The Truth Problem
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It's August! At last, the month of my birthday. It's a little-known fact, but the month of August is actually named after the first Roman emperor, Augustus Gloop, who celebrated his rise to power by commissioning a chocolate river that was occasionally used to take out political enemies.
In case you didn't realize it yet, the sentence you just read is a lie. Augustus Gloop is a character from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and he... was not very lucky with chocolate rivers. But it's apt to start a blog post on truth with a blatant lie.
I've mentioned before on this blog that my dream career is journalism. Truth is something that I value deeply and I want to spread information without giving people false impressions.
The question for me is, where do you draw the line between a lie and something misleading, intentionally or not?
If you define a lie as anything that deviates from the truth, there are two places where you can go wrong. There are two sides involved in communication: the person communicating information, and the person receiving information. Journalists fall into the former category. If the receiver ends up with false information, either the person communicating information didn't convey it properly, or the person receiving information didn't process it properly (or both).
From the perspective of the person communicating, it's relatively easy to make sure blatant lies aren't being passed on. It's much harder to control for what the receiver is concluding from the information given to them, even if the receiver doesn't have any mental biases related to the information. That's because language is imperfect, and words/sentences can easily be misinterpreted.
That's before you consider that it's up to the communicator to decide what information deserves to be passed on and how it's passed on. The communicator will have their own mental filters and personal views, which can easily affect the receiver's perception of the information. It's impossible to completely separate personal convictions from the information being communicated.
Which leaves journalism in a weird position. Ideally, we would like to be communicating only truth with appropriate context and an accurate narrative. In reality, that's not perfectly possible, which seemingly leaves journalists with no ethical high ground.
And there's a deeper problem...
The Deeper Problem
Narratives are the currency of journalism. You want to be able to tell a coherent story from start to finish, and for good reason, since otherwise you'd have a steaming mess of haphazard information. Narratives provide the structure of a story, and more than that, they give a story a unique angle.
The downside of narratives is that they only show a few perspectives. Space is always a constraint for news stories, which limits how much detail and nuance a story can go into. Narratives are kind of like a word search: once you're shown a word within the otherwise meaningless jumble of letters, it's hard to go back to seeing it as part of the jumble. You just can't be shown a narrative and then detach it from the lens that you perceived it through; the narrative is presented as the truth.
And that's just for pure news stories. Any time the writer's opinion is involved, you can also expect an argument (or thesis, if you like) of some kind. This naturally biases the writer toward not discussing information that contradicts their argument. Even if they did attempt to dissect the nuance of the situation, they'd end up spending a disproportionate amount of time talking about why the other arguments are all wrong and why their view is the correct one.
(This is actually something I've thought a lot about for my own blog. I was very idealistic about providing nuance in some of my first posts and spent a lot of time qualifying my arguments to show all the nuance. But eventually, I reluctantly accepted that it just wasn't feasible and I needed to limit my digressions.)
Now that I've talked about why I've been limiting how much time I spend qualifying my arguments, I'm going to immediately violate that and qualify the point I just made.
The Associated Press does a great job of showing multiple perspectives without necessarily favoring any of them or succumbing to narrativization. If someone told me I could only read a single news source for the rest of my life, I would pick AP, and it wouldn't even be close. It's certainly not accurate to say that all news organizations are limited by narratives.
Then again, aren't some narratives worth pushing? Does the need for a diversity of opinions make it ethical to include offensive or hateful perspectives, potentially legitimizing them in the process?
I think that, as a society, we need to make sure we're not accidentally legitimizing perspectives that run against our core ideals, like the equality of humans. Yet it's just so hard to agree on what we should take as axioms and what should be subject to healthy debate.
But that's not a question for this blog, because I'm still committed to avoiding politics.
Regardless, these are tough questions and all options seem to be imperfect. It's a reminder that narratives do have benefits but that even a narrative about narratives deserves nuance.
Supposedly a "Man in Black Suit Holding White Printer Paper" but really just a random image when I searched up "truth" that looked cool; picture from Pexels
Truth, the Epilogue
Given the apparent impossibility of perfectly communicating information, context, and perspectives, all while being ethical, it would be easy to lose hope in journalism and its ability to communicate truth.
But even if perfection is impossible, that's not exactly unique to journalism. It's also hard to deny the value that journalism creates in holding power accountable and creating an informed populace.
All we can do is strive to spread the most truth possible while balancing the ethics of how we present it. Even if perfection is impossible, we have to rigorously stick to our guiding morals while still doing our best to heed other considerations like space and the ethics of certain narratives. It's a tricky balance to navigate, but I'm optimistic that it can be accomplished.
Thanks for reading, and I'll see yinz next month!
~ Coruscant
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