This "13 Myths" web site was conceived after activists involved in Organizers' Collaborative used the Internet to research and distribute a comprehensive flyer detailing distortion of the truth in the battle for the White House in the aftermath of the 2000 election.

About a dozen contributors worked furiously for four days straight to document false statements made during the critical first week of the recount battle. Certainly there was a tendency for each side to exaggerate its case, but some of the statements of the Bush team were quite bald-faced. Examples include the statement by Ari Fleisher that "Palm Beach County is a Pat Buchanan stronghold" and the statement by Karl Rove that the number of invalidated ballots in Palm Beach county was typical.

The resulting flyer was sent on a few listservs to hundreds of thousands of people, and reached millions more through forwarding, and through its posting on more than 300 web sites. This effort was a wonderful example of how the Internet can enable a scattered group of researchers and fact checkers operating on a shoestring to have a large impact on public opinion without access to budget of the Heritage Foundation or the mass media.

In the end, during the recount fight, money prevailed; in July of 2001 it was disclosed that the Bush forces had FOUR times as much money at their disposal to wage the battle as the Gore people did. At the same time, our ability as volunteers to put together a "rapid response" flyer mobilized thousands to oppose the power of money, and is worth repeating. Thus, thanks to a volunteer, we created 13myths.org, a web site designed to facilitate even more rapid collaboration at other times when a "myth-fact" rapid response flyer may be useful.

How You Can Use This Site

13myths.org is a web application that is still in its early stages. We are not planning to completely polish the collaborative editing capabilities without some additional resources. We are going to seek out opportunities that may arise to work on specific myth/fact flyers, opportunities that may come with some institutional sponsorship that can help pay for site improvements. (We would like to cover all of the issues in the conservative agenda, but realistically, we would need a budget for 300 hours of web programming to build the necessary administration system to make 13myths.org into a full-fledged service provider to the progressive movement.)

For those of you who want to create a myth-fact flyer on your own, we encourage you to do so. Just engage in a debate on the issue -- face to face or online -- and then take some of the statements that are most challenging to respond to, and examine their veracity. For example, in 2002 a common statement by conservatives was to blame the Clinton Administration for allowing corporations to falsify their financial statements, masking the weak state of the economy when Clinton left office. They argued that for the first time, Bush was forcing companies like Enron to tell the truth, which ultimately would be good for the economy (once we recovered the so-called Clinton recession). Yet, articles like this one show that this argument is not just false; it is extremely easy to bring it down!

Thus, to develop a good flyer you want to identify some those arguments your adversary is using most that can most easily be demolished with facts. A good flyer will NOT ONLY include the arguments out there in the mainstream media. It will ALSO include a few of the arguments made by ideologically driven allies of your adversary. By exposing and debunking the extreme position, you are more likely to win moderates over to your side. Conservatives try to tag liberals with the positions of left wing radicals all the time; it actually makes more sense to use this tactic on conservatives. This is because the radical right has far more influence on conservative leadership than the radical left ever did on liberal leadership. Just look at how influential Grover Norquist, Pat Robertson, Tom DeLay, Ralph Reed, and Paul Weyrich have become. With a little bit of research you can locate widely disseminated (and widely held) positions advocating that all social programs be dismantled, or that abortion should be illegal even in cases or rape. And you can point to examples where public policy is moving in the direction of these positions.

Making it Participatory

If you have come to this page, it is likely that you received a message that a flyer is "actively being edited." What this means is that you, the reader, can go into any one of the active flyers and look at the work in progress. The idea is that we can invite a few hundred people to help out with the editing, and a dozen or two are likely to donate some time looking for typos, or checking out references through web searches on sites such at http://news.google.com.

Thus far we have used this extra volunteer help in order to be extremely thorough in documenting both the source of a myth, and the rebuttal points to the myth. If we were attorneys writing a brief this would be expensive but necessary. The Internet provides a vehicle for us to be as complete without having a budget to pay dozens of paralegals. Instead, any good-sized email list with a few hundred subscribers can provide quite a few people who are likely to have 20 minutes to help out. Recognizing that people want to help, the authors of myths and facts can write, if they are pretty sure of something (but have not yet located a good citation), [reference needed] next to it. Often we see things in the paper or on TV but we don't take down the information when we see it. It is likely that of the next 100 people to look over the myth, one or two will have seen the same thing you did, and will know where to go to cite it properly.

Note: all general announcements about the status of this site will be sent out on the RightWatch email list; if you want to subscribe to that please click on the link to RightWATCH in the links list at left.

PROPAGANDA AND FALLACY GUIDES

As a supplement to the facts presented in "13 Myths," we suggest the following guides to detecting deceptive reasoning:

Introduction to Propaganda Analysis by Chip Berlet (2-pages)
Guide to logical fallacies, at Nizkor.org (extensive)
Guide to logical fallacies, by Stephen Downes complete but succinct)