TRUTH AND CERTAINTY IN THE NEWS MEDIA

You have a decision to make. Let’s suppose that the Congress is deciding whether to pull out of the war in Iraq. Your Senator must cast the deciding vote and asks for your opinion. Many lives hang in the balance. For information in making your decision, you have full access to the news media, but that is all. Can you be sure of your position? Almost certainly, the answer is no.

Consider the difficulties. Take a hypothetical series of recent events in Iraq. Citizens A and B, two equally intelligent, well educated consumers of the news, monitor these events on television, the newspapers and radio. Citizen A comes to the conclusion that they represent a fiasco, illustrating everything that is wrong with America’s foreign policy and demonstrating why we are hated around the world. Citizen B, however, believes they represent a triumph of American foreign policy, demonstrating why we are respected and admired around the world.

With a news media supposedly dedicated to conveying objective truth, how can these same events produce such diametrically opposed views in two people earnestly trying to understand what happened? The short answer is that the world is complex, communication is difficult, and A and B are merely human. Any attempt to provide a more useful answer requires elaboration.

A partial explanation for the disparity in the views of A and B is that they rely on completely different sources for their news. Citizen A watches ABC, CBS or NBC; reads the New York Times and the Baltimore Sun; and listens to National Public Radio.[1] Citizen B, on the other hand, watches Fox News, reads the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Times, and listens to talk radio.[2] But, of course, you say. A and B are bound to disagree. Each is getting only one side of the story. A is relying on all liberal sources and B is relying on all conservative sources. As a result, neither is truly well informed. Obviously, one must examine both sides, carefully evaluate the arguments, and thereby attempt to determine the truth.

Citizens A and B are not stupid. They know they should look at all sides of an issue. But they have great difficulty doing so.[3] The reason A and B don’t examine the other side is because they find it distasteful and believe it to be futile. This is understandable, since, if you subscribe to the view of only one side, after awhile you start to believe it. Those who subscribe to the opposite view are somehow seen as uninformed, naïve, bigoted, disingenuous, intellectually dishonest, stupid and, and… – you get the point. These attitudes tend to make dispassionate analysis and reasoned discourse somewhat more difficult.

Another obstacle to Truth and Certainty is the extent to which everyone’s reality is subjective. Each of us has a unique perspective on the world. What seems to happen, according to various studies, is that once a person constructs a worldview that helps him or her make some sense out of life, the person unconsciously filters all future events through that lens.[4] Liberals interpret all events in the light most favorable to their worldview and conservatives do the same. Writ large, this helps explain why liberals and conservatives have such difficulty trusting, or even understanding, each other on the issues.

Let’s suppose we could get past all that. Citizens A and B decide to put aside their feelings, get all the facts, and analyze them thoroughly in order to obtain the truth. They try to do this, scouring each other’s news sources in addition to their own. This merely makes them confused. They find, for example, that you can read a news report of an event in both The New York Times and The Washington Times and wonder if you are even reading about the same event. In their editorials, similarly, both papers make plausible arguments but reach polar opposite conclusions. Obviously, they can’t both be right, nor is either likely to be entirely wrong. To their consternation, A and B realize that there are significant obstacles on the road to Truth and Certainty.

Inherent Limitations on Discovering the Truth

Perhaps the first problem is the difficulty of simply getting all the facts in any situation and getting them right. A news reporter is like one of the proverbial three blind men trying to describe an elephant. One touches the trunk and believes it a tree. One touches the side and thinks it a wall. The third touches the tail and thinks it a vine.[5] Each eyewitness at any scene, in fact, will experience a slightly different event. Each observer’s ability to view the entire scene, angle of sight, knowledge of relevant history, native intelligence and personal bias will be unique as well as limited. Any report of an event will therefore necessarily be subjective and incomplete.

Then you have to factor in the human limitations. In a war zone like Iraq, the reporter’s information is probably more limited than usual. The reporter likely doesn’t speak the language and must rely on an interpreter, who may or may not be accurate or reliable. The residents being interviewed may be afraid to talk freely or they may be subversives who are feeding disinformation. The reporter can’t get beyond this because he or she probably lacks a thorough knowledge of the local culture, terrain or history and can’t move freely about the country to obtain all necessary information. He or she must then take the resulting wholly incomplete perception of events and try to recreate it in words. Even if this step produces a fairly accurate rendition of the event, the quality of the overall communication ultimately depends on the clarity of the interpretive lens used by the recipient. Inevitably, no two people will receive precisely the same impression of the event. When you think about it, it is rather miraculous that we communicate as well as we do.

As you can imagine, there may in fact be little similarity between a news report and the reality. Anyone who has ever read a newspaper account of an event he or she has personally witnessed is invariably appalled by the extent of the inaccuracy in the subsequent reporting. Why, then, should we expect other news reports to be any more accurate? More likely, they are equally inaccurate. This should say something about the overall accuracy of the news.[6]

Distortions in the News Process

Even if we could start out with a perfectly accurate news report, there is a host of other reasons why the news consumer does not, and cannot, get a completely accurate picture. One of the first obstacles to truth in the news is bias. There are two types of bias, conscious and unconscious. Conscious bias can be further divided into excusable bias and inexcusable bias. One type of conscious bias is overt, intentional and excusable because market driven. This is the editorial slant consciously adopted by a newspaper or other news source. If there is only one paper in town, it will tend to be centrist in order to draw the largest readership. If there are two papers, however, one will deliberately choose to take a more liberal slant and the other will choose to be more conservative in order to maximize their respective customer bases. This is perfectly appropriate, as it provides for a fuller assessment of differing points of view.

Then there is inexcusable conscious bias. A newspaper’s slant is supposed to be confined to its editorial pages. The difficulty comes when it spills over to the news reporting. As any journalism student knows, there are many ways to express conscious bias. One of the most powerful techniques is simply the placement of new articles. A story that fits the bias of the editors will be prominently displayed in color on page one, while a story that does not will be buried on page five with a smaller black and white picture, if any.[7] Other techniques involve selection of what stories to print at all, the choice of reporter, the juxtaposition with other stories, and so on. This type of bias is systemic and widespread - but not excusable.

A more extreme form of conscious distortion is outright reporter falsification. This was seen in the sad saga of Jayson Blair, a young New York Times reporter who published over fifty stories, on important topics like that of the Beltway sniper, that were either partially or completed fabricated. When the deception was discovered, the heads of two senior editors rolled, as they should have, because there was simply no excuse for a lapse of this magnitude and duration. In the same year, similar incidents occurred at USA Today and at several other papers. One hopes that these were aberrations, from which the press has emerged a great deal wiser.[8]

The more pervasive, and insidious, form of media bias is unconscious. Bernard Goldberg described this phenomenon in his book entitled Bias, subtitled “A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distorts the News.” Goldberg noted that his former boss at CBS, Dan Rather, honestly thought he was an unbiased reporter because he usually found his position on issues to be somewhere between the left and right of those around him. The fallacy of Rather’s belief was illustrated by Goldberg’s example of Pauline Kael, the New Yorker movie critic who stated, after Richard Nixon won 49 out of 50 states, that she didn’t understand how Nixon had won because she didn’t know a single person who had voted for him.[9] Goldberg’s explanation is that Rather, like Kael, lives in a liberal bubble consisting of New York, Washington and the Left Coast. Everywhere else is written off as flyover country with no intelligent life, and it can therefore safely be ignored. What the members of this liberal elite fail to realize, according to Goldberg, is that they are all on the left side of the spectrum and the conservative views they see as far right extremism actually represent the other half of the spectrum.

Since Goldberg’s expose and numerous others, it has become common knowledge that the mainstream media, of which Kael and Rather are representative, is overwhelmingly liberal.[10] Indeed, polls have shown that upwards of 90 percent of the mainstream media television and print reporters voted for Clinton and Kerry in the last two elections. Indeed, they constituted a virtual cheering section for their candidates.[11]

Technology –Eventual Solution or Part of the Problem ?

It is fair to ask whether advances in technology will eventually eliminate or compound these impediments to communication. We can now call up answers almost instantaneously with Google, Wikipedia and many other electronic sources. While we have near instantaneous access to information with the Internet, its sheer volume is overwhelming. As many have observed, it is like trying to drink out of a fire hose. There is more information than we can possibly absorb.[12]

Although much more information is now readily available, the problem is knowing whether it is accurate. Historically, reputable news organizations would not publish anything without verification by at least two sources. Unverified reports are now immediately thrown out on the Internet, allowing the marketplace to correct for accuracy later, if at all.[13]

The news cycle is also shortening.[14] The news streams at us all day long on cable TV and on the Internet. This causes the traditional media to spit out news reports as fast as possible in order to keep up. More and more, there is less and less time for thorough investigative reporting. Accuracy inevitably suffers.

Nevertheless, some believe that technology may be the key to the salvation of the news media as a whole.[15] A development holding immense promise is the rise of the blogs. Anyone can now publish his or her thoughts online and disseminate them to the world. The traditional media initially dismissed this as “mere typing,” in that it entirely lacks the usual journalistic safeguards. Now, however, even The New York Times uses blogs, but with the caveat that its readers must remember the lack of those safeguards when evaluating the content. The potential power of blogs is immense, for their ability to provide near instantaneous dissemination of huge volumes of information to an unlimited audience; for their power to aggregate information through a multitude of hyperlinks to other publications, research sources and related subjects; and to correct falsehoods.[16]

What we need is a way to compile, verify and analyze all this news information in a systematic way. An encouraging phenomenon in this regard is the combination of talk radio with the Internet and blogs. A knowledgeable and articulate radio commentator, with high level guests from all arenas, a crack research team, and a sophisticated nationwide audience, all connected through radio and the Internet, can provide a powerful mechanism for making sense out of apparent chaos.[17]

The Wisdom of Uncertainty

The inevitable conclusion from all this is that news reports are inherently suspect and that absolute Truth and Certainty are almost nowhere to be found. The more information we have, the more we realize that it is incomplete. The more we learn, the more ignorant we realize we are. Our civilization is moving toward a realization of less certainty in life, not more.[18] A healthy skepticism, coupled with great humility, is therefore in order. We should be wary of cocksure opinions when making decisions, and the more so when the consequences are great.

Proceeding with that sense of humility, we must somehow process the information necessary to make wise decisions affecting our lives. The risk is that our awareness of just how much we should know before making decisions, and how little of it we actually do know, will lead to paralysis of analysis. But affairs of state, as well as the decisions of daily life, cannot wait. The necessary information will to some extent always be incomplete, biased or wrong, but leadership is the art of making decisions with inadequate information. So, too, in forming our personal opinions. We are entitled to hold and act upon strongly held opinions. It is essential, however, that those opinions be as well informed as possible.

So what does all of this say about our ability to form accurate opinions about important issues? As a result of the information revolution, we as citizens now have much more information with which to develop informed opinions. This presents both an opportunity and a danger. With the Internet, the barriers to information have come down, so now we can obtain the information necessary to form opinions on our own, whereas in the past we were relegated to accepting the supposedly informed opinion of others. The danger comes from the fact that, while the barriers to information may be down, the constraints on information dissemination are also down. Since anyone can now publish information and opinions on the Internet, it is as if we are all playing tennis with the net down.

Many have observed that our society lately seems to have become more polarized. Indeed it is polarized, but probably no more so than in past eras. With greater access to information, we are simply more aware of the wide divergence of views. Our increased knowledge of relevant information makes us more aware of the complexity of the issues and more aware of whether someone expressing an opinion has taken all the necessary information into account. We can thus better evaluate the opinions expressed by politicians and so-called experts, and thereby make more informed opinions ourselves. In doing so, however, we must be acutely aware that we may be wrong.

It is also apparent that labels are becoming increasingly meaningless and that it is not particularly helpful to label someone as either "liberal" or "conservative.” We know, or should know, that matters are not quite that simple. The liberal or conservative labels merely tell us which lens is being used to analyze the issues. One’s objective reality will differ, depending on which lens is being used.

This is not to say that such labels are unimportant. Having a clear set of underlying principles with which to approach issues is essential. But those principles should reflect only that, an approach, not a belief in preconceived answers. In a world where the news cycle is shortening, where the pace of events is quickening and where the dangers are increasing, it is as if we are overdriving our headlights. As we rush collectively into the future, it is essential that our actions be based on opinions that are fully informed and carefully considered.

In the final analysis, we must realize that truth, like beauty, is in the mind of the beholder. We can be sure of very little, as certainty is a tantalizing mirage that forever recedes over the horizon, even as we approach.

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[1] As a result, she honestly believes, and confidently asserts, that Bush lied about WMDs to get us into Iraq for oil; that the elevation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court was the beginning of the end for enlightened liberal policies in this country; that global warming is to be accepted as an article of faith; and that Dick Cheney is a danger to the country. Citizen A is certain that she knows the truth about these matters. She believes she is well informed. She is not.

[2] He fervently believes that we must be in Iraq to defend our freedoms, that the Alito confirmation marked the beginning of our salvation as a country, that global warming is a fraud based on junk science being perpetrated by scientists with vested research interests, and that Dick Cheney is a serious adult plagued by pygmies. Citizen B is certain that he is right about these matters. He, too, considers himself to be well informed. He also is not.

[3] When it comes to television, A can’t stand to watch Fox News because she thinks it is simply a mouthpiece for the far right. B counters by saying that it is only because the three main networks are so slanted to the left that Fox seems far right in comparison and that Fox indeed does try to be balanced.

Concerning newspapers, A thinks The New York Times is still the ultimate arbiter of the news. She won’t read The Washington Times because she thinks that any paper owned by the Moonies can’t be for real. But she has never actually read it. Citizen B, on the other hand, can’t stand to read the New York Times or the Baltimore Sun because of their relentless liberal slant. Citizen A, however, insists that she cannot see any bias in either of those papers, a view that simply astounds B.

As for radio, Citizen A thinks Rush Limbaugh is a bigoted blowhard, but she has never listened to his show. B, however, is taken by Rush’s powerful intelligence and is convinced that, if liberals ever really listened to him, they would be startled, if not a little unnerved, at the logic and coherence of his conservative principles. A also believes that Bill O’Reilly is not really “fair and balanced.” B points out that O’Reilly’s show is not intended to be a news show but, rather, opinion journalism about the news. B, for his part, can’t listen to Daniel Schorr on NPR without wanting to spit because of Schorr’s tired, insufferable arrogance. A believes that Mr. Schorr is to be venerated as an experienced, savvy political reporter.

[4] This was illustrated perfectly on C-span radio after the 2004 presidential debates. The C-Span format alternates Democratic and Republican callers. Democratic callers invariably provided articulate and thoughtful reasons why they were absolutely sure that John Kerry clearly had won the debate while Republican callers provided similarly articulate and thoughtful reasons why they believed that George W. Bush clearly had won. The callers did not sound naïve or disingenuous. They honestly seemed to believe in their own version of reality.

[5] Even if the three men had sight, however, they would not see the same elephant. No two people see precisely the same blue sky, much less more complex events like those in Iraq.

[6] Perhaps you are thinking that our hypothetical is unrealistic, that your Senator would not be making a decision about whether or not to pull out of Iraq based just on the information available in the news media. He or she would have access to all the best top secret intelligence. Of course that would be the case, but that doesn’t guarantee that the senator would have anything near truth or certainty on which to rely. Recall that when we went into Iraq, the best intelligence available from all the major powers in the world said that Saddam Hussein had WMDs at that time. They were wrong.

Or consider the current controversy over the existence at that time of a strong connection between Saddam’s Iraq and Al Qaida. The CIA and the Pentagon have diametrically opposed views on this issue, even though it involves a factual situation which, one would assume, could readily be reduced to certainty. Apparently, not so.

Or take global warming. Michael Crichton’s State of Fear, an unusual novel with lengthy footnotes and a long bibliography, spins a good yarn at the expense of the global warming proponents but the book does not say that they are all wrong. What Crichton, a scientist himself, says is that the science is hard and the jury is still out. Reading the footnotes and the list of reports makes you realize that, before you start pontificating about the existence or absence of manmade global warning, you should probably read every one of those hundreds of sources and then (or perhaps before) get a doctorate in climatology and/or geophysics so that you can properly evaluate the reports. Of course, that may not help, since most of the scientists who disagree so vociferously do have doctorates. One wonders, however, whether they have read the reports.

[7] An example of this was seen during the intense fighting at the beginning of the Iraq war. On April 6, 2003, readers of the Sunday Baltimore Sun were greeted by a large front page color picture of Iraqi civilians standing around what the caption said was a burned out American tank, apparently destroyed by the Iraqis. This was jarring news, because it did not comport at all with the public’s understanding that the invasion had so far been a cakewalk for the U. S. troops. The reader’s confusion was then compounded by finding the same picture in the New York Times, except that it was a smaller black and white version on page five, with a caption that said it was an Iraqi tank, not an American tank. A cynic would have immediately leaped to the conclusion that the anti-administration Sun had gleefully highlighted, in color on page one, what it thought was an American setback, while the equally anti-war Times had grudgingly reported, in black and white on page five, what it thought was an Iraqi setback. The reality, however, was more prosaic. In fact, it was a malfunctioning American tank that the Americans had deliberately torched to keep it from falling into Iraqi hands. It was thus simply a case of sloppy reporting by both newspapers, not deliberate bias, but you see how the game can be played.

[8] Perhaps you think that there is less of a problem with the visual media than with the print media. After all, the camera never blinks, etc. Consider the reporter for the liberal Los Angeles Times who doctored a picture of an American soldier in Iraq who was protecting a group of Iraqi men, women and children, by turning his gun toward the people to make it appear that he was threatening them. Presumably, he thought his masters would smile on his chicanery. To their credit, and to the surprise of conservatives, they fired him. Or consider the Reuters photos from last summer’s Israeli incursion into Lebanon, which were doctored to make it appear that the Israeli bombing of cities was more extensive than it actually was. The technology is now such that we can no longer assume the accuracy of any photograph.

[9] One of John Kerry’s senior staffers said almost exactly the same thing after the latter’s 2004 defeat.

[10] Responding to growing criticism of its blatant bias, and knowing that the Blair fiasco put its very credibility at stake, the Times appointed a public editor, Daniel Okrent, who was assigned the task of monitoring the objectivity of its reporting. Amazingly, Okrent bluntly acknowledged his paper’s bias in reporting on cultural matters, admitting, for example, that the Times had engaged in a virtual “crusade” in favor of gay marriage. He insisted, however, that while the cultural reporting might be biased, the actual news reporting was not. His credibility, at least with conservatives, thereby vanished and, shortly thereafter, so did he.

The editors of some papers, like the New York Times and the Baltimore Sun, have recently admitted that they have a deliberate liberal slant but they insist that their opinions are restricted to the editorial pages. Conservatives find this ludicrous, as they see virtual editorials on the front page of the Times and the Sun practically every day. To be fair, some slight progress is apparent. The Times now has a second public editor and the Sun has also appointed one. There is also occasional evidence that the beating the mainstream media has taken for its blatant liberalism is having an effect. Previously, for example, conservative commentators were always labeled as such by the liberal media, while liberal commentators were not labeled at all. Now, occasionally, a liberal commentator is actually labeled as such.

[11] The question is why media professionals would allow themselves to do this. It may have something to do with the way journalists view their profession. They are supposed to be skeptical and critical, and understand that nothing is as simple as it seems, or at least not as simple as the politicians would have us believe. Therefore, a nuanced, multifaceted view of the world, like that supposedly held by a John Kerry, is by definition seen as more sophisticated than the clear, resolute positions of a George W. Bush. Liberals believe Bush’s views to be dangerously simplistic. They will root for a Clinton or Kerry because they believe that liberalism is synonymous with enlightenment. Conservatives, however, believe that it takes a superior intelligence to extract clear, principled positions out of chaos. They find Kerry’s views to be muddled, illogical and unprincipled. They believe liberals are forever up on the roof with a windsock, trying to decide what to believe in.

[12] In order to become truly well informed, we may feel that we must at least try to drink from the fire hose, reading and viewing virtually everything. In addition to all the news sources of both Citizens A and B, we may feel impelled, at the very least, to read, say, The Economist and National Review, watch both CNN and C-Span, read Powerline.com and Slate.com online, and listen to both Al Franken and Rush Limbaugh. Of course this task would immediately become overwhelming, even if we quit our day jobs.

[13] When Matt Drudge came out with The Drudge Report, the traditional media cried foul because he did not follow the two source rule and thereby consistently scooped them, most famously with the Lewinsky affair. He also does not publish retractions, relying instead on the marketplace to sort out the truth. Afraid of being scooped, the traditional media now keep an eye on Drudge and a hand on the presses.

[14] We have been aware since at least the publication of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock in the Sixties that the rate of change is accelerating and that it will continue to do so. Nowhere is this more evident than in the news arena.

[15] One wonders whether science and technology can provide the ultimate answer. Shouldn’t we someday be able to use computers to obtain all relevant information, sift through it for validity and thereby obtain objective certainty? There are those who believe that we can, through artificial intelligence. There is a raging debate, however, about the potential for true artificial intelligence. Those who believe that it is possible argue that the human brain is just a physical organism. As soon as we determine how it works and duplicate it, we will have artificial intelligence. The doubters maintain that, until you can cause a machine to conjure up a warm summer night from thirty years ago on the mere whiff of a certain perfume, you will not have true artificial intelligence. And that, they insist, will never happen. Don’t count on it, as there is much more to this issue. Stay tuned. Anyone interested in this area might read The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Singularity Is Near, both by Ray Kurzweil.

[16] Blogs have had the effect of knocking down the barriers to news dissemination. No longer does the traditional media have a monopoly on the news. Before blogs, the senior editors at The Times could have put out some explanation for the Blair fiasco and likely survived. Instead, the staffers at the paper put out the truth on the Internet and the editors were history. Similarly, Dan Rather might have gotten away with the blatantly untrue and politically motivated story of President Bush’s National Guard service, but bloggers broke the true story a week before Rather even realized what was happening.

[17] Perhaps the prime example is Morning in America, which combines the intellectual firepower of Bill Bennett – former Secretary of Education, former federal drug czar, author of numerous books, and holder of degrees in both law and philosophy – with a crack staff of Internet researchers, a sophisticated nationwide audience and high level guests. The show has a clearly disclosed conservative orientation but, instead of pontificating or proselytizing like traditional talk radio shows, they probe into the issues and readily acknowledge what they don’t know. When that happens, the staff whips up answers from the Internet or, frequently, they get hard information from their audience, to whom they never make the mistake of talking down. The result is a daily online national seminar on current affairs.

[18] The Twentieth Century has seen a continuous move from certainty to uncertainty. The ordered regularity of Newton’s clockwork universe at the beginning of the Twentieth Century was shattered first by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, then Quantum Mechanics with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and now String Theory, all of which say that we cannot describe the world with the precision we had assumed. Chaos Theory provides that small fluctuations in our environment can have unforeseen – and unpredictable - consequences. Our uncertainty is even greater on the intergalactic level. We have recently been startled to find that the rate of expansion of the universe is accelerating, and we have no absolutely no idea why. All of the visible mass in the universe is now thought to make up only four percent of all there is. The other 96 percent is a combination of so-called Dark Matter and Dark Energy, but we have no idea what they are either.

If the scientists have floundered in their quest for truth, philosophers have fared no better. Epistemological questions of how and whether we can know anything with certainty have been part of the so called “long debate” of philosophers for over two thousand years. In the Twentieth Century, the Logical Positivists thought they could obtain absolute clarity of thought by determining the precise meaning of language. That effort hit a dead end when Wittgenstein, among others, observed that words can never mean the same thing to two different people. Jacques Derrida and the Deconstructionists compounded the difficulty by insisting that a text has no meaning except that which the reader chooses to give it. Derrida is dead and the fog of confusion is starting to lift, but the intellectual and moral relativism engendered by Postmodernism continues to exert its influence.

Most people, of course, don’t care about particle physics, cosmology or philosophical conundrums. They just want to know how to cope with the real world of daily events. Fair enough, but an awareness of the vastness of our ignorance in the realms of science and philosophy, and the extent of our uncertainty, might give us a sense of humility that would serve us well in the everyday world.