WhatFinger


"Availability cascades."

How Democrats and the media manufactured the Russia/collusion story out of absolutely nothing



If you don't already read him, I want to highly recommend the Wall Street Journal's Holman W. Jenkins. One of his tremendous strengths as a writer is that he sees past the prevailing lines of thought that seem to inform popular narratives. If everyone assumes A because it's very common to believe A, Jenkins will dig deep down into whether there's any truth whatsoever to A. And he'll often find there's none. Not only that, but Jenkins will also get into why so many people see to think A is the beginning and the end of the story, and he'll explain to you what the real story is, and why. So his piece this morning on the Russia/collusion thing is a must-read. Many of us have noted in recent days that this is an investigation about nothing. All of Washington has been looking into it for months, and no one has found any evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians. It's about as empty a story as you're ever going to find, and yet the story goes on, and on, and on . . .
So where did it come from, and why do so many people seem convinced there must be something to it when all evidence says there isn't? Well there's where Jenkins really drills deep into something known as "availability cascades". Say what? If you're thinking this sounds like something that pointy-headed liberal eggheads would think up, you're on the right track:
Their launching point is the process by which we (i.e., human beings) decide to believe what others believe, and judge the truth of a proposition by how familiar it is. Such “availability cascades” drive government policy in good ways and bad, but usually bad. An example the authors analyze in detail is 1989’s fake “Alar” cancer scare that devastated U.S. apple growers.
In other words, people believe something true because they keep hearing it's true. They don't really have enough information about the subject to critically analyze the storyline one way or the other, so they default to the idea that it must be true because it's everywhere. So how does this work with the Russia story? It starts with the constant drips of news that Trump associates were in contact with the Russians. Day after day after day, we hear another example of this having happened. Oh my goodness! So much contact between Trump people and the Russians! This sounds bad!

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It sounds bad, except for one thing. It's not the slightest bit unusual, and just about every campaign does it - for perfectly legitimate reasons. Most people don't know this, because most people don't know the ins and outs of presidential campaigns and transition teams. They have no reason to know any of this to that level of detail. So when you're suddenly pelted with information that something went on, and it's treated like it's unusual, you assume it is unusual because you never heard such coverage of it in the past. That's how something got sold to the public as a big, scandalous news story when it's actually not the slightest bit unusual or objectionable:
Consider what has passed for proof in the media. Tens of thousands of Americans have done business with Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union, not to mention before. In 2009 President Obama made the first of his two trips to Russia with a gaggle of U.S. business leaders in tow. Of these many thousands, four were associated with the Trump campaign, and now became evidence of Trump collusion with Russia. Every president for 75 years has sought improved relations with Russia. That’s what those endless summits were about. Mr. Trump, in his typically bombastic way, also promoted improved relations with Russia. Now this was evidence of collusion. Russian diplomats live in the U.S. and rub shoulders with countless Americans. Such shoulder-rubbing, if Trump associates were involved, now is proof of crime.

The Alar pesticide scare only took off when activists whom Messrs. Kuran and Sunstein label “availability entrepreneurs” peddled deceptive claims to a credulous “60 Minutes.” We would probably not be having this Russia discussion today if not for the so-called Trump dossier alleging improbable, lurid connections between Donald Trump and the Kremlin. It had no provenance that anyone was bound to respect or rely upon. Its alleged author, a retired British agent named Christopher Steele, supposedly had Russian intelligence sources, but why would Russian intelligence blow the cover of their blackmail agent Mr. Trump whom they presumably so carefully and expensively cultivated? They wouldn’t.
That this is a total B.S. story is an open-and-shut case. The harder question to answer is which percentage of the people hyping this know what a B.S. story it is, and how many of them are dupes just like the members of the public lapping it up. I got into a conversation about this on Facebook with a political reporter who admitted there is no evidence of collusion, but then asked me, wasn't I curious about back-channel communication methods and various other contacts? I responded that it's fine to be curious, but before you decide something is suspicious or wrong, you should know if it's even unusual. You can make something sound sinister by describing it in a certain way. Or you can keep using suggestive statements like "questions are swirling." When everyone in the media is talking like this, and congressional committees are conducting oh-so-serious investigations of these deep, dark mysteries, you can probably forgive a general public that has more to think about than politics on a day-to-day basis for believing there's something to this story. It's a classic availability cascade. You keep hearing it. There must be something to it. Except that no, there's not. You keep hearing it because a whole capital city's worth of people desperately want you to believe there's something to it. The real question for you to answer is why they want that so badly.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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