False Equivalence: Here's How You Deal With It

[Please see update below.] Joe Nocera -- disclosure: longtime friend -- has a column in the NYT today about the "controversy" over the Chevy Volt. The controversy is whether this ambitious hybrid car, which can get very high mileage per gallon of gas (~ 200 mpg), illustrates Obama-administration overreach for industrial planning, enforced conservationism, and across-the-board liberalism gone mad.

As Nocera points out, Fox News has repeatedly presented it that way. There was even a Volt-ish allusion in some of the argument against the Obama health care plan before the Supreme Court last week. If the government can force me to buy medical care, why shouldn't it force me to buy not just broccoli but also an electric car? After all, as former Solicitor General Paul Clement pointed out in his anti-Obamacare argument, other people's failure to buy electric cars makes their price higher, by eliminating economies of scale. Why isn't that just like people who decide not to buy health insurance?

You can go to the transcript to see how Justices Sotomayor and Breyer dealt with that analogy. But what's the truth about the Volt itself? Nocera could have said in his column: "Critics claim that the Volt is a governmental boondoggle that typifies an administration bent on imposing its do-good agenda on the nation. Administration spokesmen deny the charges." Here is what he actually says:

What is the connection between President Obama and the Volt? There is none. The car was the brainchild of Bob Lutz, a legendary auto executive who is about as liberal as the Koch brothers. The tax credit -- which is part of the reason conservatives hate the car -- became law during the Bush administration.

"It's nuts," said Lutz, when I spoke to him earlier in the week. "This is a significant achievement in the auto industry. There are so many legitimate things to criticize Obama about. It is inexplicable that the right would feel the need to tell lies about the Volt to attack the president."

It helps that Nocera was able to get the highly conservative Lutz -- shown with his Volt, at right -- to go on the record this way. But it is nice to see someone lay it out so plainly.

That is all. Except that if I ever trade up from my current (and still stylish and defect-free) 2000-model-year Audi A4, I will check out one of these.
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Update: Another NYT columnist gives another example of how it's done, albeit on his blog. This is Paul Krugman, with whom I've had my ups and downs over the years but whose views I wholeheartedly endorse here. He is talking about how journalists conditioned to the idea that they must always remain "balanced" and "objective"-seeming deal with the current imbalance in the nature of the two main political blocs, and in particular how this shows up in respectful treatment of proposals from Rep. Paul Ryan. Emphasis added:

The other type is more interesting: the professional centrist. These are people whose whole pose is one of standing between the extremes of both parties, and calling for a bipartisan solution. The problem they face is how to maintain this pose when the reality is that a quite moderate Democratic party -- one that is content to leave tax rates on the rich far below those that prevailed for most of the past 70 years, that has embraced a Republican health care plan -- faces a radical-reactionary GOP.

What these people need is reasonable Republicans. And if such creatures don't exist, they have to invent them. Hence the elevation of Ryan -- who is, in fact, a garden-variety GOP extremist, but with a mild-mannered style -- to icon of fiscal responsibility and honest argument, despite the reality that his proposals are both fiscally irresponsible and quite dishonest.

At almost exactly this time last year I was weighing in to similar effect.

About the Author

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. His latest book is China Airborne.

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”