Cokie’s Law über alles Longtime readers recall Cokie’s Law. Digby coined the term in 2008 for how skillfully the right wing tosses smears into the air to be carried by the media like the wind. Smears, lies, and disinformation become a “legitimate” subject of mainstream reporting not because they are true or meaningful but because they are “out there.” The law is named for the late NPR/ABC reporter Cokie Roberts: “At this point,” said Roberts, “it doesn’t much matter whether she said it or not because it’s become part of the culture. I was at the beauty parlor yesterday and this was all anyone was talking about.” Thus right-wing smears, lies, and disinformation become, in campaign parlance, “earned media.” James Fallows on Saturday did not reference Digby’s law, but essentially conceded that “the death-cloud of misinformation, ignorance, lies, myths, fears, stereotypes” has come to represent, like the shadows in Plato’s cave, an “artificial reality playing out in the minds of citizens.” Fallows: —It’s not a new problem in American democracy. Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, published when Warren Harding was in the White House, was about people’s inevitable reliance on “pictures in our head,” often stereotypes or half-truths, to judge events they had not witnessed themselves. Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, about the convergence of information and entertainment (with entertainment coming out on top), was published nearly 40 years ago but grows ever more prophetic-seeming. —It’s not even a new insight into this election. In the past week, while traveling, I’ve seen excellent…