Making News, Making History

The sorry state of journalism is often portrayed -- in particular by media elitists, to the extent they acknowledge it -- as a recent development; one that calls into contrast the current state of affairs with some imaginary 'golden age' of purely objective reportage. My own suspicion, however, is that good journalism [1] has always been a rare thing. Journalists, and more especially those who have employed them, have yoked the facts of human events to existing dogma -- to prevailing orthodoxy -- and to liberal political agendas.

Are things worse now than in earlier times?  I cannot say with certainty, but it seems to me that institutional media have, in the last decade, abandoned all pretense to objective reporting even at considerable costs to market share -- perhaps with the expectation that the liberal establishment will save their financial bacon.



To set the stage for my argument I want to make a distinction between journalism, on the one hand, and reporting on the other.  A journalist is one who makes his living by "writing or editing public journals..." [2], and one whose work is almost always subject to the strictures of a publisher's scrutiny.  A reporter, defined in a minimalist way, is one who simply records facts and is accountable for the veracity of his work.  One might point to a recorder of meeting minutes, which are verifiable by meeting attendees.  If he errs, meeting attendees will object, and corrections of omissions and inaccuracies will be written into amended minutes.  In this narrow context we may find the most "objective" [3] reporting that is possible.  But most news reporting is necessarily a different matter.


First, most readers of wider news accounts will not have had direct experience of the events described.  Unlike the example of reporting meeting minutes, verification requires considerable effort if it is possible at all.  More importantly, what media reporters cover may be enormously complex, requiring not only analysis but exposition in the form of a consistent narrative.


The Narrative Fallacy [4]

This (closely associated with "illusory correlation") asserts that there is in human beings a deep-seated psychological need to organize and summarize facts, experiences and observations into a coherent narrative or story so that they "make sense" to us.  While these narratives may be mostly congruent with their elements, they are often often skewed by prejudices, expectations, dogma and dominant memes.  In other words, our narratives often coerce facts into stories that seem correctly to explain them, but in fact do not.     

Model: media reporting. How many of us have been directly involved in a newsworthy event and subsequently read, heard or seen accounts of it that seem to have -- at best -- only the most tenuous relationship with the facts involved?  And then, with head-scratching bemusement tried to reconcile the event with the account?

Besides the limitations inherent in the narrative fallacy and the complexity of events themselves, reporters -- even those who in good faith try to adhere to the standard of objectivity -- usually work under heavy constraints.  Time allotted for investigation, deadline pressures, conflicting editorial priorities and policies, (often) failure of insight into their own assumptions and prejudices in combination with inadequate knowledge and training are but a few.

It's my belief -- based on my observations of what seems to be a growing, systemic contrast between reportage and fact -- is that most reporters are far more concerned with their careers, which is to say pleasing their editors and publishers,  than with the merit of their work product.  These are the practitioners who arrive on the scene of  'breaking news' armed with recording devices, ambition, laziness and devotion to elitist memes and agendas.

Making News, Making History

If the reader is willing to accept, even in part, my argument regarding the serious fallibility of news reporting, he will begin to understand the pernicious effects on the writing of history, which is largely -- though not exclusively -- based upon newspaper (and more recently radio and television) accounts.
Trouble is news accounts have almost always been at variance with one another in every period.  How does the historian reconcile or choose among them?

I would submit that -- like journalists/reporters -- historians are more or less subject to the narrative fallacy, and, further, more or less honest and ethical; more or less concerned with their careers at the expense of accuracy.  It seems to me that contemporary (and earlier) historians are more successful to the degree that their work conforms to dominant liberal memes and the received learning that has shaped them.  Their work is more likely to be endorsed and promoted by academe and liberal media.  I am not asserting that historians cynically contrive their writing to conform (though perhaps some to), but that is more likely that as legatees of modern universities their thinking already conforms. [5]

Which returns us to the use of reporting in periodical references and the narrative fallacy.  It seems to me that the liberal historian will be led to select those source documents that support the liberal narrative.  Here we are most vulnerable to conditions in which ideology is likely to trump facts.


Trouble is much of our history uses selectively chosen newspaper references to text-proof the historian's prejudice.

I am uncomfortable with the thought that future history may rest on foundations laid by the New York Times.

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1.  By good I mean work that has a command of relevant fact, featuring informed and astute observation.  Regarding past glories of journalism, consider a few of the gross and pernicious errors fostered on a gullible public by America's newspaper of record.
2.  From etym[ology]online, which I regard as an invaluable resource.
3.  It can be argued that true objectivity, like freedom from error, is not humanly possible; still, if we set it as a standard, we may not come too far short.
4.  The "Narrative Fallacy", is most closely associated with the ideas of  Nassim Taleb in his book, The Black Swan. 
5.  I'm inclined to believe that "notable historians" would likely not be notable if they didn't conform to liberal orthodoxy.