Truth is a high ideal, but a fragile one. Describing
"unnamed man", Winston Churchill supposedly said:
"Occasionally he stumbled over the truth but he always picked
himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened." A bit
earlier, in The Examiner of November 9, 1710, Jonathan Swift wrote: “Falsehood
flies, and the truth comes limping after it.”
Truth's fragility is understandable. It is an
idealistic notion that presumes truth can be empirically determined and
then remain inviolate. The fault, dear reader, is not in our stars, or
Facebook posts or Tweets, but in ourselves, that we are imperfect.
Scientific or mathematical findings and the like --- findings that can be
subjected to demonstrable proof, may come close to realizing the ideal,
although new knowledge may one day alter such conclusions. Even mathematical
or scientific proof, however, cannot withstand those in denial, e.g.
those who disregard evidence of global warming.
When we venture beyond a disciplined logic, when we shape
the truth with our subjective thoughts, our ever diverse thoughts, truth
becomes something in the eye of the beholder. Our intellectual discipline
to question and prove breaks down. We fall too easily into a willing
suspension of disbelief --- ready to set aside "hard" truth for a
creative variation.
In earlier times, a remark like Churchill's above likely would
have been spoken first to an individual or to an audience of a few or many.
Each listener might take away a different recollection, variations
of what the speaker actually said. Readers here may have participated in an
exercise where a sentence or two is spoken in confidence to one person who is
instructed to repeat that expression to another person and so forth, each
person telling the next what they heard until
the expression has passed around the room. Most often the last person to
receive the message ends up with something entirely different from the first.
As observers, most of us are not trained listeners or observers, so our
recall of what we hear or see is
subjective. Or, we just may try to improve on the original with our own
variation.
So, we have come to rely on "trained" observers
--- writers, reporters, photographers, etc. --- who, like scientists and
mathematicians, strive for disciplined observation and verification for the
purpose of delivering the observation to others. Once there were courtiers
who carried information and other communication between royal courts (and from
time to time became part of court intrigue). There were town criers
who spread the news to the general public.
The distribution of "news" (information) has
evolved with technology. The printing
present allowed us to receive information through publications:
newspapers, magazines, books, and scholarly journals. Radio and television added the broadcast of
information over radio and television. Now
we have the Internet with its wild bazaar of expression from a wide spectrum of
sources – traditional news organizations online, Facebook and Twitter, blog
posts, personal webpages, business websites, etc.
It would be naive to say that these prior and current
methods reporting and delivering information were pure and entirely reliable.
Often, governments control the media and distribution of
information. In such societies, there often is no alternative -- no
competing sources of information to correct or rebut the official
message. It has not easy for the truth to come forward. It is
actively suppressed. People seeking truth must quietly look for it
elsewhere, often fearing discovery and persecution.
In response, free societies like ours have encouraged open
sources for distribution of information. In 1791, the Bill of
Rights was added to the United States Constitution. The First Amendment
squarely addresses freedom of expression in three forms, freedom of religion
(and religious expression), freedom speech (individual expression) and freedom
of the press (dissemination of information and opinion):
Freedom of Religion,
Speech, and the Press
Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise
thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press, or the right of
the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress
of grievances.
Having a right to free expression does
not guarantee that such expression will be truthful. The right
to free expression has not prevented, and often may encourage, false expression.
The right to free expression does provide, however, a mechanism to refute false
information. Unlike totalitarian states, we all have the right to speak
out and assemble and to petition the government to correct or oppose false
ideas. The constitutional guarantee of free speech seeks to foster truth
through diversity of expression, by which, eventually, the truth will
surface. This approach calls upon us to evaluate differing views and
determine their merit, to distill the truth from competing ideas.
In his Supreme Court opinion on free speech, Schenck
v. United States, Oliver Wendell Holmes famously stated: “The
most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely
shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” Commentary on this opinion notes the importance of the word
"falsely":
That “falsely” is what’s doing the
work, both in Justice Holmes’s hypothetical, and in how such a false shout
would be treated by First Amendment law today. Knowingly false statements of
fact are often constitutionally unprotected — consider, for instance, libel,
fraud, perjury, and false light invasion of privacy. That would presumably
apply to knowing falsehoods that cause a panic.
. . .
No, political advocacy harshly
critical of a country, urging a severing of ties to that country, or supporting
a war to destroy that country is not analogous for free speech purposes to
deliberately lying about a building being on fire. If you want to argue that
political advocacy on a subject that’s deeply important to democratic decision-making
about foreign relations, about business ethics, and more should be punishable,
you can do it. Just don’t rely on unsound analogies to a supposed “shouting
fire in a crowded theater” doctrine, and don’t omit the qualifier — “falsely
shouting fire” — that makes the doctrine work.
Note that the First Amendment covers three interrelated
freedoms: religion, speech and press. All three involve expression of
beliefs and opinion. All three are likely to overlap from time to time.
Religious conviction, political spin and editorial commentary often clash.
The border line may be hard to define. Holmes' "falsely
shouting" embodies an element of intent --- the intent to intentionally
mislead by knowingly expressing a falsehood. Religious belief and
editorial opinion involve personal or institutional beliefs --- ones that may
not be universally shared nor empirically proven, but may be
sincerely held.
Freedom of expression depends on the recipient having the
freedom and capacity to accept or reject what is expressed. Expression is
not one-sided, it is interactive, not theoretical.
Today we have an unprecedented outpouring of
expression. We have so many sources for receiving information.
At the same time, we have much confusion over whether such received information
is true. The death of truth is widely proclaimed. The recent Presidential
election illustrates how "social media" (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) has
become more widely used than ever before. Technology and social media not only delivered
information, they became an issue in the campaign.
Hillary Clinton's private server and hacked mail became
campaign issues. WikiLeaks released several installments of
hacked email, making headlines and influencing the election. Such leaks
sparked controversy, debate and continuing investigation. How were servers
compromised? How did WikiLeaks obtain this material? Were the
Russians behind all of this?
This election produced a President fond of tweeting at all
hours about whatever is on his mind. We are still embroiled in questions of cyber security, hacking, wiretapping, and spying. Donald Trump may not
have coined the phrase, but "false news" seems to be one of his
favorite talking points.
. . . Now we have a president
who, when he speaks, spatters the air with unfinished chunks, many of which do
not qualify as sentences, and which do not follow from previous chunks.
Much, if not all, of this is "speech" protected
under the Constitution. Under the shelter of political expression, even
comments closer to "falsely shouting fire" in a crowded theater may
be protected.
The point is not how inarticulate Trump can be and
often is. It is not that he relies on misdirection and mischaracterization
with little or no effort to provide factual proof. It is not that he
seemingly cannot muster thoughts longer than 140 characters. The point is
that many, many people simply accept his expressions as "truth"
without thinking about their substance or going beyond and asking questions
about their meaning and veracity.
We have an unparalleled array of information delivered to us
every day. We are shifting away from a society that largely relied on
established media with proven credibility, standards and practices, and
reputations. You may not always agree with such media on the issues, but
most follow a framework for analyzing stories and opinions and reporting.
Today, if you have a computer or a cellphone, you can use
the Internet and social media and find comment on whatever you want and make
comments on whatever you want. Anyone and everyone can be pundit and there is
no requirement for disciplined thought or fact checking or experience.
No doubt some of us still get (or at least see) one or more
daily newspapers (real paper, delivered to your door). Of course, the
paper versions increasingly are "timed out" --- good for recipes and
movie reviews and obituaries, but usually out of date in the ever churning
twenty-four hour news cycle by the time they hit the doorstep.
Established print publications have web portals (e.g., The
New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Economist).
Increasingly, however, these established media must capsulize their posts to
catch attention of Internet viewers with limited attention span. Not only
does this dilute the analysis in the information distributed, but such
established news outlets must compete in an environment built on brief
attention spans of those browsing through headlines and stories and unwilling
to pay for in-depth journalism. The online dilemma arises: the expectation that everything should be
“free” on the Internet. In response,
many of these professional new sources offer limited coverage on line (e.g. a
certain number of stories per month and then require you to buy a subscription
to receive full cover. This is call
hitting the “pay wall”, which cuts the reader off from reaching more detailed
and informed reporting.
Online sources can still be enormously important in
reporting reliable, up to the minute news coverage. A personal example was the recent terrorist
attack on the British Parliament. Waiting at a doctor' office in
mid-afternoon, my cellphone sprung to life with bulletins and direct reports
--- from established news sources and ordinary citizens. (Meanwhile,
the television in the waiting room only infrequently interrupted the
mind numbing babble of Access Hollywood with news bulletins.)
Online access gives you a far wider range of reporting.
International sources are widely available. With the
London terrorist attack, I could follow online The Guardian newspaper's
frequently updated live feed as the situation developed. (The Guardian does not have a pay wall, but
does ask readers to contribute to support online coverage.)
The Internet also provides more choices, making it difficult
to sort out what is real news, "fake news", social interaction,
general information or just cyber-babble (“gibberish”). Beyond the
reports on social life, recent trips, the concert last night and pictures of
pets, sunrises / sunsets, social media (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,
etc.) can provide person to person reports and debates. In theory,
we have much more information available to us than ever before.
The abundance of information, however, is as much a part of
the problem as it is the solution. Because we have so much information
and anyone can comment and spin the information, we have information
overload. We are left to try to process it. As discussed above, many established
journalistic enterprises simplify their initial distribution of information
online to capture audiences through social media, but if you go to their
website for more in-depth reporting, you hit the “pay wall” cutting off further
information unless you pay.
The Internet has sparked keen competition for
readers/viewers. Many of these information portals may have excellent,
detailed reporting behind the initial cellphone or web page screen,
but the first challenge is getting us to click further. The second
challenge is getting us to stay long enough to read the details. Most of
us have a nervous cyber-twitch to move on, to browse further rather than read
further.
Then there are the less reputable provocateurs,
sensationalists and amateurs trying to attract viewers / readers to sites that
are largely advertising or sites trying to be the "next big thing."
Finally, add the dark side -- those sites that clearly care little about
the quality or truth of what they post, who are exercising the freedom of
expression to gather attention, to tear down someone or something, or just
fabricate material with little or no factual basis (the true "fake
news" or "hate news").
As the audience, we are left to find our way through this explosion
of information. Taken far enough, it can become something like Dante's
journey through Hell. (I will leave for another time the truly "Dark
Web" with its illegal activity (trafficking in stolen identity, credit
cards and passwords for sale and worse).
"Well,
now time passed and now it seems
"Everybody’s
having them dreams
Everybody
sees themselves
Walkin’
around with no one else
Half of
the people can be part right all of the time
Some of
the people can be all right part of the time
But all of
the people can’t be all right all of the time
I think
Abraham Lincoln said that
“I’ll let
you be in my dreams if I can be in yours”
I said
that"
We are not going to turn off all the tweets and
Facebook posts and other voices. Some of these voices are clearly false
--- luring us not homeward toward truth, but to a rocky shore. Some of
these voices indeed may be "falsely shouting fire in a
theatre" and the law one day may reach out and mute them.
Meanwhile, we need to exercise better judgment and a
strong dose of skepticism. We need to judge the sources providing
the information. When major newspapers across the country determined what
news was, we came to identify news sources that we found reliable, that applied
some standards and practices in their reporting. Sources that could be
trusted. They may have had a "point of view", e.g. liberal or
conservative, but that usually could be identified through the paper's
editorial positions and you could take that into account.
There are still major media enterprises that apply standards
to reporting and still have a point of view. The New York Times is
different from the Daily News. The National Review is different from The
New Yorker.
These established publications are now promoting themselves
as a reliable sources of news. Here is a recent pitch from the Wall Street
Journal: "As accusations of facilitating the spread of fake news continue,
our readers can draw comfort and confidence from content that is created,
curated and checked in a real newsroom." This appears on Facebook above a sales pitch to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal at a 50%
discount in the subscription price. A comment received from a reader
reflects skepticism: "Baaaahahahaha, yeah right! What an aloof statement.
You people must be pretty detached from the rest of society if you think people
are going to buy THAT load of BS."
During the election last year, a "truthfulness" chart of "news" sites went
viral on the Internet. It attempted in single page to show the political
spectrum of mainstream media. It is a helpful chart, but ultimately subject to
debate and criticism. What it does not address is the ever growing number
of publications and web enterprises that run the gamut from journalist
endeavors to personal soap boxes.
So what are we to do if we value something approaching
"truth"? How do we make sense of all this?
We start by thinking for ourselves. Read past the
initial headline or web caption. Where did this post come from?
Does the writer have a background that enables an informed discussion of
the subject? Are verifiable facts presented? Is there a different
point of view, expressed elsewhere, that you can check and compare?
Whether you agree with the main point of the article or not, question its
reasoning, its sources, its conclusions. (If you have read this far,
please feel free to apply this criteria to this article.)
This sounds like a lot of work. It is. Would you
be skeptical if you were paying for the information? If you were buying a
car or a house, would you stop and buy the car or house after only seeing a
picture online and a short sales pitch from the seller? Would you want to
know more? Would you want to see the car or house, test drive it or walk
through? Would you want an inspection? When you voted for President last year, did you really
investigate the candidates with the same care you would have used in making a
major financial investment or purchase?
In the end, if we do not think for ourselves, someone else
will. The fault will not be in our stars, but in ourselves. As the
Russian proverb favored by a former Republican President says: "Trust
but verify."
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