all be talking about the same universe of data. "For all its shortcomings," says Parry, "the Internet can't do much worse than the mainstream media have. It might even help Americans discover information in a more democratic fashion. Let's hope."
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