The Truth, the Facts and “Fake News”
We all want to know the truth. Many of us even live and die to defend the truth. Since there can only be one truth, it should be easy to agree on a straightforward way to arrive at it. Alas, there are other people out there in the world who for some unexplained reason do not see the truth which is visible, even obvious to us. How can it be? More importantly, how to remedy this embarrassing state of affairs?
The answer is simple, by checking the facts! As the late senator Moynihan once said: We are all entitled to our own opinion, but we are not entitled to our own facts”. Politicians and media love facts and we all elevate frequently our opinions to the lofty status of a “fact”. But how do we know? The answer again, is simple, we ask the “fact checkers”. US media love to quote fact checkers, so much so that they hire their own fact checkers for faster access to the unfiltered truth, especially during the election news. It would then seem important for everyone to agree on an indisputably objective standard process by which we can all access the same truth and the same facts. Presumably this process will be grounded in hard science and logic and proven beyond any doubt by mountains of incontrovertible evidence.
Alas, when our media and politicians quote “facts”, which indeed they do often and with the utter conviction, they take a more “laissez-fair” approach and simply resort to quoting “experts” known to them, whether they are “Pentagon experts”, “government experts”, “science experts” or simply “sources” or “scientists”. For some reason these experts (just like fact checkers) often stay anonymous. Surely that is OK, you may argue, who in their right mind would doubt the word of our politicians and media personalities? Upon closer inspection however, it appears that what elevates the subjective human beliefs and opinions to the level of “facts” is simply sheer repetition and the ability to reach large audience by mass media platforms, whether it is CNN evening news program, White House Press Briefing, New York Times front page, Breitbart News web site or Harvard University public releases. This might be acceptable, if these media used some universally accepted method of access to the objective truth. But do they? Does for example CNN news use the same fact checkers that Breitbart News does?
They do not and here lies the problem. Unlike disembodied objective “science”, presumably comprised of pure facts unpolluted by subjective human opinions and beliefs, “experts” paraded on media, even if they are not anonymous, are embodied, flesh and blood human beings, fallible and belief prone. They differ from me or you not in having privileged access to heavenly realm of truths and facts, but in having privileged access to the earthly media platforms owned by embodied, flesh and blood media owners, harboring their own beliefs and so on.
When magnetic personalities of US media stars look straight into our eyes and, through TV or Film cameras indeed into our very soul and proclaim that something is a fact, we melt like butter and are ready to accept unconditionally the brave new reality, so compellingly presented to us. We forget that It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to create these magnetic personalities in the first place. The cost however is a chump change for say NASA (and other industries) given that Matt Damon can show US audiences by “sciencing the hell out of it” how potatoes can be grown on Mars. Matt Damon’s embodiment of “science” is apparently good enough for MIT to hire him to deliver commencement address to 2016 MIT graduates and future leaders of our society. Both the left and the right wing pundits such as Paul Krugman or Sean Hannity command astronomic salaries, which are quite acceptable to New York Times and Fox owners. What media gets in return for its investment are large audiences ready to buy whatever the media is selling.
Alas, more recently the size of those audiences is shrinking. According to 2016 Gallup poll, credibility of US mass media decreased from 50% in 2005 to 32% in 2016 and most likely to below 20% after 2016 presidential elections. Apparently quite a few of US citizens form their beliefs relying on a different media sources today than they did just 10 years ago. But do not worry, mass media have a solution to this “problem”. They claim that these poor souls acquired their new set of misguided beliefs by relying on “fake news”! And who decides which news are true and which news are fake? Mass media themselves, of course, with the help of “experts”. By condemning the “fake news”, our 21st century media personalities moved far away from 1919 Supreme Court progressive justices Brandeis and Holmes spirited defense of the freedom of speech when they wrote “We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death”.
I have come to believe that there is no such thing as pure facts, divorced from human beliefs and that the distinction between the facts and mere opinions is fallacious. In our everyday lives, whether we write a newspaper article, a science paper or a novel, we always write from a specific viewpoint, expressing opinion coherent with our belief system. While this seems like a common sense, since Rene Descartes, western culture and more recently mass media embarked on a quest for the “objective truth” in an effort to replace human beliefs with the “logic of facts”. In reality however they are simply substituting one belief system for another. Most of us are mere mortals, “thrown” in a Heideggerian world of embodied and messy life’s situations, forming biased opinions. Yet we are told that an elite group of privileged “men of reason” in Ivory tower of academia and mass media is able to assume disembodied, god’s point of view with direct access to truth and facts.
This, I argue, is a dangerous illusion of the western man. Beliefs are essential to our existence, society is a human product and at the same time man is a social product. To borrow from Berger and Luckman: “Man in society is a world-constructor. As man externalizes himself, he constructs the world into which he externalizes himself.” In other words, men themselves are the authors of their cultural world. While the idea of an absolute truth is tempting, we may pay attention to Merleau-Ponty’s warning: “As long as I keep before me the idea of an absolute observer, or knowledge in the absence of any viewpoint, I can never understand my situation in the world. Once I acknowledge my viewpoint, my contact with the social in the finitude of my situation is revealed to me as the starting point of all truth, including that of science”. While this may sound less assuring that direct access to objective truth, we should be vary of false prophets offering us easy access to one. Truth and facts are useful, provided that we realize that they are only relative and grounded not in the “objective” reality but in our shared beliefs.
