About the Answers to Questions Put to an Organization

A variety of recent news articles made me think about the process of posing questions to organizations about past behavior. That process is obviously different than posing a question to an individual about the person's past behavior. The person presumably remembers or does not remember what he/she did. The knowledge of an organization's past behavior is spread among many people, and may best be unearthed from electronic and paper documents.

It occurs to me that there are two dimensions to the response:

• Gathering the information,
• Preparing the response to the query.

The effort to find out what the members organization actually did and how that action came about may be undertaken seriously, in a general way, as a token response, or not at all.

The formal response issued from the organization may seek to convey information discovered in a factual manner, spin that information, obfuscate, or simply lie.

When one looks at the Q&A therefore, one is seeking to place the response in a two dimensional field -- how much information actually was used by the respondent(s) and how was that information used in formulating the response.

People appear to differ widely in the standards they use to judge the quality of information. The hearings yesterday in which Al Gore testified about global climate change illustrate that point clearly. Republican legislators, especially, seemed not to be at all impressed by the information that emerged as a scientific consensus from a compilation of peer reviewed research finding. Gore on the other hand, could cite data and had clearly spent a great deal of time seeking to understand the scientific information and its credibility. Some people seem to believe that if they say something, it makes it so!

Too often these days we seem be be offered heavily spun answers from organizational spokespersons who do not place strong quality standards on the information on which those answers are based.

Of course, this is hardly a new phenomenon. Check the Wikipedia entry titled "The Big Lie."

• "The Big Lie Technique" by Robert Scheer in The Nation
• "The Big Lie" by Russ Baker in The Nation
• "What Would Machiavelli Do? The Big Lie Lives On" by Thom Hartmann on CommonDreams.Org