Truth Squad called for foul; responds by asking who'd back a self-described progressive group

by: Eric B.

Fri Sep 28, 2012 at 22:00:37 PM EDT

I saw this in a press release earlier today. Planned to note it, but the Detroit News beat me to it (in my defense, I cooked a damn fine rabbit stew for dinner). Here's a link to the entire piece by Progress Michigan. I'm going to flag Progress Michigan right out of the gate for a technical foul in stealing my bit about the Truth Squad getting called for a foul. I did it a week ago today. So, there is that. Oh yeah, Politico, Michigan edition had something, but you can probably ignore it since it didn't have anything interesting to say.

What appears to bother Progress Michigan is the funding for The Michigan Truth Squad. I have to say that by themselves, this Show Me the Money stuff isn't terribly interesting. People who do shit purely for the money, like the Mackinac Center, can usually be spotted pretty easily because their work is of awful, shoddy quality. Once you establish that they are ignoring inconvenient information, shoehorning shitty data into their conclusions, and basically saying the same damn thing over and over again, you can usually move on to where they get their money, since it often explains things. As much as I bitch about The Michigan Truth Squad, they aren't the Mackinac Center's Capitol Confidential.

The Center for Michigan responded in this piece by John Bebow, which poses this odd challenge for Progress Michigan.

Instead of calling for Truth Squad transparency that already exists, perhaps Progress Michigan should look in the mirror. Where is Progress Michigan’s transparent list of funders? We didn’t see it on their web site.

This is the very sort of thing that the people behind the Michigan Truth Squad would think is a savage burn. So, what's the difference? The Michigan Truth Squad claims to be a neutral, non-partisan outfit to advance an agenda of a smarter dialogue. Progress Michigan is pretty up front in saying that it's a progressive advocacy and activist group. Does anyone expect to pull back the veil on a group so up front about its designs and find that Henry Payne is really pulling the levers?

Okay, so here's the problem:

The center says its objective is "to cure our unhealthy hyper-partisan political culture and reinvigorate our broken policy apparatus by calling forth a bottom-up, common ground citizens’ agenda for Michigan’s transformation."

I don't frankly know what any of that means, and I'm a specialist in slinging bullshit. What I take away from it is that the Center for Michigan wishes to use The Michigan Truth Squad to call bullshit on ads that are full of it.  Good on them, in theory.

In reality, what happens most of the time is that they actually believe the bullshit they're slinging. Somehow, that excerpted paragraph is turned into a mission statement, which when executed means not taking anyone's side too overtly even if that means not entirely tossing foul flags when they deserve to be tossed. As an example, I remind that last week they only flagged ads that cited the Mackinac Center's Capitol Confidental that in turn used as a source Patrick Michaels with a technical foul. In a fair world, they would have thrown about six dozen flags for poor credibility and then gotten around to vetting the factual claims of the ad. That is, if you really wants to fix our hyperpartisan political environment by doing something from the ground up, it ought to start by identifying people who lie for a liiving as not terribly trusthworthy. If you're not willing to do that, you're problems are bigger than just who gives you money.