Lost in Translation: A Game of Telephone

Remember that old game we used to play in grade school—”Telephone”? The teacher lines the students up and whispers a sentence into the ear of the first one who whispers it to the next and so on, until the sentence has passed from lips to ear down a line of school kids and come out on the other end in a significantly different form than it began.

“All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again” morphs to “All the king’s horses ate all the king’s hens and couldn’t get Humphrey together with Ben.”

Hilarity ensues, because in grade school, this was funny and fun. In the adult realm of communication, not so much of either. 

It seems to happen in politics a lot, despite the existence of video and audio recordings that can be verified as real. In the Time Before AI, I vividly recall watching a legislator during a television interview, deny repeatedly that she had said A Thing. She had said it on an earlier episode of the same news show with the same host, so he immediately pulled up the “receipts”. She watched herself say A Thing, then smiled and repeated, “I never said that.”

The poor interviewer was gobsmacked. “But I just showed what you said,” he reminded her, “in context with the question I asked.” Smile intact, she repeated, “I never said that.”

My predilection for backtracking stories I read to the earliest source available has netted a host of examples of political telephone (aka message creep). It’s also gotten me blocked or unfriended on Facebook, but hey, that’s life, right?

This particular game of Telephone happened right out in the open over a relatively short period of time (roughly two weeks). I’m not going to time stamp the example, which I hope might remove some of the partisan sentiment from the progression. I’ve dropped any names for the same reason.

It began with a question/statement in the National Review: “Did you know the (then current) administration’s position has been defeated in at least 13 cases before the Supreme Court since January that were unanimous decisions?”  

Next, from a congressman on a network news broadcast, who said that the Supreme Court had ruled unanimously on 13 occasions “that the president has exceeded his constitutional authority.” 

From a former congressman, who noted that the Supreme Court issued 13 unanimous decisions that said “the president or the administration exceeded its constitutional authority.” 

From a party’s communications director on national television: “… 13 times, the Supreme Court, unanimously, 9-0, including all of the president’s … picks, have struck down the president’s executive orders.” 

Did you catch what happened?

The message shifts from saying that the court ruled against administration-held positions in 13 cases (which is true), to saying that it struck down 13 executive orders (which is not true). Between the first quote (which is accurate, and is about positions endorsed by the administration of the time) the message first morphs to be about the POTUS himself, the cases become 13 occasions, and the subject shifts from positions he held to his constitutional authority. By the third iteration, the 13 decisions were 13 direct rulings that the president had exceeded his constitutional authority. 

Now, depending on which of these statements someone read or heard, they’d get a different idea of what had happened. In fact, the only case in which the court challenged the constitutional authority of the White House was one dealing with interim appointments made while Congress was in recess. At issue was that Congress and the White House were in conflict over what “in recess” meant.  The court decided that Congress, not the White House, got to decide what “in recess” meant.

These distinctions are important because they color the way we view issues, the people involved, and each other. They color the way we express ourselves about them. Too often, even in every day conversation, we paraphrase what we’ve heard, unwary of the fact that our source may have been paraphrasing what they heard, and we may both be wrong.

I see this sort of message creep as a reminder that when we ingest information, whether in print or on media, it’s important to pay attention … and maybe do a little backtracking.