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Getting political journalism to focus on fact checking is appealing in principle. It is disappointing – even futile – in practice.

You can understand why people find fact checking seductive. Our politicians pander to prejudices, fudge policy details, vilify their opponents, and exaggerate their own virtues for votes.

But as good democrats we put the winners of this squalid electoral contest in charge of the levers of government. So it would be nice to know which politician lies least.

And there’s clearly frustration with journalism as it is practiced today: why not make its new duty to judge political untruths?

Fact checking was a feature of the 2012 Presidential campaign. One frustrated Mitt Romney advisor said he wouldn’t “let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers”.

But, in a column over the weekend, Australia’s Laurie Oakes unintentionally demonstrated how faddish and illusory the fact checking idea really is.

Writing that he expected fact checking to become a central part of Australian journalism, Oakes identified two recent falsehoods: Julia Gillard’s “there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead”, and Tony Abbott’s claims about the future economic cost of that tax.

If only it were so clear.

Did Julia Gillard lie about the carbon tax on 16 August 2010? Well, yes. And no.

She probably thought she wouldn’t introduce a “carbon tax” in the next term of government. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t introduce an emissions trading scheme. And what we call a carbon tax in 2012 is actually the latter with an initial fixed price.

Yet free market economists have long insisted that, contrary to popular wisdom, there’s not a big conceptual difference between a tax and a trading scheme. They both price carbon. A tax could be described as a “market mechanism” too.

The point is these are terms of art, not science.

The idea that a journalist – or scientist, or economist, or philosopher – would be able to provide anything near a definitive statement of whether Julia Gillard was being factually accurate is nonsense.

Anyway, how on earth could the press gallery fact check a prediction? Tony Abbott’s claims about the carbon tax’s economic impact are almost entirely rhetorical. Yes, he understates how much of recent electricity price rises have been due to the changes in the energy industry – an understatement which is regularly pointed out in parliament and the press. But as to the carbon tax’s real cost?

Models of future economic costs merely reflect the assumptions they’re built upon. We don’t know how much a policy hurts until long afterwards. Even then it’s still quite hard to tell. Fact checking of such predictions is just arguing the toss.

This problem is clearly illustrated in the latest piece on The Washington Post’s Fact Checkerblog. Run by a veteran correspondent, Glenn Kessler, Fact Checker is apparently the gold standard in the field.

The story goes like this. Republicans have been citing an Ernst & Young study saying tax increases on the rich would “destroy nearly 700,000 jobs”.

Kessler notes that a) the jobs are lost over a decade or more, b) 700,000 jobs is only a tiny fraction of total employment, c) the study ignores the benefits of reducing the deficit, and d) there’s a different study that says otherwise.

For their “misleading” analysis, he awarded the Republicans three out of four Pinocchios.

But who is being misleading here? The Republicans aren’t wrong. At best they are guilty of an ungenerous presentation of the evidence. The Ernst & Young study says 700,000 jobs will be lost – just not immediately. You can’t refute rhetorical excess.

What Kessler isn’t doing isn’t fact checking, really. It’s just more argument. Which is fine, but let’s not pretend that more argument is a journalism revolution. And it’s definitely not new.
Even apparently clear falsehoods – for instance, Mitt Romney’s ad saying Barack Obama “sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China” – are more subtle than they’ve been presented. In a confusingly worded Bloomberg article, Chrysler was reported to be considering exactly that.

Kessler gave Romney four Pinnochios for his Chrysler ad, but his actual conclusion was more modest.

The ad was “a series of statements that individually might be factually defensible, but the overall impression is misleading”.

In the hands of partisans this has become a classic Romney ‘lie’.

Certainly, Romney had confused the Chrysler issue in an earlier speech in Ohio. But senior politicians are usually very clever with their words. They don’t lie. They dissemble.
Kessler to his credit is relatively even-handed. He goes after both left and right.

Such non-discrimination is unusual. Fact checking is more common as a political attack than journalistic technique. Hacks of all sides push their own fact checkers. It’s just another weapon in the partisan’s armoury. Smugly purporting to be on the side of ‘reality’ is a fashionable way to hit your opponent.

There’s a more critical problem with the fact checking fad. Political journalism is a business of generalists not experts. The best reporters know a little about a lot, not a lot about a little.

That, indeed, is why the ‘he-said, she-said’ model of journalism was developed. He-said, she-said has a bad reputation these days – it is often used unthinkingly – but it exists for a reason. It reflects a modesty that generalists cannot rule definitively on all issues. Sometimes you need to call a specialist. If something is controversial, you may need to call two.

Political rhetoric is rarely true or false. When an issue is simple, politicians will fudge it. When an issue is complicated, it requires experts to unpack.

Either way, self-conscious and self-satisfied ‘fact checking’ is no magic bullet.

The Government’s Asian century white paper finally reveals the conceptual poverty of the Asian Century idea.

Certainly, Asia will continue to grow prosperous and come to dominate the global economy.

But Ken Henry’s white paper demonstrates that the concept of an “Asian century” offers almost nothing to guide Australian public policy in 2012.

Don’t believe the hype. The Asian century is not the stuff of wonky earnestness. It is a political story.

A simple reorganisation greatly diminishes the whole project. We can group the proposals – sorry, “pathways”, a horrible word that the Government uses to conflate policies with goals – of the white paper into two categories.

The first category is things that are true no matter which continent dominates the next 100 years. The white paper wants Australia to be one of the top ten richest countries by 2025. Fair enough. But this holds regardless of whether there will be an Asian century, or an American century, or a New Zealand century. Most of the white paper is like this.

One sentence reads: “A world-class school system is essential to Australia’s success in the Asian century.” What do the last four words contribute? The government will create “a long-term national infrastructure strategy”. It will establish a Tax Studies Institute. There will be a National Plan for School Improvement. We ought to expand our trade with the rest of the world. The Asian century conceit adds nothing to these ideas.

The white paper even plugs Closing the Gap. Ending Indigenous disadvantage is extremely important, but what on earth does it have to do with Asia?

In the second category are proposals specifically designed to deal with rising Asian economies. There aren’t many in this category. And they’re all pretty minor – even token.

Of these, increased Asian language teaching is the most significant. I’ve criticised this idea in the past, and Benjamin Herscovitch from the Centre of Independent Studies has done so recently at length. Yet even if more Asian language teaching was necessary, it’s an oddly trivial hook for this ambitious white paper. Is offering Chinese at more schools really the pivot on which our nation will turn?

The quality of proposals declines sharply from there. The white paper says that one-third of board members of Australia’s top companies should have deep knowledge of Asia. This is a pretty gimmicky idea. Anyway, why is intellectual composition of the boards of private firms any business of the Commonwealth government?

One welcome proposal is to boost the numbers of tourism and working visas from Asia (you could ask: why not boost visas from everywhere?). Yet in the mid-year budget just last week the government significantly raised the cost of visas for foreign workers.

Asian century boosters have always struggled to link their statement of the obvious (Asia is growing) to concrete proposals. This white paper is most ambitious attempt yet. If Ken Henry can’t make it work, nobody can. But it fails.

Apart from continuing to strive to be productive and educated and rich – good things whether our neighbours are rising or declining – it’s not obvious that Australia needs to do anything special about the rise of Asia.

Indeed, that may be the point.

The white paper mostly just reiterates existing Gillard government policies. Far from jolting us out of our complacency, the paper encourages it … well, as long as we stick with Labor and its NBN and its schools plan and its carbon tax.

The Asian century paper is a political document. It’s a theme for the Government now that most of the Rudd-era ambitions have been squared away; a fresh “Labor vision” for the party of Keating and Whitlam. It doesn’t have to be particularly coherent or convincing. It just has to be plausible.

And, to be fair, it is. The white paper exudes seriousness. It is ridiculously Big Picture. The Asian century is intellectually flattering: everybody feels smarter when they talk about it. In the last 48 hours almost every special interest in the country has claimed their pet issues are the key to surviving the new Eastern paradigm.

Given that the Asian century is above all a political idea, it seems significant that the Opposition has been caught off-foot. First the Coalition welcomed it, said it lacked detail, then said it lacked funding. By Monday Tony Abbott had described it as “laughable, frankly”. Then he moved on to Peter Slipper.

This is probably not wise.

The Asian century looks like Julia Gillard’s election strategy. It’s a lot better than Moving Forward. But like so many political visions, it’s seems more profound than it is. We should not confuse narrative for substance.

Fifty years ago, on the morning of October 16, 1962, the CIA delivered to John F Kennedy aerial reconnaissance photos revealing Soviet missile sites in Cuba.

Shortly after the CIA briefing, Kennedy showed the photos to his advisor Kenneth O’Donnell.

The president was alarmed. “You’d better believe it,” he told O’Donnell, coming to terms with the missiles’ significance. “We’ve just elected Capehart in Indiana and Ken Keating will probably be the next president of the United States”.

The Cuban Missile Crisis has become an icon of 20th century history: the closest the Cold War came to a hot war, two great superpowers playing a game of brinkmanship that could have slipped into Armageddon.

But it was more a domestic crisis than a foreign policy crisis. Fear of the November 1962 midterm elections loomed larger than fear of nuclear war.

There’s a lot of mythology about those 13 days in October. It didn’t take long for the tale of an heroic president pulling the world back from the precipice to take root. But that mythology massively overstates the severity of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and, as a consequence, the likelihood of apocalyptic nuclear war at any time in the 20th century.

Put simply, the world never came to “the brink”.

In his excellent 2010 book, Atomic Obsessions, the political scientist John Mueller demonstrates neither Kennedy nor Nikita Khrushchev had any intention of escalating to nuclear hostilities.
The Soviet premier, for all his bluster, was scarred by his experience of World War II. One of the cables he sent Kennedy wrote of his fear of the “death and destruction” of total war.

Explaining himself later, Khrushchev said “I’m not a Czarist officer who has to kill himself if I fart at a masked ball. It’s better to back down than to go to war.”

It’s now clear Khrushchev placed the missiles in Cuba to deter an American invasion – that is, not in an offensive capacity. But even then, some historians have suggested there was agreement in the Soviet leadership to withdraw the weapons if the US responded with military force.

The USSR never even went on a general alert.

The Americans were even less eager for conflict. Put aside the warmongering General Curtis LeMay, who was nowhere near the decision-making team and exasperated Kennedy. David Welch and James Blight, two historians who have worked closest with the tapes of White House meetings, say the odds the Americans would have escalated hostilities were “next to zero”.

And the gambit that ended the crisis – Kennedy’s secret promise to Khrushchev that he would remove American missiles from Turkey – wasn’t much of a gambit at all. The tapes reveal the president vowing “I don’t want to go to war anyhow, but I am certainly not going to war over worthless missiles in Turkey”.

Keeping the deal secret was just good domestic politics.

Of course, neither side knew of the other’s true position. But half a dozen times during October each side made missteps which, had the world been truly on the brink, would have pushed them off. A U-2 was shot down trying to get a closer look at the missile sites. Neither superpower budged. Another U-2 strayed into Russian territory and was chased out by Soviet fighters. Neither superpower budged.

Nobody wanted war. And as Henry Kissinger once said, “despite popular myths, large military units do not fight by accident.”

So what was the crisis in the Cuban Missile Crisis?

As usual, domestic politics drove foreign policy.

Kennedy had beaten Richard Nixon in 1960 by outflanking him as a hawk – charging that the Republicans had no plan to topple Fidel Castro and stoking fears of Soviet nuclear superiority.

But after the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle – where US backed Cuban exiles were routed in an invasion attempt – Cuba suddenly became Kennedy’s political problem. Cuba looked like it was going to be a big issue in November, and maybe even in the 1964 presidential race.

Two Republican senators in particular attacked him furiously over Cuba: Ken Keating, a New Yorker with White House ambitions, and Homer Capehart, from Indiana.

These attacks had hurt. Kennedy wanted to reassert his hawkish credentials. The most fateful event of the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred, not in October, but in a press conference a month earlier. On September 13 Kennedy declared bombastically that “if Cuba should possess a capacity to carry out offensive action against the United States … the United States would act.”

Kennedy didn’t know missiles were already on their way. This September ultimatum was for a domestic audience – to counter Republican claims he was soft on communism – but it seriously constrained his choices in October. He’d promised action.

Throughout the crisis, Kennedy regretted his September chest-beating: “I should have said that we don’t care”. But it was too late. He’d ruled diplomacy out. Blockading Cuba was the least warlike thing the administration could think of.

Kennedy famously declared on television that the missiles were an explicit threat to American security.

Privately however the administration thought different. “It is generally agreed,” said Kennedy’s advisor Ted Sorensen on October 17, “that these missiles, even when fully operational, do not significantly alter the balance of power – that is, they do not significantly increase the potential mega-tonnage capable of being unleashed on American soil.”

Defense secretary Robert McNamara was more direct. “I don’t think there is a military problem here.”

The successful resolution of the crisis on October 28 blunted the Republican attacks. The midterm election was only a week away. The Democrats picked up four seats in the Senate, one of which was Homer Capehart’s.

October 1962 has become central to the JFK mystique. It was quickly integrated into the legend of Camelot.

Not only that, but the episode defined how we think of nuclear politics; as if we are, at all times, minutes away from global war.

But if the Cuban Missile Crisis is the closest the world has ever come to a nuclear exchange, then we’ve never come very close at all.

The death of Steve Jobs has offered us a symbol which is surprisingly rare: the capitalist as a hero.

The tributes to the Apple co-founder have praised his vision, entrepreneurial drive, single-mindedness, how he defied convention, and developed a business model centred on innovation.

These attributes are not unique to Jobs. He is an icon because of our relationship to the products he developed. And Apple made a point of showcasing Jobs – he launched their new products personally.

But his death reveals a peculiar cultural blindness. We don’t often celebrate the achievements of capitalist entrepreneurs, in life or in death. Military leaders, political figures, religious and royal icons, yes, but not capitalists.

August this year saw the death of Keith Tantlinger, the American inventor and entrepreneur who, with his business partner Malcom McLean, developed, marketed and sold the modern shipping container beginning in the 1950s.

The standardised container sounds simple, but it was revolutionary.

Before the container, goods would be stuffed, manually and arbitrarily, into the irregular shaped holds of ships. This incurred enormous labour costs, theft and accidental losses. Armies of unionised longshoremen would load a ship by hand, unload it by hand, load the cargo onto trains and trucks by hand, and helped themselves to samples. The expense of all of this had to be factored into the price of consumer goods.

McLean and Tantlinger had to face down unions protecting their members from the threat of a standardised, secure, labour-saving container, and the automation those containers made possible. They had to face down regulators protecting the trucking industry from competition. Ports unsuited to the new containers confronted closure. Gone are the old ports of New York. The great ports of the world are now in Le Havre, Busan, Felixstowe and Tanjung Pelepas.

This largely unheralded story is told in a 2006 book The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger by Marc Levinson. It is not much exaggeration to say that we owe a great deal of the last half-century of globalisation to their big metal box. Thanks to the container, the cost of transporting goods is near zero. Markets which were local are now global. Manufacturing networks are spread across hemispheres.

It is that box which allows Apple to produce the iPhone and iPad at lowest cost in Shenzhen and Brazil. And that box which facilitates the production of the iPad’s competitors.

Not to diminish Steve Jobs, but there is no person on earth who hasn’t benefited from the entrepreneurial drive of Tantlinger and McLean.

Yet when these two died, they met with a tiny fraction of the acclaim we’ve seen for the Apple boss. No prime minister or president was asked to reflect on their achievements. No newspaper rejigged its cover for the inventors of the shipping container.

The news aggregator Factiva records 23,133 separate stories on Steve Jobs in the first four days after his death on Wednesday. Keith Tantlinger only received 26 stories in the entire month after his death. When Malcom McLean died in 2001, he was mentioned 41 times.

It’s not a competition. But it is a revealing comparison. Jobs is exceptional in the public eye not simply because he was an exceptional capitalist – although he undoubtedly was – but because his products are in the front of our mind.

We know we’re using an iPad; the touch, design and functionality is clear. We don’t know that the only reason we can is because someone else invented and constructed and marketed and sold a container to bring it to us. The achievements of McLean and Tantlinger are entirely in the background. Virtually every single mass-produced item in the world finds itself in one of their boxes at some stage during the manufacturing and distribution process.

Jobs has breached the unwritten rule that only statesmen, or intellectuals, or others who spurn profit can be true heroes. Even though it is capitalists more than anyone else who have built the world.

Indeed, the idea of a hero entrepreneur is almost entirely absent in popular culture.

Amazon.com lists 33,000 biographies of political, military, and royal figures – nearly 50,000 if you include religious leaders. It lists only 3,000 biographies of business leaders.

Extraordinarily few films depict business people in a positive light. Two biopics stand out: Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator is one of the rare pro-capitalist genre, as is the largely forgotten Tucker: The Man and His Dream, the Francis Ford Coppola film based on the automobile innovator Preston Tucker. They offer portraits of individuals who were both heroic and tragic. Howard Hughes and Preston Tucker were innovative risk-takers whose success rested on filling the demands of their consumers.

And in both of these films, the dramatic obstacle they have to surmount is not just commercial but political. Competitors allied with governments tried repeatedly to frustrate both Hughes and Tucker by raising the regulatory barriers to innovative entrants. The same happened with McLean and Tantlinger. Any truly great innovation necessarily upsets the interests of the status quo.

Steve Jobs’ achievements were substantial. Anybody who brings a product to market that so many consumers want is worth celebrating. But there are many other stories of capitalists and entrepreneurs who have shaped our social and economic lives. In light of the huge reaction to Jobs death, we might think about broadening our search for heroic icons to the profit-making world.