THE PROBLEM LISTENING TO THE NEWS

The sources of information on current affairs has become more than somewhat problematic. So much ‘stuff’ is available from so many different outlets, presented with an increasingly personal point of view. There is no information, it would seem, that is without an agenda. The days of ‘Just the facts, mam’ are gone. It has, admittedly, never been easy to present just the facts without putting some element of emotion in the telling. It is less difficult to do it in print and almost impossible to do vocally.  On top of that, there are the inevitable accompanying images under the narrative. But what does one expect?

 

One can say:

1-    The President is stating that many of the ballots counted in this election are illegal and fraudulent.

2-    The President is stating that many of the ballots counted in this election are illegal and fraudulent, without providing any evidence to support his claims

3-    The President in making baseless claims that...

 

One can also say:

‘The Presidents legal action was dismissed’, or, ‘Without any evidence to back up his baseless claims of fraud at the polls, a Judge, appointed by the President himself, dismissed the applicant’s suit’

 

So, what are we to do? On the one hand we had a simple statement of fact, and on the other a loaded statement. The claims are characterised as without foundation, and to emphasise the lack of merit in the claim, the Judge is defined has having been one of the applicant’s own appointees, thereby suggesting that the Judgement rendered is somehow objective and beyond any criticism.

 

Now, as a person with an admitted aversion to this President, I am prepared to accept the slant given to the report on baseless charges, but what about reports on matters of which I have no previous knowledge or specific point of view. Do I dissect every adjective and epithet associated with the information? Or do I believe and accept the information along with the emotions evoked by the language used to convey the information? Do I go with the flow or do I question everything?

 

Now of course, in response to this problem of belief, we have the reporting agency doing what is referred to as ‘fact checking’. Every reported claim is then dissected by the reporter who tells us what is a lie and what is the truth. So and so said x y z, Fact Check = that’s a lie, so and so said a b c, Fact Check = that’s not quite correct, and so on. A lot of articles will even inform the reader/viewer/listener that ‘This article has not been Fact Checked”

 

But therein lies the problem. Who is doing the checking and what elements of the story are being checked? The fact is that the fact checking can carry as much of a slant as the reporting does in the first place. To learn to distinguish fact from opinion is an essential part of the education process. Learning how to think is not about learning what to think. Sometimes a difficult thing to distinguish. There is a very nice little exchange in an episode of The Big Bang Theory, between Sheldon and his Bible bashing mother. She makes a comment about evolution being an opinion. Sheldon responds “Evolution is not an opinion. Evolution is fact” She says “And that is your opinion”. This is the very kind of response one gets from some supporters of Mr. Trump when questioned about some of their beliefs. They believe what he says as much as Sheldon’s mother believes the word of the bible. A very depressing state of affairs. Holding a college degree is not any guarantee of reasoned thinking, but is it any wonder that, statistically (so I am led to believe) most people who voted for Mr. Trump are without a degree.

 

I cannot now recall who made the comment “From the same set of facts, we have Marx, Buda and Christ”. It might even have been Harry Lime, but he was talking about the Renaissance and Coo Coo Clocks. There are of course many other figures who were born of those facts.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The fifty-six men who signed the Declaration of Independence probably all did believe those propositions were self-evident truths, but they were certainly not facts, nor were they true, which is why they were incorporated in the document. Those men wanted them to be true; now, however, by the very fact that they are part of the Constitution of the United States, they are not only facts but the law of the land. The country is still struggling to make them true. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will have a devil of a time trying to figure it out. Assuming they get the chance.

 

So facts and opinions, truth and lies are all very much in the mix of the information we are getting from all those sources spouting across the earth on papers, on screens, over wires and through the air. We need to learn how to distinguish one from the other and form our own reasoned views about what we take in.