Friday, June 30, 2006
Holding The Media Accountable, Part 1 of 2 (for today)
My conversations with local newspaper editors have so far been fruitful. Friday's Eureka Reporter is already online with the following and I'm told today's Eureka Times-Standard will carry another new essay I wrote this week. The two pieces come from different directions and end up in the same place, calling for a community forum on media accountability.
http://www.eurekareporter.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?ArticleID=12587
Self-delusion and ruthless honesty
by Dave Berman, 6/29/2006
Reporter Editor Glenn Franco Simmons recently wrote a provocative editorial about the need to be honest with ourselves and to reconcile the inconsistencies between our actions and ideals. “We’re all guilty,” Simmons wrote, of this “self-delusion.”
I see this common experience as human nature. Our brains seem wired to lie to us in order to make sense of a chaotic and contradictory world. Guest columnist Larry Hourany recently cited “confirmation bias” as one way our minds tend to deceive us in order to fix new facts around the policies of our lives.
I have written about this many times, including in my book, “We Do Not Consent” (free .pdf download: http://tinyurl.com/rlnr2). Countering self-delusions requires more than just honesty. We must practice “ruthless honesty.” This means matching what we say we believe with how we act on those beliefs. Simmons used the example of environmentalists who don’t fully acknowledge their own environmental impact. When we are ruthlessly honest we walk the talk.
While ruthless honesty is a reflective, inward exercise, once understood it becomes very tempting to help others see their own self-delusions. This can be tricky because people will often become defensive if told they are believing lies, much less that they are lying to themselves. The most useful approach I have found relies upon what Donald Rumsfeld calls “known unknowns,” or things we know we don’t know.
Many things we don’t know are actually things that can’t be known — exactly how many stars there are in the sky or grains of sand on the beach. Other things can’t be known because conflicting accounts divide public opinion about what constitutes truth or reality. Merely pointing out such examples can be dicey because some people will want to cling to what they think they “know,” not allowing for the possibility that it is “unknowable.”
So at the risk of Humboldt County’s many gentle, fragile psyches, consider whether we can really be sure about what happened on Sept. 11, for example, when many inconsistencies and scientific impossibilities in the official story have raised questions that remain not only unanswered, but also unasked by media.
“We don’t do body counts,” said U.S. Gen. Tommy Franks about the death toll in Iraq. That alone is an admission that the total is not known, or at least won’t be revealed. The inability or unwillingness of media to investigate, quantify and report means that again we cannot precisely know the human cost to the war.
And the topic I write about most frequently, elections, is the most glaring of all. In the last federal election, and again in the next one, roughly 30 percent of the votes in the country will be cast on paperless electronic machines. If we can’t recount the votes, how can we be sure — and verifiably prove, over and over if necessary — that the reported results match the will of the people?
Even locally, where votes are cast on paper, they are counted by computers using secret programming code. The public, media and even elections officials are prevented from scrutinizing this programming because the machine manufacturer, Diebold, claims a “proprietary” privilege. Space prohibits me from detailing the many official reports and news stories explaining how easily manipulated these machines are. To learn more, go to www.guvwurld.org and click on the Voting section.
For our purpose here, the ruthlessly honest point is that we are placing blind trust in the secret vote-counting machines, the elections department and then media that pass on the elections department’s results without verifying them or stopping to realize that they can’t be proven. Under current election conditions, there is no rational basis for confidence in the results reported. They are, by definition, unknowable.
Throughout these examples, and many others, media are the common component. Of course, it is said, “Don’t believe everything you read” (or see on TV), but what is presented to the public by media has an undeniable influence on our perception of reality. When unknowable information is presented as fact, the public buys into a dangerous fantasy and the media have betrayed our trust.
The creation of a rift in the perception of reality is, by my estimation, the single-biggest cause of what is often called the culture war, or the red state/blue state divide. I actually think of it as a cold civil war. If we want to keep it from going hot, we need to find better ways to communicate. Ruthless honesty is a good starting point, especially if taken from the point of view that not everything can be known for certain.
I am proposing something specific now so that we can take a measured step toward improving this communication. This community would benefit greatly from a forum on media accountability. There should be a panel of local media decision-makers prepared to answer questions, and be held accountable for setting new policies that prevent reporting what can’t be proven or independently verified.
Specifically regarding our elections, on the line is nothing less than the viability of our democracy and the credibility of our media. We must count our ballots by hand to verify the results otherwise determined only by Diebold’s secret counting machines. For media to be believable in reporting election results, we must have them fully supporting and documenting this verification process.
(Eureka resident Dave Berman is a founding member of the Voter Confidence Committee of Humboldt County. He writes regularly in his blog: http://WeDoNotConsent.blogspot.com.)
Permalink:
http://wedonotconsent.blogspot.com/2006/06/holding-media-accountable-part-1-of-2.html
Read or Post a Comment
Dave,
There is another category of "unknowns" -- those that we don't even know we don't know. Those can come from lack of education/information, lack of curiosity, closed eyes, listening to propaganda ...
I think the editorial makes some good points about responsibility. Is the least we can do good enough when we're talking about major issues like global warming and secure elections? We can't afford to shut our eyes (let there be unknowns that we're not aware of) on these two. Our health, welfare and the future depend on us staying wide-eyed and continuing to ask questions. Which the media plays a big part in (or can).
Jane
Permalink to comment | Top of Page | WDNC Main Page