Ringo appears to have nailed it, and I’ve previously given him credit for saying it succinctly.* Trust, as he postulates in the song, doesn’t come easily for many, especially in personal relationships. And there’s plenty of evidence in broken friendships and loves. Trust is also hard won in more distant relationships, also, particularly nowadays, as, for example, between news outlets and the general public. I suppose the lack of trust—or suspicion that something’s amiss—derives additionally from the multitude of scams that hit us unexpectedly from every angle, including from unsolicited phone calls and emails that people with the name Unknown keep making (particularly curiously, many of who live in Nigeria, where, I assume, since I have only one native Nigerian friend whom I’ve never asked, the most common surname is “Unknown,” uh, excuse me, “Royal and Deceased Rich Uncle Unknown” who left money, transferrable upon receipt of a bank account number). Yes, trust doesn’t come easily for good reason. The world has long been filled with—how can I tactfully put this—LIARS. And among those who lie without compunction are some who have been granted awesome power for distributing lies: Politicians, celebrities, and newspeople (Is that last term PC?). I’ll focus on reporters here.
I stumbled upon a site that lists “The Top 12 Journalism Scandals since 2000” this morning.** Some I could remember well; others, a little; a few, not at all. The Jayson Blair New York Times 2003 scandal came to mind immediately. Blair, if you recall, fabricated and plagiarized information, and the paper fired him and two editors. Because I wasn’t a regular reader of the Times, I simply looked on that “scandal” with curiosity while it played out in the press. After a series of manipulated news stories, not just in the Times, but also in other news outlets, including cable and network TV, I’ve pretty much lost faith in the face value of any news story. In fact, on Black Friday morning, 2019, I awoke to find Newsweek had reported that the current President spent his Thanksgiving playing golf and spending leisure time in Florida (implying a rather narcissistic lifestyle), whereas, in truth, he was in Afghanistan visiting troops and the Afghani president. ***
Three years after the Blair incident at the Times, the Duke University lacrosse scandal plunged the team and coach into disgrace over a false story. Not that the boys were totally innocent. Regardless of their eventually proved innocence in the case, were I one of the players’ parents, I can’t say I would not have “gone ballistic” over their foolishness and immaturity that served as the context for the false criminal complaint against them that altered their lives. However, with regard to reasons for untrustworthy reporting during that nationally debated incident, Daniel Okrent, a Times ombudsman, said, “It was too delicious a story. It conformed too well to too many preconceived notions of too many in the press: white over black, rich over poor, athletes over non-athletes, men over women, educated over non-educated. Wow. That’s a package of sins that really fit the preconceptions of a lot of us.”****
I’m not surprised by Okrent’s comment, but I say that from the perspective of my age and experience. Before I taught earth sciences, I taught literature and writing at the same university for more than a decade. During that “earlier career,” I interacted with many English and journalism students. As I was in youth, so they were in their youth: Largely uninformed, impressionable, and maybe a little too eager to adopt uncritically the perspectives of those senior in age but not necessarily superior in native ability. I saw many students with a high potential for learning undergo a strangely decreasing breadth of perspective as they were influenced by colleagues of mine with specific philosophical or political agendas. Not that all of us are sans sin. Surely, I said to myself, I, too, must have a tunnel vision in some ways. In retrospect, I, too, was probably like Daniel Okrent, suffering from confirmation bias derived from unavoidable inculcation. If so, then I was probably also to some degree an untrustworthy source.
In this morning’s encounter with the false story about the President, I remembered something Richard P. Feynman, famous physicist, relates in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.***** Feynman tells the childhood story about his father’s frequent reading to him from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He mentions sitting on his dad’s lap and hearing the entry on the Tyrannosaurus Rex, and says his father would make comparisons, such as with the height of the tyrannosaur and the height of a house. “Everything we’d read would be translated as best we could into some reality and so I learned to do that—everything that I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really saying by translating and so [here Feynman laughs] I used to read the Encyclopaedia when I was a boy but with translation, you see, so it was very exciting and interesting to thing there were animals of such magnitude….” Translate? Maybe “making comparisons and drawing analogies” might have been a more appropriate choice of words. Hold that thought for some clarification on Feynman’s thought below.
I’m pretty sure “translating” is what journalists today do all the time: “Translate.” But not for clearer understanding as much as for following, to use Okrent’s words, a “delicious” story that confirms preconceived notions. In today’s terminology, we might say, “spin.” And though one of the reasons for “spinning” lies in journalists’ needs to support an agenda through propaganda, another reason for spin is unavoidable: Language is imprecise, requiring us to interpret and extrapolate, to infer and imply. It has made us addicted to modifiers, i.e., adjectives to brighten and embellish a bland world of facts, but that introduce innuendos that foster surmise. It’s in translating from a limited point of view with modification, such as Okrent’s expressed need to support preconceptions, that we end up with false news stories that make us eventually distrust even true stories. That’s where we are today, it seems, with a story about a president playing golf when, in fact, he was visiting troops in Afghanistan. The story was “too delicious” because it conformed to preconceived notions.
Although I do read through them, I don’t subscribe to newspapers anymore, haven’t for years. Am I ignorant as a result. Yes—and no. I keep asking myself whether anything I read online, hear on the radio, or see on TV isn’t the product of some “translation” that makes sense to the writer or newspeople or whether anything I conclude isn’t the product of my own faulty “translation.” I look for words without modifiers in the stories I read or hear because any adjective, regardless of its seeming truth, is a subjective choice of the writer or speaker. And today I read not only more modifiers per story than probably ever before, I also read what Shakespeare included in his plays: The aside, subtle little phrases or clauses that imply whatever supports the agenda du jour and the preconceived notions of the reporter.
Of course, you might argue reasonably that if all of us keep questioning the motives of those who tell us what is going on and subsequently question how we ourselves “translate” what they say, we’ll never get to any truth. All will be relative; all will be agenda-driven; all will be the culmination of inculcation or, at least, a temporary manifestation of it. I can understand that because I have made the same argument. Trust is essential for the spread of knowledge.
Somehow, we have to trust, to find trustworthy people and trustworthy sources for anything that crosses our brains. Later in the Feynman book, the Nobel laureate says, “We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher” (211).
Feynman then asks why scientists didn’t discover the final answer on the electron sooner. The answer is that they first accepted the result from a famous experimenter, passed it from brain to brain, and accepted answers that were close to Millikan’s answer. I’m sure there are people who will say “Trump played golf in Florida on Thanksgiving, 2019.” Is it a big deal that they will do so without verification and without reading the subsequent addition Newsweek added to the initial headline? No, not really because it will simply confirm their own preconceived notions. One little false story probably doesn’t matter much in the course of history though such stories can accumulate in memory and shape attitude. But, then again, some “little” false stories have “mattered,” such as those that motivated people to riot in Tulsa about a century ago, and you can probably think of other such reactions throughout ancient, medieval, and modern history. ******
We’re probably all somewhat subject to adhering to preconceived notions and bias. As Feynman points out, even scientists who look to confirm earlier findings by rather famous people are sometimes willing to overlook their own intuition and discoveries when they contradict the “truth” everyone accepts. Yet, as with the refinement of the truth about the electron, so refinements of social truths often surface, sometimes by chance and time and sometimes by the hard work of minds that ignore their own or others’ preconceived notions.
With so many in the news business who cannot resist inserting their subtle and not-so-subtle asides, implications, and outright falsehoods in their stories, cynicism will eventually pervade the intellectual avenues of trust. But because I believe many people in every generation are truth-seekers regardless of the limitations of knowledge and wisdom imposed by our finite lives, I will cautiously look for trustworthy sources of information, for sources I can trust. Why cautiously? Because, as Ringo sings, “It don’t come easy.”
*Starr, Ringo. “It Don’t Come Easy.”
**Rogers, Tony. 28 Jan. 2019. ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/the-top-journalism-scandals-2073750 Accessed Black Friday, 2019. See also the Wikipedia list under the entry “The New York Times controversies”—but in checking out that or any other source online, remember Ringo’s opening line.
*** Kwong, Jessica. The “revised” headline with “additional reporting by James Crowley, 11/28.19, at 10:16 am EST, reads, “How did Trump spend Thanksgiving? Tweeting, Golfing—and Surprising U.S. Troops in Afghanistan.” https://www.newsweek.com/trump-thanksgiving-plans-maralago-1474518 Accessed November 28, 2019.
****Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_controversies#Judith_Miller (If I can trust that Okrent is quoted correctly)
*****1999. Copyright Carl Feynman and Michelle Feynman. Foreward by Freeman Dyson. Perseus Publications. p. 3.
****** You might be interested in one story of a false report gone really bad, the cause of the Tulsa riots at the end of May, 1921. There’s a photo-journal report at http://www.tulsaworld.com/app/race-riot/timeline.html Accessed November 30, 2019. And you might also be interested in reading Roth, Andy Lee and Mickey Huff, Censored 2020, Foreword by Sharyl Attkisson, available through Amazon as a Kindle Book. https://www.amazon.com/Censored-2020-Andy-Lee-Roth/dp/1609809602/ref=sr_1_1?hvadid=3486133409&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&hvqmt=e&keywords=project+censored&qid=1575117989&sr=8-1
I stumbled upon a site that lists “The Top 12 Journalism Scandals since 2000” this morning.** Some I could remember well; others, a little; a few, not at all. The Jayson Blair New York Times 2003 scandal came to mind immediately. Blair, if you recall, fabricated and plagiarized information, and the paper fired him and two editors. Because I wasn’t a regular reader of the Times, I simply looked on that “scandal” with curiosity while it played out in the press. After a series of manipulated news stories, not just in the Times, but also in other news outlets, including cable and network TV, I’ve pretty much lost faith in the face value of any news story. In fact, on Black Friday morning, 2019, I awoke to find Newsweek had reported that the current President spent his Thanksgiving playing golf and spending leisure time in Florida (implying a rather narcissistic lifestyle), whereas, in truth, he was in Afghanistan visiting troops and the Afghani president. ***
Three years after the Blair incident at the Times, the Duke University lacrosse scandal plunged the team and coach into disgrace over a false story. Not that the boys were totally innocent. Regardless of their eventually proved innocence in the case, were I one of the players’ parents, I can’t say I would not have “gone ballistic” over their foolishness and immaturity that served as the context for the false criminal complaint against them that altered their lives. However, with regard to reasons for untrustworthy reporting during that nationally debated incident, Daniel Okrent, a Times ombudsman, said, “It was too delicious a story. It conformed too well to too many preconceived notions of too many in the press: white over black, rich over poor, athletes over non-athletes, men over women, educated over non-educated. Wow. That’s a package of sins that really fit the preconceptions of a lot of us.”****
I’m not surprised by Okrent’s comment, but I say that from the perspective of my age and experience. Before I taught earth sciences, I taught literature and writing at the same university for more than a decade. During that “earlier career,” I interacted with many English and journalism students. As I was in youth, so they were in their youth: Largely uninformed, impressionable, and maybe a little too eager to adopt uncritically the perspectives of those senior in age but not necessarily superior in native ability. I saw many students with a high potential for learning undergo a strangely decreasing breadth of perspective as they were influenced by colleagues of mine with specific philosophical or political agendas. Not that all of us are sans sin. Surely, I said to myself, I, too, must have a tunnel vision in some ways. In retrospect, I, too, was probably like Daniel Okrent, suffering from confirmation bias derived from unavoidable inculcation. If so, then I was probably also to some degree an untrustworthy source.
In this morning’s encounter with the false story about the President, I remembered something Richard P. Feynman, famous physicist, relates in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.***** Feynman tells the childhood story about his father’s frequent reading to him from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He mentions sitting on his dad’s lap and hearing the entry on the Tyrannosaurus Rex, and says his father would make comparisons, such as with the height of the tyrannosaur and the height of a house. “Everything we’d read would be translated as best we could into some reality and so I learned to do that—everything that I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really saying by translating and so [here Feynman laughs] I used to read the Encyclopaedia when I was a boy but with translation, you see, so it was very exciting and interesting to thing there were animals of such magnitude….” Translate? Maybe “making comparisons and drawing analogies” might have been a more appropriate choice of words. Hold that thought for some clarification on Feynman’s thought below.
I’m pretty sure “translating” is what journalists today do all the time: “Translate.” But not for clearer understanding as much as for following, to use Okrent’s words, a “delicious” story that confirms preconceived notions. In today’s terminology, we might say, “spin.” And though one of the reasons for “spinning” lies in journalists’ needs to support an agenda through propaganda, another reason for spin is unavoidable: Language is imprecise, requiring us to interpret and extrapolate, to infer and imply. It has made us addicted to modifiers, i.e., adjectives to brighten and embellish a bland world of facts, but that introduce innuendos that foster surmise. It’s in translating from a limited point of view with modification, such as Okrent’s expressed need to support preconceptions, that we end up with false news stories that make us eventually distrust even true stories. That’s where we are today, it seems, with a story about a president playing golf when, in fact, he was visiting troops in Afghanistan. The story was “too delicious” because it conformed to preconceived notions.
Although I do read through them, I don’t subscribe to newspapers anymore, haven’t for years. Am I ignorant as a result. Yes—and no. I keep asking myself whether anything I read online, hear on the radio, or see on TV isn’t the product of some “translation” that makes sense to the writer or newspeople or whether anything I conclude isn’t the product of my own faulty “translation.” I look for words without modifiers in the stories I read or hear because any adjective, regardless of its seeming truth, is a subjective choice of the writer or speaker. And today I read not only more modifiers per story than probably ever before, I also read what Shakespeare included in his plays: The aside, subtle little phrases or clauses that imply whatever supports the agenda du jour and the preconceived notions of the reporter.
Of course, you might argue reasonably that if all of us keep questioning the motives of those who tell us what is going on and subsequently question how we ourselves “translate” what they say, we’ll never get to any truth. All will be relative; all will be agenda-driven; all will be the culmination of inculcation or, at least, a temporary manifestation of it. I can understand that because I have made the same argument. Trust is essential for the spread of knowledge.
Somehow, we have to trust, to find trustworthy people and trustworthy sources for anything that crosses our brains. Later in the Feynman book, the Nobel laureate says, “We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher” (211).
Feynman then asks why scientists didn’t discover the final answer on the electron sooner. The answer is that they first accepted the result from a famous experimenter, passed it from brain to brain, and accepted answers that were close to Millikan’s answer. I’m sure there are people who will say “Trump played golf in Florida on Thanksgiving, 2019.” Is it a big deal that they will do so without verification and without reading the subsequent addition Newsweek added to the initial headline? No, not really because it will simply confirm their own preconceived notions. One little false story probably doesn’t matter much in the course of history though such stories can accumulate in memory and shape attitude. But, then again, some “little” false stories have “mattered,” such as those that motivated people to riot in Tulsa about a century ago, and you can probably think of other such reactions throughout ancient, medieval, and modern history. ******
We’re probably all somewhat subject to adhering to preconceived notions and bias. As Feynman points out, even scientists who look to confirm earlier findings by rather famous people are sometimes willing to overlook their own intuition and discoveries when they contradict the “truth” everyone accepts. Yet, as with the refinement of the truth about the electron, so refinements of social truths often surface, sometimes by chance and time and sometimes by the hard work of minds that ignore their own or others’ preconceived notions.
With so many in the news business who cannot resist inserting their subtle and not-so-subtle asides, implications, and outright falsehoods in their stories, cynicism will eventually pervade the intellectual avenues of trust. But because I believe many people in every generation are truth-seekers regardless of the limitations of knowledge and wisdom imposed by our finite lives, I will cautiously look for trustworthy sources of information, for sources I can trust. Why cautiously? Because, as Ringo sings, “It don’t come easy.”
*Starr, Ringo. “It Don’t Come Easy.”
**Rogers, Tony. 28 Jan. 2019. ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/the-top-journalism-scandals-2073750 Accessed Black Friday, 2019. See also the Wikipedia list under the entry “The New York Times controversies”—but in checking out that or any other source online, remember Ringo’s opening line.
*** Kwong, Jessica. The “revised” headline with “additional reporting by James Crowley, 11/28.19, at 10:16 am EST, reads, “How did Trump spend Thanksgiving? Tweeting, Golfing—and Surprising U.S. Troops in Afghanistan.” https://www.newsweek.com/trump-thanksgiving-plans-maralago-1474518 Accessed November 28, 2019.
****Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_lacrosse_case and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_controversies#Judith_Miller (If I can trust that Okrent is quoted correctly)
*****1999. Copyright Carl Feynman and Michelle Feynman. Foreward by Freeman Dyson. Perseus Publications. p. 3.
****** You might be interested in one story of a false report gone really bad, the cause of the Tulsa riots at the end of May, 1921. There’s a photo-journal report at http://www.tulsaworld.com/app/race-riot/timeline.html Accessed November 30, 2019. And you might also be interested in reading Roth, Andy Lee and Mickey Huff, Censored 2020, Foreword by Sharyl Attkisson, available through Amazon as a Kindle Book. https://www.amazon.com/Censored-2020-Andy-Lee-Roth/dp/1609809602/ref=sr_1_1?hvadid=3486133409&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&hvqmt=e&keywords=project+censored&qid=1575117989&sr=8-1
RSS Feed