A proposal: First, the facts; afterwards, the analysis. Really.

[struggle4progress]

When I first came to DU several years ago, I spent most of my time in LBN. And I learned some interesting things by doing that

You know those two or three sentence filler stories about outrageously ignorant and idiotic behavior in foreign lands? A lot of those stories are demonstrably bullshizz: if you dig around and try to verify the facts, you'll frequently find there are multiple conflicting versions, involving people with different names in different places at different times. More astonishingly, some of the stories have been floating around here and there in various versions in various newspapers for several years before your local rag picks up the story and reports it as if it happened last Tuesday

There are many other stories that have a bit of truth to them, but only a bit. These stories sometimes provoke enormous amounts of heated discussion. And it's often the case the situation becomes much clearer when we know more facts. For example, there was a story a few years back, about a woman allegedly denied French citizenship for wearing a burqa. In that case, the French examiner's report did mention that the woman wore a burqa and did recommend denial of the citizenship application. But the report actually said a great deal more: it said (for example) that the woman believed women should not take any part in public affairs and should not vote, that the woman had no knowledge of the French system of government, and that she almost always stayed at home and didn't interact with anyone except her family; and the examiner concluded the woman did not sympathize with French political values and so was unlikely to contribute much as a citizen. The story sounds somewhat different when more facts are known

Sometimes, stories seem to appear as distractions from other stories. An example of this occurred before the 2004 election: several different media outlets at approximately the same time produced similar, but independently sourced, stories about Bush's TANG "service" -- but within a day or so, all the other stories disappeared from public view (and were then forgotten) as a very loud controversy erupted about whether Dan Rather had adequately verified the one story that he provided on the topic

As another example of story-as-distraction, I'll cite an early June 2009 story that "twelve members of a Christian sect in Peru were killed after they reportedly set themselves on fire in a bizarre religious ritual." It was worthwhile to try to pick out the details, and here's what was clear on 14 June 2009: The original story ran in CPN on 5 June. It alleged five charred bodies in Pedro López Lancha's church in Yurimaguas. At the time the story ran, Yurimaguas and roads to it were blockaded by indigenous people protesting the land decrees. In addition to blockades near Yurimaguas, there were also roadblocks at Tarapoto and Bagua Grande. On 5 June, Peruvian authorities began military attacks on the indigenous. A new version of the story from EFE on 6 June moved the story a hundred miles to Nueva Esperanza (near Bagua Grande), changed the church to a house (a later story claimed two houses), and increased the number of charred bodies to twelve; it also claimed the local governor had denounced the dead for threatening to kidnap him. The Amazonas seat of government is in Chachapoyas, down highway 3N from the Bagua Grande roadblock; route 5N towards Tarapoto ends on 3N between Bagua Grande and Chachapoyas. Subsequently, hundreds of people have been reported missing, and there are claims bodies have been burned and dumped in the river. Thus the story occurs in one of two places associated with the Amazonas protests, though the first (Yurimaguas) was probably inaccessible to outsiders at the time, due to the blockades; it is first reported on the day the authorities attacked the protesters; the second version of the story alleges a kidnapping threat against an official; and local reports suggest there may be some burned bodies associated with a government coverup. No new versions of the story of the supposedly suicidal church-members have appeared for a week: the alleged church is still unspecified; the religious group is still unspecified; while the dead are explicitly said to have been charred beyond recognition

It's worth the effort to get the facts right. In fact, we should not call ourselves a Reality Based Community if we're not very interested in facts. When I first started posting in LBN, a few years back, many posters there were interested in clarifying details of stories and getting those details right; many responses in threads contained links, and it was not uncommon for mere opinion-posts to receive comments such as "So what?" or "We like links around here"

So I say: get the facts right before doing the analysis. If you have an opinion, try whenever possible to support it by providing additional relevant information

[Riftaxe]

1. Hmmm... a reality based approach...

it just might work!

K&R

[Jackpine Radical]

2. Naaah.

Got nuthin goin fer it.

[bemildred]

3. That's no fun. nt

[rucky]

4. link?

:evilgrin:

[emulatorloo]

5. Recommending

There's an "article" on the TSA controversy written by a rightwing conspiracy theorist that's been put up several times on DU the last few days. The author is a birther, has a bunch of wacko conspiracy theory "investigations" on his site, he obviously has no problem with just making things up.

Each time it has been posted it gets a lot of recommendations and people act like just because they read it on the internet it must be true. Mods have been good and lock the threads eventually because of the questionable nature of the source.

But it is troubling to see DU'ers getting all excited about baseless conspiracy theories.