I found this in Lawrence Lessig's column in this month's Wired:
Good journalism likes two sides to every story. Lazy journalism fails to distinguish between objective sources and interested parties – and this issue has interested parties aplenty, from industry-funded think tanks to hired PR firms, feeding the press the disinformation it needs to make the story sound balanced. This is the media’s own inconvenient truth – that the institution charged with reporting the facts is so easily manipulated by those whose “salary depends upon [our] not understanding” the facts (to reuse Gore’s favorite Upton Sinclair quote). The result is the perfect storm for obfuscation. You can’t buy the story outright, but you can twist it enough that the truth is no longer recognizable.
It reminded me of a recent Rockridge article, Occupation: The Inconvenient Truth About Iraq:
It is time to tell an inconvenient truth about Iraq: it is an occupation, not a war. In wars, armies fight to dominate land. The US won the war three years ago when Bush said, “Mission Accomplished”. Then the occupation started, and our troops were not trained or equipped for an occupation under predictably hostile circumstances. Finally getting the courage to tell the truth that the US is an occupying force drastically changes the picture in Iraq. You cannot “win” an occupation. “Cut and run” does not apply to an occupation.
Regardless of the effect Gore's movie has on the global warming debate, it looks like he's definitely given liberals a new frame. When he titled his movie, he had to pick one aspect of his global warming spiel to stand for the whole thing. He chose to focus on the idea that global warming is a fact that no one wants to acknowledge. Now it looks like people are taking that frame and running with it, painting every liberal position as a brave stand by the reality-based community. I googled the phrase "another inconvenient truth" and got 47,000 hits. People are labeling all sorts of things as inconvenient truths: discarded electronics flood landfills with toxic components, urban gridlock is insoluble, dangerous chemicals are making kids sick. It's a crowded bandwagon. It waters down Gore's message a bit, but if the folks working for universal health-care, election reform and civil liberties (etc.) can take advantage of his traction in the media, maybe they can get some rhetorical unity and finally get taken seriously as reality's standard-bearers. I mean, when people talk about getting new frames into public debate, this is what they mean: the perfect storm of a compelling idea, a catchy name for it, and famous people to disseminate it.
I wanted to say that it's a phrase best suited to liberal usage -- that we own the phrase. However, googling the phrase "real inconvenient truth" results in 42,000 hits, most of which seem to be right-wing rebuttals along the lines of "You think that's an inconvenient truth? The real inconvenient truth is X". Funny thing is, most of the X's are something like "global warming is a hoax", which would not be inconvenient at all if it were true. So maybe we do own it after all.
Just thought it was interesting.