Just the facts, ma'am.

I love facts. They're the things that make it possible to find solutions to our problems.

I often tell my conservative friends that I'm certain that if we got a group of 10 of their like-minded friends together with a group of 10 of my like-minded friends, we could solve whatever problem we wished to work on.

Why? Because we would actually want to solve the problem, not keep controversy alive to boost our ratings or look toward triumph in the next election.

No matter what the problem, the first item of business, after identifying the problem to be solved, would be to collect the pertinent facts. No facts to work from, no solution possible. Facts are that important.

It seems that facts are in a bit of difficulty these days. First of all, they're harder to come by in our daily reading.

I just began reading a book titled "Blur: How to know what's true in the age of information overload." It's by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel, who are also the authors of "The Elements of Journalism."

We all know that newspapers and magazines are having a hard time staying alive in this digital age, but this quote from the opening of the book caught me by surprise: "The numbers are shocking. In the initial ten years of the twenty-first century, newspapers saw nearly half of their ad revenue disappear, Roughly a third of all newsroom jobs vanished. The audience and revenue for network news were less than half what they had been twenty years earlier. More than two billion dollars in news gathering [ability] annually disappeared."

Remember TV series like "Lou Grant" or movies like "All the President's Men?" Newspapers made exciting drama because they had the resources to speak truth to power, and to uncover when power was screwing with the rest of us. The editor was always asking the reporter: "Do you have two sources for that? You do? Then print it!"

Newspapers and magazines had editors and fact-checkers. I know from experience that when a writer submitted an article to a national magazine, it was assigned to a fact-checker who verified every single fact from the article.

Then came the internet, devoid of editors and fact-checkers. "The most fundamental change," say Kovach & Rosenstiel, "is that more of the responsibility for knowing what is true and what is not now rests with each of us as individuals."

It's a "reader beware" situation with facts today. They can be used--and abused--in some rather clever ways.

Remember the argument in Wisconsin about the pay and benefits of teachers and other public employees? "Everybody knew" that teachers were better off than workers in the private sector.

How did they know this? Because the average pay of public employees was higher than the average wage for a worker in the private sector. That is a fact, so case closed. No need to investigate further. Pay no attention to the additional facts behind that curtain!

You see, if one recognizes that the public workforce is made up of a lot of highly educated people such as teachers, engineers, nurses, doctors, etc. and compares the pay and benefits of comparably-educated members of the public and private workforces, an entirely different fact emerges. Taking into account both pay and benefits, public employees in Wisconsin earn less than their private counterparts with equal educational levels. For specifics, see the following blog post:

http://rsteinfeldt.blogspot.com/2011/06/public-pay-vs-private-truth-is-in.html

Facts are so complicated. That's why I would like to give you a few examples of how facts can be misused in the next couple of posts.