Flakcheck Offers Hope

All right, I admit to being snidely critical of the world of Twitter Text and the cult of Face Tweet.  I continue to search for that glimmer of hope, however, that the techno-revolution will have a positive effect on society beyond enabling our youth to instantly communicate to hundreds of “friends” where they ate lunch.

The use of cell phones and the Internet during the Arab Spring is encouraging, of course, but on Sunday I saw a glimmer of hope that was a little closer to home. On Bill Moyer’s weekly show on the U.S. Public Broadcasting System he interviewed  Kathleen Hall Jamieson about the website www.flackcheck.com created by the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) at the University of Pennsylvania. Fed up with the hostile, negative and factually wrong political campaign ads being run during the current presidential campaign, the APPC created Flackcheck to point out exactly where the campaign ads were factually incorrect.  Not only that, but they encouraged viewers to e-mail and Tweet the candidates responsible demanding that the incorrect ads be taken off the air.  In effect they are doing in a systematic and serious way what Jon Stewart on The Daily Show does for comic effect on late-night TV. It is actually working; they have forced the removal of several ads across the country.

Canadian politics has not yet sunk to the depths of American political bad taste, but the success of attack ads down south has infiltrated our campaign processes. A Canadian website like Flackcheck would go a long way to halting that slow erosion of public discourse and would force politicians to argue policy differences on the basis of real facts and authentic issues instead of absurd exaggerations like those of Conservative MP Vic Toews.  You remember his blustery tirade, don’t you?  He stood in the House accusing the NDP, and by implication anyone else who was against his legislation, of “making things easier for child pornographers.” To the credit of Canadian observers, Toews was castigated for his comments, whereas I doubt that such remarks made in the U.S. House or Senate would have even been reported down there, unless it was to praise the politician making them for putting those godless, elitist, left-leaning so-and-so’s in their place.

If a Canadian Flackcheck website were to be created, then who knows, maybe it will lead to real political debate and a time when anyone who dares try to bamboozle voters with negative ads will be handsomely defeated in an election, not rewarded with victory.  If so, our youth will have to be commended for rescuing the political process.

Or maybe the lackadaisical Twitterfacers will be too busy texting about their lunch to care.  Time will tell. Meanwhile, the glimmer abides.