Sunday, May 23, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: 'Find out the objective truth'

A.G. writes in from San Jose, Calif.:

"Hi, Vin,

"In last week's column, Alan Korwin said: `The widespread media notion that if someone says something it's printable news and factual is complete abrogation of responsibility. The idea that a statement, inaccurate on its face, still deserves the supportive treatment this story got is the death knell of any credibility for the media. ...'

"(Some argue) the job of the press these days is not to print or publish the truth, but to be `objective.' Therefore, if someone quoted in a story says something that is palpably false, it's not the job of the news organization or reporter to point this out. Their job is to print or publish `all sides of an issue' and let the public decide.

"My question is, how are we to decide if we are never told that a `fact' is untrue? Most of us are too willing to believe that any piece of information in a news story has got to be true, otherwise they wouldn't publish it. It then comes down to who you choose to believe. That shouldn't be the way that rational people make decisions about anything. There is objective truth, and the job of the press should be to find it, and report it, period."

I replied:

My colleagues here in the news biz have it part-way right.

It's not usually possible for a reporter -- who's only human and can't be an expert on everything he or she is sent out to cover on short notice -- to know the truth with certainty.

So if reporters never reported anything except what they already believed to be true, the advance of knowledge would be considerably slowed, since new ideas would rarely gain a hearing.

Who in his right mind would have reported the initial claim that large and small objects fall at the same speed? Intuitively, doesn't it seem like heavier objects should fall faster?

Since it's hard to ever know the "complete truth" (without the benefit of some centuries of hindsight), it's usually best to present all sides -- even the seemingly wacky ones, properly attributing who said what -- and allow the weight of evidence to gradually accrue.

Yes, that imposes some responsibility on the reader to pay attention. Life is an ongoing final exam to determine whether you're paying attention, as my old schoolmate who jogged into traffic while wearing headphones found out. Sorry.

Those who had purposely infected themselves with the milder disease known as cow pox claimed to be able to work in the smallpox wards without dying? The correct answer was to run their far-out claims of "immunity through vaccination" alongside the warnings of those who proclaimed they'd soon be dead. Keep checking.

If Don Rumsfeld says everything is going fine in Iraq and the editor doesn't believe it, would we want him to say, "Don't run the Rumsfeld remarks -- I think he's lying and we only run statements we find credible"? No. (For one thing, our newspapers would be a lot thinner.) I want to hear what Mr. Rumsfeld has to say. Then run enough first-hand reports from the front to allow me to reach my own conclusion about his truthfulness.

When the system breaks down is when lazy or smug reporters fall into the trap of assuming there are only "two sides" to an issue -- that quoting Bush and Kerry will always give you the full range of available analysis.

The problem is the Republicrat and the Demopublican may both want to raise school taxes to win the endorsement of the teacher union -- so who does that leave to argue that the government schools are actually rendering each generation progressively stupider and less literate, that the nation was more literate and more freedom-loving before the current "public school" institution was imported wholesale from totalitarian Prussia by Horace Mann and the gang in the 1850s, that the proper solution might be to close them down entirely?

(It leaves New York state teacher of the year John Taylor Gatto, actually. And Isabel Paterson. And Marshall Fritz.)

The problem arises when we try to get our mainstream press to run serious, in-depth analyses of the positions of people who contend the public schools do more harm than good; that government-mandated pertussis vaccinations and thimerosal do more harm than good; that HIV does not and could not possibly "cause AIDS" (see esteemed research scientist Dr. Peter Duesberg); that high tax rates and the welfare state they support do our society -- and especially the poor -- more harm than good; that the income tax and/or the drug war are unconstitutional as currently enforced (and federal judges are viciously wrong when they won't allow juries to hear extensive presentations of those constitutional arguments in their courtrooms), etc.

The common wisdom is that it would be irresponsible to give any lengthy hearing to those arguments since, "That's all black helicopter conspiracy nonsense."

Ah ... but what happened to "just give the readers the full range of views and let them decide"?

What happened is that the mainstream press is often deciding for us what "the facts" are ... and doing it largely unexamined, based on "what everyone knows." Pretty much as you started out demanding, A.G.

It all sounds fine, until you stop to think that three centuries ago, "everyone knew" diseases were caused by too much bathing and fresh air, and the best way to cure sick people was to "rebalance their humours" by draining them of several pints of blood (that's how they killed George Washington).

Yes, A.G., "rational people" have to make decisions by weighing conflicting views. It's when you trust an "expert" to tell you only what he or she has decided is "the objective truth" that you're going to be in trouble.

Can I interest you in a couple spare tickets on the unsinkable Titanic?

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco Killers" and "The Ballad of Carl Drega." His Web site is www.privacyalert.us.