Tag: objectivity

journalism, philosophy, politics

The Attack on Truth: Postmodernism and propaganda

Posted on by Beau Dure

In grad school, I worried that the same “postmodernist” tools that ivory-tower professors used to question reality were also being used by propaganda merchants to question climate change, evolution and so forth.

I hate being right. But this Chronicle of Higher Education piece, The Attack on Truth, confirms it.

“But now the climate-change deniers and the young-Earth creationists are coming after the natural scientists,” the literary critic Michael Bérubé noted, “… and they’re using some of the very arguments developed by an academic left that thought it was speaking only to people of like mind.”

Granted, the seeds of doubt go back a bit farther than that:

Of course, some folks were hard at work trying to dispute inconvenient scientific facts long before conservatives began to borrow postmodernist rhetoric. In Merchants of Doubt (Bloomsbury Press, 2010), two historians, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, have shown how the strategy of denying climate change and evolution can be traced all the way back to big tobacco companies, who recognized early on that even the most well-documented scientific claims (for instance, that smoking causes cancer) could be eroded by skillful government lobbying, bullying the news media, and pursuing a public-relations campaign.

And to some extent, our discussions have never been about finding truth:

In a recent paper, “Why Do Humans Reason?,” Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, both of them philosophers and cognitive scientists, argue that the point of human reason is not and never has been to lead to truth, but is rather to win arguments. If that is correct, the discovery of truth is only a byproduct.

So we’re talking about deeply ingrained human nature. But we often fight against that human nature and come up with the occasional Age of Reason or Enlightenment, pushing our scruffy species a little farther up the road toward good government, good decisions, and technology. If our species could never agree on truth, Apple engineers would still be yelling at each other about how to make an iPod. We’d never have an iPhone.

The bad news today is that we have the means to amplify every crackpot, and the media business landscape makes shouting pundits more profitable than careful research.

An obvious solution might be to turn to journalists, who are supposed to embrace a standard of objectivity and source-checking that would be more likely to support true beliefs. Yet, at least in part as a result of the competition that has been enabled by the Internet, we now find that even some mainstream journalists and news media are dangerously complicit in the follies of those who seek to disrespect truth. There have always been accusations of bias in the media, but today we have Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left (along with a smattering of partisan radio talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh), who engage in overt advocacy for their ideological views.

Yet those are not the kinds of journalists we should be so worried about, for they are known to be biased. Another tendency is perhaps even more damaging to the idea that journalism is meant to safeguard truth. Call it “objectivity bias.” Sensitive to criticism that they, too, are partisan, many news sites try to demonstrate that they are fair and balanced by presenting “both” sides of any issue deemed “controversial” — even when there really aren’t two credible sides. That isn’t objectivity. And the consequence is public confusion over whether an issue — in the case of climate change or childhood vaccination, a scientific issue — has actually been settled.

 

A lot of this was written in some guy’s grad-school thesis in 2000:

With readers choosing the news they see, vital bits of information may not get to the people who need it. Readers may not hear that the food on their shelves has been recalled because of a possible salmonella contamination. Voters may believe erroneous reports about the economy; a Los Angeles Times poll in 1994 found this to be the case, with 53 percent of respondents saying they believed a recession lingered in the United States despite considerable evidence to the contrary.  Readers have new power to get around the gatekeepers, but journalists have less power to ensure that important messages get through the gates.

I hate being right.

5
journalism

The media’s role in climate-change denialism

Posted on by Beau Dure

False objectivity, postmodernism, getting “both sides” — by any name, it’s a problem:

As Kenner sees it, on any issue, there are typically three groups: true believers; nonbelievers; and the vast, confused middle. It’s not the middle’s fault it’s confused: Kenner blames the Marc Moranos of the world, who are paid to sow not just doubt but fear. (“Fear is a big part of it,” he says.) The media share much of the blame. Kenner singles out newspapers — this one in particular — for his harshest criticism of what he calls their tradition of “false balance”: the insistence on always presenting two sides of an issue, even when there aren’t two.

via ‘Food, Inc.’ director’s new project shines light on climate-change deniers – The Washington Post.

An honest debate on climate change would include several qualified people discussing how bad it’s going to be and how we should fight it and/or adapt. Not outright denialists. You wouldn’t include a Flat Earther for “balance” in a discussion on air travel, would you?

0
journalism

Positivism and objectivity (or, data and calling b.s.)

Posted on by Beau Dure

I somehow stumbled into a long think piece about the inadequacies of “Big Data,” which includes everything from FiveThirtyEight to, somehow, dating sites. Echoing Jay Rosen’s work on the futility of a purely “objective” view, it’s called “View from Nowhere.”

The gist of it is that the positivists, here defined as people who think we can figure everything out through data (my philosophy professors probably defined it differently, but this definition actually makes sense to me), are conceited in their belief that they can step away and let data discern truth. We all have biases, writer Nathan Jurgenson says, even if they only show up in the way we ask questions. It’s like the old saying on computers’ fallibility being directly attributable to bad programming: “Garbage in, garbage out.”

Jurgenson’s critique is reasonable, but I also found myself thinking about a recent post from the most grounded journalist or ex-journalist I know, Lex Alexander, who fretted about the media’s outright refusal to call bullshit on anything or anyone.

The terms get slippery here. To some extent, Lex and Jurgenson are both criticizing the “View from Nowhere” that has indeed led to some journalistic malpractice over the years. My McCarthy studies taught me how easy it is to manipulate journalists who are trying to get “both sides” of an argument. Reporters and editors must have the inclination, the guts, and the knowledge base to say, “Yeah, hang on, I’m going to check that out.”

But my issue with Jurgenson’s piece is that I hope people, while recognizing the limits of “Big Data,” can also see it an important tool for calling bullshit.

A lot of controversies in modern media aren’t opinions. They’re facts. We have people in elected office who go against science on climate change and evolution. They go against history on … well, American history. They go against economics whenever convenient.

Outside politics, we have a populace that believes in a lot of junk. Anti-vaccination movements. The latest chain email from Grandma about that African-born Obama trying to usher in an Islamofascist state. And so on.

Big Data isn’t perfect. No source is. And frankly, the data journalists like Nate Silver are really good at explaining the limitations of their own work. Silver doesn’t just pass along numbers from Rasmussen without challenging the methodology.

But in a land of people so desperate to believe whatever someone tells them to assuage or reinforce their fears, we desperately need Big Data. Because Big Bullshit is a monster.

1
journalism, politics

The only words you need to know for the campaign: Tell the truth

Posted on by Beau Dure

At the height of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, comedian Wanda Sykes had some simple advice for the president: Stick with your lie.

Ah, the good old days. Back when the country was running relatively smoothly, so we filled the 24-hour news void with the Starr Report.

But the rough part is that “Stick with your lie” has become the prevailing campaign philosophy.

Jay Rosen, a frequent critic of journalists passing off the “view from nowhere” as objectivity, sums up the problem.

Suppose a major party candidate for president believed we were in a “post-truth” era and actually campaigned that way. Would political reporters in the mainstream press figure it out and tell us?

I say no. They would not tell us. Not in any clear way.

Why not? Rosen continues:

Exposes the press to criticism in too clear a fashion. Messes with the “both sides do it”/we’re impartial narrative that political journalists have mastered: and deeply believe in. Romney will be fact checked, his campaign will push back from time to time, the fact checkers will argue among themselves, and the post-truth premise will sneak into common practice without penalty or recognition, even though there is nothing covert about it.

Depressing thought.

To be sure, “both sides do it” to some extent. You can find people of all political stripes who’ve decided the ends justify the means. (I’d call it Machiavellian if Cracked hadn’t showed that we’ve all been misusing the term.)

But sometimes, when the fact-checkers try to grab one from the “other” side to balance things out, they overreach. “Both sides” is NOT objectivity. (Sometimes, as in the current outsourcing debate, everyone is indeed lying.)

So let’s get back to Rosen’s post, in which he sums up a few campaign tactics: keep repeating lies until people believe them (climate change and “death panels” would be good examples), build your own facts and history, etc.

We should be demanding better. Instead, we write off the fact-checkers as partisan. If Jon Stewart and Andrew Sullivan raise the same complaint, we label Stewart as “liberal” and Sullivan as “not really conservative.” People write off Politifact as partisan even though their current home page is rather evenly split between parties. (Nice of MoveOn to provide so much material for them!)

We’ve got four more months of this garbage. I think the only way to get through it isn’t to heat up the rhetoric. It’s not to seek phony “balance.” It’s to demand the truth. Period.

 

0
journalism

Update to My Previous Post on Truth Vigilantes | The Public Editor – NYTimes.com

Posted on by Beau Dure

NYTimes public editor (others call that job “ombudsman”) Arthur Brisbane attempts to remove his foot from his mouth:

A large majority of respondents weighed in with, yes, you moron, The Times should check facts and print the truth. That was not the question I was trying to ask. My inquiry related to whether The Times, in the text of news columns, should more aggressively rebut “facts” that are offered by newsmakers when those “facts” are in question. I consider this a difficult question, not an obvious one.

Yeah, no. Some of the criticism Brisbane received for his initial post was silly — a classic case of people not reading beyond the headline.

But Brisbane’s still wrong. It’s only a difficult question if you think objectivity is simply getting “both sides.” It’s not. Objective journalism is the quest to get the facts no matter what the partisans want you to say.

Yes, challenging mistruth is difficult. You have to deal with legitimate criticism as well as the idiots and cretins will always attempt to discredit the fact-checkers. These days, you’ll get called “liberal” more often than not.

Yet if no one checks facts, what would prevent politicians from inventing new reality? What would make us different from the Soviet Union of the 1970s? Our bulwark against propaganda is already too thin.

I’m glad Brisbane raised the question. Plenty of people have forgotten that journalists are supposed to do more than repeat partisan rhetoric. But the answer is indeed obvious.

via Update to My Previous Post on Truth Vigilantes | The Public Editor – NYTimes.com.

0
journalism

PolitiFact falls into the “both sides = objectivity” trap

Posted on by Beau Dure

Re: PolitiFact Rhode Island | Comic Jon Stewart says Congress met most Christmas Days in its early years.

PolitiFact Rhode Island gives this a “Pants on Fire,” a rating usually reserved for blatant, malicious falsehoods that fly in the face of evidence the speaker should or clearly does know.

The commenters on Facebook have calmly taken PolitiFact to task, saying this is nowhere near a “Pants on Fire.” It’s false, yes.

Here’s the bigger problem: The fact in question is from the History Channel (PolitiFact strangely leaves “channel” lowercase). Stewart was simply repeating it and citing them. The Daily Show could perhaps be faulted for not double-checking Congressional records, but most people would expect the History Channel’s research to be somewhat reliable. (Certainly more reliable than the typical cable talk show.)

But the headline, of course, isn’t the History Channel. It’s Jon Stewart. That’s sensationalism.

And PolitiFact’s agenda for making it about Stewart is rather transparent. Stewart is considered a left-wing voice — though, if you watch his show regularly, you’ll see that he’s fair, if not necessarily balanced. By taking a shot at a prominent “left-wing” voice, they appear to be balancing out all the “False” and “Pants on Fire” rulings they have to give from the GOP debates.

PolitiFact simply can’t operate that way. If one “side” is telling more falsehoods than the other, so be it. That’s not a value judgment on either party — this year, we have a lot of Republicans running for president and one Democrat who hasn’t really shifted into campaign mode, so you’re simply going to have more to evaluate on the Republican side. If we had eight Democrats running for president right now, PolitiFact would surely have some crazy crap to analyze from those debates.

Stewart, moreso than most actual journalists, realizes that you can’t get at the facts by taking one from Column A and one from Column B. And that’s why, if PolitiFact continues down this path, he’ll be a more reliable fact-checker than PolitiFact.

 

0