A few months ago, I discovered the blog known as Slacktivist, written by Fred Clark. I’m not sure how to describe the blog for those who aren’t familiar with it — suffice to say, he writes about issues in journalism, politics, literature and religion with a command of the English language that I have not seen in quite some time. Mainly, I’ve been working through a series he’s been writing since 2003: a scathing page-by-page deconstruction of the Left Behind novels. Not only is the series insightful and well-written, but it is also fascinating for me, as a nontheist, to wade through a ferocious theological battle between two self-described evangelical Christians.
With that in mind, Clark may be a bit out of my league. He has been going since ’03, he routinely gets comments numbering in the hundreds, and he’s referenced by some very prominent bloggers. But this morning’s post, Good news and bad news, touches on an argument that I’ve fought against in many lower-caliber settings, and I suppose I’d be a coward not to do the same here.
Clark writes:
The newspapers’ identity myth cannot be believed by anyone who has actually read a newspaper, yet the myth and the pretense continues. “It’s not our job to say whether the news is good or bad,” the newspapers claim. “It’s only our job to report the truth.”
This claim is both incoherent and disingenuous.
It is incoherent because it is impossible to be committed to the truth without also being committed to the good (and to the beautiful). These things are inseparable. We settled that point way back before Socrates and it has never been unsettled.
The claim is disingenuous because, again, newspapers are constantly reporting on the days’ news as being either good or bad. This is not — as the pretense pretends — a matter of “taking sides,” but of acknowledging them. It is an inseparable and unavoidable aspect of the newspapers’ commitment to accuracy.
The pretense that journalism requires — or even allows — neutrality or indifference to good and bad is just that, a pretense. A lie. A vain lie in at least two senses of the word. It is a lie told out of vanity and arrogant self-flattery, and it is a futile lie due to its nonstop refutation by the newspapers themselves.
Now, I wholly agree with the second claim: it’s disingenuous. I’ve always been mystified by the school of thought that says journalists must hold themselves above the events they chronicle, like a global caste, absolved of the common man’s subjugation to community, to class, to citizenship — to agency. It’s just not something people can do.
We can be indifferent toward the random minutiae of life, but when something is remarked upon in a newspaper, it tends to be, well, remarkable. We consider a work of journalism incomplete if it fails to answer our fundamental question: “why should I care about this?” And to care entails having an opinion, a judgment. That’s not to say that the journalist should prescribe his own judgment for us to adopt. But it is disingenuous to pretend that he doesn’t have one. As Clark says, we can acknowledge “the sides,” even our own, without foisting them on our readers. It’s nothing more than the principle of full disclosure, in its most basic application.
But the other half of his argument completely loses me.
To understand the survival of this daily-refuted pretense, we have to look beyond it to the pretense behind the pretense. This underlying pretense is the claim that we cannot know what is good. Goodness, this claim says, is too diverse, variable and contentious a thing for us to be able to identify or agree upon it. The goodness of good news, it says, cannot be affirmed due to our religious, political, ethnic and economic pluralism. Any notion of goodness is, according to this claim, unavoidably sectarian, partisan and chauvinistic — a subject of constant dispute among factions competing for power and nothing more than that.
…the pretense behind the pretense is incoherent. If we are to assert that goodness is unknowable and that all we have are competing claims to power masquerading as claims of goodness then we have no choice but to conclude the same thing about truth, at which point newspapers would be obliged to pack it in and go out of business.
Sadly, this seems to be where much of American journalism has arrived. The pretense that we cannot know or say what is good or bad has led inexorably to the corollary pretense that we cannot know or say what is true or false.
This is a non sequitur. I don’t even care if I’m contradicting Socrates; it simply doesn’t follow.
A woman has an abortion. Is it good that she exercised her right to control her body? Or is it bad that she presumed the right to extinguish a human life? Or is it good because she may have saved herself and her unborn child from a life of insecurity and destitution? Or bad because we lose all that the child may have contributed to the community?
It’s not both, it’s not neither. The only “truth” here is that a woman had an abortion. And that descriptive truth is in no way threatened by a disagreement over what normative interpretation to apply. We don’t only have “competing claims to power masquerading as claims to goodness.” We also have actual competing claims to goodness. A huge range of honest-to-goodness disagreements over what defines right and wrong. Goodness is indeed not something we can know. It’s something we decide. If even on the basis of the word of God.
I am, of course, invoking the principle of non-overlapping magisteria here. While usually reserved for the relationship between science and religion, what it’s really about is the distinction between normativity and truth. And it infuriates me when someone suggests that being agnostic about a moral issue somehow makes me a nihilist.
I assure you, there is nobody more frustrated by the ability of certain well-known politicians and media outlets to peddle outright lies and get away with it, even be rewarded for it, than me. A paranoid fear of taking sides by speaking facts smothers public discourse as effectively as a pillow. But the answer is not to tear down the distinction between fact and opinion. If it were, then Fox News would be regarded as a paragon of journalism: when Fox reports on conservative victories and liberal defeats, their opinion of its “goodness” is quite unabashed, as much so as the anti-pollution crusader that Clark imagines, “siding with those who understood the meaning of the word ‘waste’ and against those who did not.” We must differentiate between the crusader and the propagandist, and the difference must be based on more than which one we happen to agree with.
Epistemic closure is alive and well. But I reject the notion that its cause is the unwillingness of journalists to draw moral conclusions about the stories they cover. It is their unwillingness to pursue truth at all. Yes, if a reporter refuses to express judgment on a killing spree or a troupe of rescued miners, we would rightfully castigate her laughable phobia towards the slightest risk of controversy. But when a CNN anchor refuses to contrast Mitch McConnell’s stated position on the deficit with the factual, causal implications of his own tax policy, it is more than just a coarse misconception of political neutrality. Such cowardice fails both the standard of goodness and the standard of truth.
If it is an obvious error to report opinion as fact, then so it is to report fact as opinion. The news does not fail because it pretends that one side isn’t better than the other. It fails because it pretends that one side isn’t much stronger, more consistent, and more thoroughly vindicated by rigorous debate. When the truth is known, it speaks for itself.
“Truth is beauty,” they say, and it’s a lovely aphorism. But please, let us not mistake poetry for a logical identity. The more accurately we perceive reality, the more accurately we can predict the effects of our actions, and then we can decide that some of those effects are “good.” This is where the descriptive meets the normative: we observe, then conclude, in that order. Even if we choose not to conclude, the observation — the truth — stands.