Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin Book

Everyone in the world knows what Bill Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky, or the sordid facts about the O.J. Simpson case. Ask them about the in and outs of the British Royal Family, or what happened to Brad and Jennifer and you'll find they're pretty clued in. These facts, or events, or factoids, mysteriously capture the world's attention and creates a media frenzy.
But there's a flip side to this. Fog Facts — the important things that nobody seems able to focus on anymore than they can focus on a single droplet in the mist. They are known, but not known; the sort of things that journalists and political junkies know, but somehow the world does not. Such as President Bush's war record (he doesn't have one), or how Dick Cheney became that rich. Who really won the election in Florida 2000 and how many people have perished since the invasion of Iraq.
Beinhart's book is a dazzling and unsettling exploration of how this has come to pass, about "The Soft Machine," a mysterious mechanism that manufactures consent in a so-called democratic society and how ordinary citizens can fight back.

Publishers Weekly

Beinhart scored satirical points last fall with his novel The Librarian, about an archivist whose talent for digging up damaging truths frightens a vast right-wing conspiracy with more than a passing resemblance to the current administration. The novel introduced the concept of the "fog fact": published information that remains unnoticed by the public. This slim volume promises to gather various fog facts about George W. Bush's presidency, but offers much more opinion than fact-specifically, amazement that reporting on subjects like the allegations that Bush pulled strings to avoid going to Vietnam or committed insider trading while his father was president didn't cost him either the 2000 or 2004 election. Beinhart sees the media's failure to call more prominent attention to political lies as the source of many Americans' "delusional" worldview, which he says led to war in Iraq. But his explanation of the "Soft Machine"-the media-industrial complex he says distorts our perception of reality and is the "enforcement arm of capitalism"-asserts rather than explains. Beinhart's freely associative tract could have used a more nuanced argument and suffers from digressions, like a lengthy exegesis on Horatio Alger's pedophilia, that, however entertaining, stick out awkwardly in a discussion of Dick Cheney's finances. Agent, Bonnie Nadel. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.