Observers' paradox

Schrödinger's Cat. By Draguunthor at DeviantArt.

The tempest over the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation massacre as it unfolded Thursday and Friday put me in mind of a problem on a blogospheric scale that I have meant to address for some time, the Heisenbergian way the Internet has of dealing with uncertainty—you can perceive the velocity of a story as it travels through the Tubes or its position, but not both at the same time, and the aspect you choose has an effect on what the story actually is.

The news that SGK had reversed its decision to withdraw funding for breast examinations [jump]
broke fairly early Friday morning on the West Coast—David Dayen at Firedoglake may have caught it first in our world, from Seattle television, with an appearance by Senator Patty Murray. Shortly afterwards, not long after the Times had put their version on line, the Washington Post's Greg Sargent was reporting that it hadn't necessarily been a reversal at all, and this was quickly picked up by Kos's Kaili Joy Gray, Emptywheel, Talking Points Memo, and Dayen. Gray was particularly angry:

So, traditional media, are you still going to keep doing the bidding of the Komen Foundation by pretending it has changed its position? Or are you going to report the truth?

But out there in the rest of the world, as you could see, in spite of the headline, from the citations in the TPM story, nobody was reading it this way. Not just "traditional media", I mean, but actual human beings, such as Senator Murray: "This is a huge win for women in communities across the country who will now be able to get the breast cancer screenings they count on through Planned Parenthood."

President of Planned Parenthood Cecile Richards said, "I think it's a really good sign that they’re focused on the mission, our joint mission, and I really take them at their word that this is behind us." And in the view of Senator Barbara Boxer, "I think it’s a reversal and I’m very happy. And I think what happened today is that women’s health triumphed over right-wing politics."

While right-wing politics itself tended to agree:

“Komen hasn’t bent to political pressure from Planned Parenthood and its left-wing political allies — they’ve snapped like a toothpick,” wrote Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center. “And according to our statistical analysis, pro-abortion ABC, CBS and NBC News have undoubtedly played a strategic role in this pressure.”

(I love the implication, supposing that second sentence to have any empirical meaning at all, that some other statistics might have shown the networks only playing a tactical role)

"It's mystifying how an organization can fully articulate sound reasons for eliminating a funding relationship, then turn around and capitulate on that reasoning within days," said Carrie Gordon Earll, senior director of issue analysis for government and public policy at Focus on the Family. "This is an example of how difficult it has become for organizations to take a morally principled stand. It's also evidence of the strong-arm tactics employed by pro-abortion allies of Planned Parenthood."

So what happened, exactly? What I figure is, in the first place, Komen drafted their "apology" in the most weaselly way they could, hoping to retain some control over the situation, and Kaili Joy Gray's analysis of it in those terms is pretty apt. But events did not stop transpiring during the wait for the document to be issued: the furor in Tweets and Facebook postings continued, spontaneous new donations to Planned Parenthood kept mounting up and while there were donations to Komen as well they were matched by emails saying, "I'll never donate to you again."

Meanwhile their credibility sank further and further as their story changed (when it became obvious that it wasn't about Planned Parenthood being "under investigation", they said it was because Planned Parenthood clients had to go elsewhere to get the mammograms PP obtained for them), and as more people realized that their Senior Vice President for Public Policy Karen Handel, was fresh from a stint as one of Sarah Palin's Mama Grizzlies, running for governor of Georgia on an anti-immigrant, anti-abortion, anti-gay platform (though she seems to have had something of a pro-gay past), and that they had known full well that the Planned Parenthood decision would be controversial—that's why they had hired George W. Bush's old press secretary Ari Fleischer to help them deal with it.

So by the time the apology finally came out, it was no longer capable of meaning what it was meant to mean; it was turning into a total, abject capitulation to an enraged public. And by the same token the analysis that said they were only pretending to change positions was irrelevant, except—well, except that it was part of the force that was inflicting this monumental defeat. Which is where your observer's paradox comes in: that focus on Komen's position in spacetime without regard to the velocity with which it was moving helped to speed it up and bend its trajectory down, down, down!

But we couldn't see it happening ourselves. And so the story it creates in our minds remains the story of our rage and disappointment—we're missing the narrative of victory, of the online mobilized forces of virtue and kindness! Which is unfair, not to Komen, but to ourselves, dear emoprogs.

What's important about this is that it happens quite a lot, and especially notably when our Barack Obama and/or the Democrats in Congress are negotiating with Republicans over some large package of legislation: we'll be watching Obama cave, cave, cave and growing ever more dispirited, until when the legislative language comes out at last we greet it with howls of despair—Betrayed! Betrayed again!

And then overnight something funny happens—as the Republicans read the legislation, they find their victory dissipating before their eyes: cuts in taxes suddenly seem more progressive than they were led to believe, or cuts in programs turn out to be cuts to increases they didn't realize they had agreed to, and the whole thing just doesn't look quite "conservative" in the cold light of day, as in the case of last April's budget deal, as blogged by Stephen Stromberg in the Post:

One could smell the concern from Boehner's office all day on Thursday; his staff sent out press release after press release defending the deal's numbers, and they called an unplanned meeting to explain the intricacies of federal budgeting to the GOP caucus. Most Republicans came around.

But, given that some GOP lawmakers may still feel misled, they might be angrier when Boehner wants to raise the federal debt ceiling in a few weeks. The base might not be all that excited, either. Boehner and the Democrats waged near total war over cutting a pittance from the 2011 budget — and, it turns out, even those cuts came with a confusing asterisk.

It's a pretty narrow victory Obama squeezes out of them time after time (considerably helped out not only by the skills of Pelosi and Reid but also the incompetence of Boehner and Mitchell), but it's a victory all the same, and that's actually a lot under the circumstances. We should really try to acknowledge it, acknowledge our own role in it, and remember that that story is always developing....

And as we try to push Obama to the left, try to do it, maybe, with a friendly smile?

 Peter Tosh, with a lyrical assist from Dorothy Fields and 1936.

Update
I forgot to mention what I learned from Emptywheel about SGK in the post linked above: We've been hearing that they mysteriously wouldn't go along with the rest of the cancer world when it developed that there should be fewer, not more women taking breast exams less, not more frequently; and when the very expensive drug Avastin turned out not to work very well and other organizations wanted to eliminate it. What Wheeler adds from her own experience as a cancer patient is that they also encourage individual patients to have more treatments, and more expensive treatments, than they need, hawk particular brands, and in general sound like they are advocating for industry rather than people. In short a typical charity of the Gilded Age, watching out for class interests a little ahead of their charitable aims.