Untruth: Why the Conventional Wisdom Is (Almost Always) Wrong

"In Untruth, Newsweek and Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson explains why our political, economic and cultural debates so routinely traffic in misinformation--popular fads that, like meteors, momentarily burn brightly in public consciousness and then fizzle out. They are discredited by time, experience and (occasionally) reason and logic. The prevalence of dubious political and intellectual fashions, Samuelson argues, stems from the triumph of ""problem-solving politics."" Advocacy groups, politicians and their unwitting allies in the media instinctively create agendas of problems that afflict society and must somehow be solved. The process of merchandising these ideas inevitably results in exaggeration and simplification. Samuelson calls this process ""untruth,"" because it is (usually) not the consequence of deliberate lies or even conscious conspiracies. The result is the same: the public is misled about what is wrong and how easily it can be made right. Untruth collects some of Samuelson's most enduring assaults on the conventional wisdom. These include columns arguing that campaign contributions have not corrupted politics, that the ""service economy"" is not turning America into a nation of hamburger flippers, that political gridlock is good (at least better than the alternatives) and that the Internet isn't the most important invention since the printing press."