Planned Parenthood and the Stories We Tell Ourselves

All of these stories caught fire because they initially appeared to confirm conservative beliefs about organizations they dislike. (Anyone remember Frank Peretti's Prophet, with the abortion clinic that kills teenage girls and kills people to cover it up?) Activists, bloggers, and interest groups ran with the stories before they had the time to judge their accuracy. But time and investigation of both events proved, once again, that bomb-throwing partisan tactics rarely reveal the truth of a situation. And in the process, these stories cost innocent people's jobs, deepened political hostilities, and spawned hurricanes of spin that took weeks for any critical observer to sort though.

Stories are now ammunition in the information war that political discourse in America has become. It no longer matters if a story is true; if it can mislead enough people for long enough, a point is scored for the storyteller's side. Activists like Rose are, as journalist Libby Copeland aptly described her, "the face of all-out war" over political issues, a war where stories are used as weapons.

Liberal democracy depends on the virtue of level-headed people weighing evidence and considering information that challenges their preconceptions—a practice more difficult to maintain as partisan media grow louder and unaccountable activists get attention with nothing more than a video camera and an Internet connection.

We should take pains not to believe stories just because our side is telling them, especially yarns calculated to cause maximum damage to the enemy. One too many of these bombs could blow us all to pieces.