As a scientist, I traffic in data, ideas, models and theories.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how the whole process works. And many scientists and science philosophers have thought about this as well. One inescapable fact: humans tend to duck, deny and fool themselves into believing certain ideas even when data points the other way. It's the little voice in our head that says "I am not biased, it's everyone else." Humans are highly prone to much cognitive dissonance. It's just that in science you must confront this reality head on, all the time.
These tendencies exist everywhere and are held in check by institutional mechanisms. In the sciences and most of academia, this tendency is countered by our most treasured currency, trust. Scientists are known to be very skeptical individuals, this reflects the fact that in the scientific world trust must be earned. We all struggle in the lab to get results and generate theories that can advance the field we're in. These theories and models can then be tested further directly or indirectly. If your experiments are uncontrolled, unreliable, your results do not jive with other published results or your models have very little or no predictive power, you will never establish the trust that is required to succeed. The assessment of a particular scientist's reputation is aided by the many scientific institutions, such as publishers (who need to build up their own reputation), peer reviewers, tenure committees and a constant stream of new data from competing labs. Sometimes a mistake does happen (cold fusion being the best example), sometimes it's deliberate, sometimes it's sloppyness, but in the long run these problems are weeded out, science marches on. Within this framework most scientists learn to be careful with their experiments and their interpretations - after all their reputations are in play and the steady march of science doesn't give a damn.
In other arenas, such as in American political discourse, the cognitive dissonance that plagues human thought is rampant.
What is the difference between these two worlds? Why are they so different? Who is to blame?
A finger could be pointed at the main stream media (apparently now known as the traditional media). They have been seen as playing the role of public critic/skeptic and as the fact finder. However over the last eight years they've mostly played the role of stenographers and cheerleaders. Some may even claim that they've always played this second role - and to a certain extent they may be right. But it's definitely been worse in recent times.
Part of the problem is that those in position of influence within these institutions have forgotten how messy the human mind is. They forget that it is easy to fool yourself - the human mind easily gravitates towards ideas that are convenient. I guess there is no equivalent to the steady march of science. It seems to be all about short term profit and not long term reputation. And recently the whole situation in the MSM has been aggravated by the proliferation of political pundits. This is not only to forget the problems of ideology, but to fully embrace it.
Iraq is the enemy? They've must have helped Bin Laden. The schools are bad? Let the invisible hand of the free market magically fix things. You don't like the president's plan? You must be a traitor. These are simple thoughts that conveniently support the thinker's own inner bias. The pundits who spout these ideas are supposedly experts in every subject, but in the end are nothing but apparatchiks for the powers that be. These hacks are a case study in ideology-gone-wild.
Why did this happen?
For most networks, it's a case of short term gain. Sending professional reporters around the world costs money. Their reports about what is happening out there requires quite a bit from the media consumer - a deeper understanding of world events and an acceptance that issues can be complicated. On the other hand screaming lobotomized pundits don't cost as much, reinforce people's stereotypes (aka misguided ideologies) and get people's emotions stirred (aka higher ratings). And it is easier to use pundits to fill in the 24hr news cycle then to have more reporting. This has been exacerbated by the appearance of Fox News. They took that formula (screaming lobotomized pundits) and elevated it to a new level. On top of it, the network is headed by folks well connected to the right-wing nuts. These folks aren't interested in the truth, they are interested in proving and disseminating their version of reality. And the worst part is that they truly believe that they are correct in their world views. They represent the exact situation that the scientific establishment strives against.
Most of you reading this blog are probably agreeing with the main point of this post, but I'm sad to say that a large chunk of the American public does not share this view. And it's become really bad. The American-right and it's version of the MSM thinks in unison like one giant mad ideologue. So when a clip like this appears, we can hope that this country is slowly regaining its senses.
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The mainstream media and the US government serve the same masters, the multinationals that pay ad revenues and finance the election campaigns. Their vast power allows them spend billions of dollars worth of propaganda while pretending that it is all simple news coverage, while making direct profits off those investments ahead of the vast indirect profits they will later make.
Is Faux News a mouthpiece for the Bush Administration...or it the Bush Administration merely implementing the policies of our corporate masters?
http://davidkorten.org/content/Americandemocracy
Well let me say a couple of things in response. First of all news outlets are after one thing ... profit. Whatever you see or read, it is being driven by the bottom line. In addition, multinational corporations that have their hands on the MSM have an interest in viewing the world in a certain way and these views filter into news coverage (or punditry). But I think that they deceive themselves as much as they deceive others. It's the syndrome of believing things that are self-serving and/or convenient.
There are two forces driving the news:
a) easy, cheep, non-critical punditry - you make a lot of money and don't really inform. You confirm your own warped view of the world. It's infotainment and infoporn. It is spreading your ideology.
b) reputation - good news reporting about what is actually happening out there. It costs more, it is harder to convey, it often challenges your assumptions.
Right now (a) is winning massively over (b). In science it is all reputation - that's how you keep out ideology.
For anyone looking to further their understanding of the workings of the corporate media, I recommend "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. In it, they present what has become known as the Propaganda Model. Despite sounding like conspiracy theory (I can assure you that it is nothing of the sort), I've found it to be an invaluable framework to help explain the bias in the mass media towards state-corporate interests.
Jon G,
I've read that book and at the time it deeply affected me. This episode with Fox news fits neatly into their paradigm. There is a lot of truth in what Chomsky has to say although looking back I now find their theories overly simplistic.
You are completely wrong about cold fusion. It was not a mistake. It was replicated in hundreds of major labs such as Los Alamos, and thousands of papers on the subject have been published, including about a thousand in mainstream, peer-reviewed journals. I suggest you review the literature before commenting on this subject. See:
http://www.lenr-canr.org/
- Jed Rothwell
Librarian, LENR-CANR.org
Alex,
I agree with you in as much as the Propaganda Model isn't a complete explanation for the failings of the mainstream media. There certainly are factors not discussed in Manufacturing Consent - particulary, I think, related to human psychology. (In Chomsky's defence, however, I don't think he has ever claimed that there aren't other factors at play.) My intention in bringing Manufacturing Consent to your readers' attention was to give those who were unfamiliar with these issues but whose interest had been sparked by your post a good starting point to further their understanding.
While I'd like to write more, the office beckons unfortunately, so I'll leave you with another example of what you were discussing. Chances are that you're already familiar with this story but not being a US resident, I don't know how widely this was covered by your media. Even as someone who is familiar with the mainstream media's tendency to be servile to established state-corporate power, I was nonetheless shocked to to see such an overt example of the government dictating the news agenda.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/05/10/analysts/
Where's Orwell when you need him?
An otherwise good article was marred by the blooper:
"Sometimes a mistake does happen (cold fusion being the best example)"
For your information,
Cold Fusion has been verified in top labs all over the world countless times since the (somewhat chaotic) initial announcement in 1989.
Reporting errors of this type illuminate the very point you are making: it is getting harder and harder for the intelligent layman to distinguish all the well-packaged spin and BS propagated by paid talking heads from hard and sometimes inconvenient facts (such as Cold fusion and Peak Oil) that are known to just a few geeky eggheads.
I'm not so sure that these results are so widely accepted, as you claim. Science, as you know, is conservative. It doesn't want to place confidence into theories and models that have a bad track record. The original results were hard to evaluate and there were issues with (as I understand it) the measurements and the standard errors. (i.e. low signal to noise ratio.)
This episode with cold fusion demonstrates that trust is the main currency a scientist has. Although results may reflect reality, if they are dicey, science will require a high standard of proof and reproducibility before it can fully embrace the proposed theory.
This is quite different from other "controversies" such a evolution and global warming, which have withstood the scrutiny of the scientific establishment.