The Truth is Out There

“All around the world we are subjected to 3 or 4 huge news distributors,” the letter began, “and one of them—as you well know—is CNN.” The missive, from a Brazilian named “Marcio,” revealed that the CNN footage of Palestinians celebrating in Nablus after the attack on the World Trade Center was actually recycled video taken during the invasion of Kuwait in 1991. According to the letter, the network, now part of global media conglomerate AOL/Time Warner, had reported the false story and aired the old footage knowing the effect it would have on public opinion and America’s willingness to go to war.

The letter, which was hosted by leftist news site indymedia.org and is now making the rounds on the Internet, would be more shocking if it did not appear to be completely, unequivocally false. For one thing, the invasion of Kuwait took place in August of 1990, not 1991. For another, journalists for the Associated Press and Reuters have written about the celebrations and taken similar footage and pictures. Several journalists have had their lives threatened by militia groups for covering the story, and the Palestinian Authority has confiscated some pictures and equipment to back up Chairman Yasser Arafat’s claim that the celebrations included “less than 10 children in East Jerusalem”—which only makes the hoax more disturbing. Of course, I didn’t watch the two clips side by side, and maybe CNN, against every institutional interest it possesses, used the old footage anyway—but I wouldn’t put money on it.

The power of news organizations like CNN is immense, and no one who pays attention to the news can avoid the nagging doubt that one is being duped, that the networks’ influence is being used to promote a hidden agenda. Journalists are human, after all, and have senses, affections, passions—all the things that lead us to dissemble or to distort the truth.

Yet dealing with specific allegations of media bias is exceptionally difficult. Hidden bias, after all, is by definition unapparent. When someone describes a news story as biased—in interpretation, selection, wording—it often means that it conflicts with what the speaker believes to be an accurate presentation. During the Lewinsky scandal, conservatives were sure that the protection of the liberal media had kept President Bill Clinton in office, just as Clinton’s defenders spoke of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” that was keeping the scandal alive. Without a method to employ, however imperfectly, in pursuit of objectivity, the concept of bias becomes less of a tool for seeking truth than a convenient way to ignore evidence whose implications one resists.

The idea of objective news coverage doesn’t come from authority alone, or from journalists’ profound moral superiority over the rest of us. Rather, it comes from accountability and the opportunity for false information to be corrected elsewhere, something lacking in countries without a free press; from the comparison of information from different sources with different interests; from requiring extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims; from providing a forum for criticism and being willing to accept it.

One would think that college students who spend four years learning “approaches to knowledge” would be familiar enough with these methods to be suspicious upon encountering the hoax—or at least would check their sources. But some of them, less trusting of major media outlets than of a pseudonymous Internet post, bought it hook, line and sinker.

I’m not entirely sure why, but I got an inkling during my sophomore year in Historical Studies A-13: “China.” I don’t remember what material was discussed in the section devoted to bias in history; perhaps the journals of a court eunuch, a low-level bureaucrat or a scholar frustrated by failure in the exams. In any case, it was quickly resolved that all the sources before us were biased, fundamentally so. I remember feeling surprise at how easily 20-year-old students—many of whom had never taken a college-level history class—disposed of the thousand-year-old documents on the handout and in the sourcebook, laying bare the writers’ deepest assumptions and secret agendas.

If these sources were all that many of the students knew of hundreds of years of Chinese history—they were certainly all I knew—what was the use of calling them “biased”? So officials may have preferred a powerful bureaucracy; did that disprove their contention that the war was the Emperor’s fault? Without additional sources to compare these to, without the ability to use them constructively in forming historical judgment, the charge of bias was no more than what Isaiah Berlin termed a memento mori, an expression of human fallibility and error with no historical content. Or, to quote Berlin once more: “One cannot cast doubt on everything at once, for then nothing is more dubious than anything else, and there are no standards of comparison and nothing is altered.” Arguments are made and response papers get written just as before, with a small offering at the shrine of bias just before the concluding paragraphs.

What goes unnoticed in these discussions is that assertions of bias, as with all historical interpretations, depend on very general assumptions about the way humans think, act and write—that “people generally act according to their own interests,” “those without power envy those who have it,” “men seek honor as well as riches.” Those among us who view bias as an absolute bar to objective judgment would shrink from making such universal claims on the residents of a faraway place and time. Yet the ease with which accusations of bias are made instead makes this pop psychology the highest authority.

Human beings are driven by all sorts of passions and base instincts, and some of them lead one to put pen to paper. Perhaps in writing this very column I was seeking to curry favor with professors or marginalize threats to my worldview, moved by some denizen of the dark unconscious. And perhaps in reading this column in context with other sources one should keep these interests in mind.

But there is a fundamental difference between such natural skepticism aimed at discovering the truth and the deep distrust of the “regular” world that invents for ourselves new myths—the kind of “X-Files” mentality that makes conspiracies ever more believable the more fantastic they become. The former, always imperfectly realized, is a difficult path to uncertain knowledge. The latter, unfortunately popular in our times, is nothing but a quick route to feelings of superiority, at least compared to the benighted masses who still believe what they saw on CNN.

Stephen E. Sachs ’02 is a history concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears regularly.