Dean's World

Via Glenn, a self-serving bit of tripe over at HuffPo that goes a long way toward explaining why the media is one of the least-trusted institutions in America today:

Journalists who think they are telling "the truth" don't understand the truth. We each have our own truth.

Tell that to Scooter Libby. He was sentenced to prison for remembering "the truth" differently than journalists.

In a larger sense, this trope (which has become distressingly common) tends to differentiate those who work in technical and nontechnical fields. When you work in programming or engineering, any logical or mathematical untruths you commit are simply intolerable and must be rooted out, exposed, and corrected. Comforting notions that your flawed work (and no one gets it right the first time; technical work always involves a lot of painstaking, humbling effort in finding, and admitting, your own mistakes) somehow embodies "your truth" will lead to a very unproductive career.

Sadly, such notions of rigorous intellectual honesty and absolute truth don't even rate lip service from our media, thanks to attitudes like this. Instead of being a reliable source of objective, factual news, the media forces anyone seeking truth to de-filter the narrator's bias from every "story" -- often with extremely troubling consequences.

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K :

I once had a book of the LA Times front pages for Nov 15 over the last eighty years or so. It was a birthday present.

Around 1990, on a whim, I looked at the 1930 - 1950 pages and made a count of news articles v. those labeled 'analysis'. It went pretty fast, there weren't any analysis articles giving someones opinion of how the news should be understood.

Pick up the same paper today* and you will find well over half the front page stories are a writers analysis. The rest will be about some campaign speech or how an interest group 'feels' about something.

* might be a little overstated - I don't live there anymore and can't see the paper. Don't care to either.

7.22.2007 2:51pm

Foobarista:

Part of the problem is the influence of "postmodernism", which basically asserts that there are no truths and it all boils down to an assertion that white men invented the whole notion of truth and reason to beat up on everyone else, ride roughshod over other intellectual systems, and generally hurt everyone's feelings. Sadly, this crap is highly popular in literature and language departments in universities, where lots of journalists get "trained".

If you want journalists committed to truth, you're more likely to find them on the sports pages than anywhere else. Even weather reports now have a "perspective" and lots of "analysis" thanks to Al Gore.

7.22.2007 2:58pm

Dean Esmay:

The most obnoxious example of this sort of press behavior is the "reports" they give on poll results. Newspapers are especially notorious about this: instead of printing the questions exactly as they were asked, and then just giving the numbers, they "interpret" the poll for you. That's where bogus things like "most Americans believed Saddam was behind 9/11" bullshit stories came from, just for example.

Then of course there's the stories that tell you what a politician said in a speech, rather than just, y'know, printing the speech.

The type of journalism I trust most is when both questions and answers are printed in full. Even though those may be edited for space or clarity, they're the most trustworthy.

7.22.2007 3:08pm

Aziz (mail) (www):

He was sentenced to prison for remembering "the truth" differently than journalists.

talk about having your own version of the truth! richly ironic, that statement.

here is the detailed report from Fox News about Libby's actual convictions for perjury.

On the four counts with a guilty verdict, Libby was convicted of:

• Obstruction of justice for lying to the grand jury about being told by Russert that Plame worked at the CIA and all the reporters working the story knew it; lying about being surprised by Russert's "news" and telling the grand jury that he told Cooper what he had "heard" from Russert;

• False statements to the FBI about his alleged conversation with Russert. Libby told the FBI he was surprised by this statement because he had forgotten that the vice president already told him of Plame's status;

• Perjury to the grand jury about his conversation with Russert, and telling the grand jury he was "taken aback" to learn from Russert that Plame worked at the CIA; and

• Perjury to the grand jury about his conversation with Cooper, in which he supposedly told Cooper he had heard from other reporters that Plame worked for the CIA.

"The thing that convinced on most of the accounts was the alleged conversation with Russert. It was either false, which some of us believe it never happened, or if it did happen, Mr. Libby saying that he was surprised to hear about Mrs. Wilson," Collins said.

Collins said that the jury had about 34 posted pages of "building blocks ... and what we came up with was that Mr. Libby either was told by or told to about Mrs. Wilson at least nine times, and in a period of time where it was extremely" hard for him to have let it drop off the radar.

heres the summary: libby not convicted on all five counts, the jury did its job and actually considered the evidence carefully. This is how our justice sstem - a system of rules and law - works. You either have faith in it or you don't.

And lets dispense with the "bad memory" excuse. The jury exolicitly considered that and still found Libby to have been guilty of perjury.

"We were told he had a bad memory, and we actually believed he did," but testimony about Libby's grasp of details was such that "even if he had forgot that someone had told him about Mrs. Wilson, who had told him, it seemed very unlikely that he would not have remembered about Mrs. Wilson," Collins said, adding that the memory problem was the least convincing argument presented in the trial.

7.22.2007 3:54pm

DanielH:

Of course no one should be surprised that eye-witness reports often conflict. Everyone pays more attention to different details. Yet if a writer aims at something higher than mere reporting (like, say, investigative journalism or history), (s)he must lay the various reports side-by-side, and endeavor to discover a common and coherent pattern. Ibn Khaldun, one of the greatest historians, put it thus:

The (writing of history) requires numerous sources and greatly varied knowledge. It also requires a good speculative mind and thoroughness. (Possession of these two qualities) leads the historian to the truth and keeps him from slips and errors. If he trusts historical information in its plain transmitted form and has no clear knowledge of the principles resulting from custom, the fundamental facts of politics, the nature of civilization, or the conditions governing human social organization, and if, furthermore, he does not evaluate remote or ancient material through comparison with near or contemporary material, he often cannot avoid stumbling and slipping and deviating from the highroad of truth. Historians, Qur'an commentators and leading transmitters have committed frequent errors in the stories and events they reported. They accepted them in the plain transmitted form, without regard for its value. They did not check them with the principles underlying such historical situations, nor did they compare them with similar material. Also, they did not probe (more deeply) with the yardstick of philosophy, with the help of knowledge of the nature of things, or with the help of speculation and historical insight. Therefore, they strayed from the truth and found themselves lost in the desert of baseless assumptions and errors.

On the other hand, I think it is a mistake to try to fit journalism (and historiography) to the methods of computer science and engineering. The former is an empirical (though for the most part not experimental) science (and thus necessarily probabilistic), while the latter are more logical than empirical, and much more compatible with absolute standards of certainty.

7.22.2007 4:00pm

Dave Schuler (mail) (www):

The (writing of history) requires numerous sources and greatly varied knowledge. It also requires a good speculative mind and thoroughness.

Good words and well spoken (written). I think it also helps to have an anchor which, sadly, many modern journalists and historians lack.

Honestly, I blame the J-schools. They should be abolished as good for nothing. Journalism is a craft not an art or a profession. Until the last generation or so journalists were people, frequently with broad experience in other areas, who had oopsed one way or another into reporting, editting, or writing copy. Now a lot are J-school grads with poli-sci majors.

That's why it's extremely difficult to get decent science, business, economics, or medical reporting.

7.22.2007 4:12pm

TallDave (mail) (www):

Aziz,

You're just proving my point. Journalists had their version of the truth, Libby had his -- and the difference apparently does matter, contrary to what Penelope Trunk says.

7.22.2007 6:17pm

and endeavor to discover a common and coherent pattern.

The problem is, that's not a good way to arrive at anything resembling truth. Once you start defining your narrative, there's a natural tendency to become emotionally committed to "your" theory and throw out facts that don't fit the pattern. Eventually proving your narrative becomes the goal, and suddenly 1971 TANG memos written in Microsoft Word become perfectly believable to people who should know better.

On the other hand, I think it is a mistake to try to fit journalism (and historiography) to the methods of computer science and engineering.

It's a mistake for journalism not to emulate the stringent standards used in the most exacting and precise technical fields. A levee system failing because an engineer did an equation wrong may seem more real, but running fake news reports about decapitations in Iraq can be just as damaging. Facts can be verified, they're just not doing the work.

7.22.2007 6:27pm

This is how our justice sstem - a system of rules and law - works. You either have faith in it or you don't.

Oh, the left is preaching faith-based justice now? Jury verdicts are wrong a fair amount of the time.

So much for US justice: juries get the verdict wrong in one out of six criminal cases and judges don't do much better, a new study has found.
And when they make those mistakes, both judges and juries are far more likely to send an innocent person to jail than to let a guilty person go free, according to an upcoming study out of Northwestern University.
"The sources of the errors are quite resilient to correction," he said.
"They have to do with all sorts of biases and the strong presumption of guilt when someone is arrested and brought to trial."

Hmm, a Republican being tried in DC, which is about 6:1 Dem, with Dems on TV every day screaming the whole Bush admin is criminal.

And we already know Fitz lied about who first told reporters about the "secret agent" Plame inexplicably sending her husband on a very public CIA trip -- which no one was ever charged for, because any fool can see sending your husband out to write NYT op-eds and appear on TV regarding a CIA assignment you sent him on is going to compromise your secrecy. The whole case was nothing but a vindictive fishing expedition from start to finish.

Also, Libby's case is awaiting appeal, so it's not a done deal. If you have faith in the system, maybe it will be overturned.

7.22.2007 6:41pm

mikeca (mail) (www):

There have been big changes in the news business in the last hundred years. People use to look to newspapers as their primary news source. Radio, all news radio, TV, 24hr TV news channels and now the internet have completely replaced printed newspapers as a primary news source for most people.

Newspapers are struggling with ways to justify their continued existence in printed form. One thing they have done is to include more “analysis” with the news. The 24hr news channels also are struggling finding enough national/world “news” to fill all that airtime, and the result is there actually is very little news on 24hr news channels. It is mostly analysis, opinion and celebrity stories.

The only real niche left to newspapers is local news.

7.22.2007 7:20pm

Samuel Tai (mail):

Actually, I think we already have a probabilistic means of finding the truth, especially in areas of incomplete knowledge, such as journalism. It's just that very few have thought of it in this way before.

I refer, of course, to futures markets. Let the free market bid on the likeliest scenario for an event, past, present, or future. Forget narrative in this case. Money talks; BS walks.

(Google's bug bounty program is an example of this adapted to a complex software engineering task.)

7.22.2007 7:29pm

Jack G (mail) (www):

Argument's Outhouse

In science and mathematics a probability is likely,
but not necessarily true,
In everyday life truth is not necessarily likely,
but it might be assumed.

In the law truth is the objective,
beyond a reasonable doubt,
And in argument's outhouse,
truth can be turned inside out.

Now that doesn't help much if truth is the aim,
Lose at the truth, and a falsehood is gained,
But the day that men happen to think of the truth
As their personal possession instead of their due
Is the day that the truth will slip quite away
To lands more inviting in which she might stay,
So if truth is the measure by which you count right
Don't confuse dawn with the coming of night
For fact and opinion are not both the same
Despite what the fool in his foolishness claims,
If wisdom you seek then the truth at all cost
Better the struggle than easy the loss,
For man in his shrewdness and modern insight
Sees no divergence 'tween darkness and light,
But truth will not harbor such a blatant affair
She will not be forever reduced to despair,
So if your good nation would avoid disarray
You must give her credit by which she might stay,
For truth is expensive, the sum quite a cost
But to lose her is far worse, for then all is lost.

7.22.2007 8:49pm

mikeca: You are correct that newspapers are too slow for hour to hour events. But as I pointed out in the very first comment the use of 'analysis' is not new - big papers were riddled with it by 1990 but not in 1960.

I think it was a matter of economics and comfort. Why spend big bucks to maintain reliable and well trained reporters and cameramen all around the world? Why delay to confirm a story? And why run a short announcement when a 300 word opinion can be attached in no time at all?

Another trend at the same time was the 'expert' pool ready to present the other side. The 'expert' is usually a professor somewhere who will dispute any government or company statement or action. As soon as X is announced the reporter calls an expert or two. They then express serious reservations and concerns. And the first paragraph of the story says 'concerns have been raised about how X will reduce civil liberties or consumer choices or endanger a species or cause more car wrecks or...'

Newspapers can do this because they are immune from consequences. They can virtually never be sued. Retractions are sometimes given grudgingly on page 37 a month later.

And from the reporters standpoint the bar at a five star hotel is a better place to write your story than in a jungle or desert hell where the adventurous often disappear. Notice that even TV news reports are almost never from the field anymore. The reporter stands in front of someplace well secured where something happened hours ago and mouths nothing.

7.22.2007 9:12pm

mikeca: You are correct that newspapers are too slow for hour to hour events. But as I pointed out in the very first comment the use of 'analysis' is not new - big papers were riddled with it by 1990 but not in 1960.

In 1960 Newspapers were still the primary news source for many people. There was TV news, but only a few times a day. The really defining event was the founding of CNN in 1980. By 1990, newspapers were no longer the primary news source for most people, CNN had taken over that roll.

7.22.2007 9:55pm

Acksiom (mail) (www):

I'm far from an expert in such matters, but I'm finding more and more often these days that I get superior analytic results the more I follow the money. So I'd ask how the target market for 'news' journalism has changed.

My guess would be that there's been a significant increase in consumer spending by women which has driven the changes, but, as I said, I'm not an expert.

7.23.2007 6:07am

Mike (mail):

Isn't it amazing how "everyone is entitled to their own opinion" has become "everyone is entitled to their own truth"?

7.23.2007 4:16pm

triticale (mail) (www):

DanielH cites Ibn Khaldun above. Khaldun made an assertion regarding taxation and revenues similar to the Laffer curve over 500 years ago. Inclines me to think well of him.

7.23.2007 5:13pm

triticale --

Here's the chapter you are referring to: Taxation and the reason for low and high (tax revenues)

Also well worth the read: Injustice brings about the ruin of civilization

7.23.2007 5:39pm

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