******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
NY Times Op-Ed, Jan. 15 2017
Lessons From Russia: Verify Everything, Don’t Publish Rumors
by Masha Gessen
The year was 2006. A reporter for an independent Moscow newspaper who
had uncommonly good access to President Vladimir V. Putin had written an
article about the president’s affair with a famous athlete. I was the
editor of a monthly magazine and wanted the journalist to expand his
report for my publication.
“I made it up,” he said breezily when I called him.
That could mean several things. He could indeed have made the story up.
Alternatively, he could have been lying when he said he had made it up.
Maybe he had gotten in trouble for publishing it and had to promise to
deny it in order to maintain access to the president. On the other hand,
if it was made up, he had probably secured Mr. Putin’s consent for the
fib — it portrayed the president as the macho man he likes to be. But
then why didn’t the journalist want to do another article on the topic?
Perhaps they both wanted the story to take on a life of its own. I was
going down a rabbit hole. It wasn’t the first time: In my job, this
sense of endlessly unfolding confusion had become familiar.
I had spent years teaching young journalists, on the job and in academic
settings. How many times had I uttered the phrase “multiple independent
sources”? It’s a rule of journalism: Unless witnessed by the reporter, a
fact must be corroborated by two or more different sources — people,
organizations, publications or documents — that did not get the
information from one another. That was a standard I taught and to which
I demanded that my staff adhere.
And yet hearing a fellow journalist tell me that he had made up a story
did not particularly surprise me. That was what much of the work of
journalism had become: a process of weighing probabilities against the
personal stakes of sources in order to form a picture of reality based
on beliefs — perhaps to a greater extent than on facts.
There was, to me, a familiar tone to an exchange during President-elect
Donald J. Trump’s news conference on Wednesday. A journalist for BBC
News asked about the allegations in an uncorroborated, leaked report on
Mr. Trump published by BuzzFeed News the night before.
“As far as we understand it, the intelligence community are still
looking at these allegations, this as false news as you describe it,”
the reporter said. “If they come back with any kind of conclusion that
any of it stands up, that any of it is true, would you consider your
position, would you — ”
Mr. Trump interrupted the reporter to reject the possibility that this
could happen, and went on to rail against what he saw as the news
media’s tendency to lie. “They’re very, very dishonest people, but it’s
just something that we are going to have to live with,” he said. “I
guess the advantage I have is that I can speak back. When it happens to
somebody that doesn’t have this — doesn’t have that kind of a megaphone,
they can’t speak back.”
The president-elect was repeating something that he’d said for months,
and that appears to reflect his perception of reality: News outlets are
his adversaries, and the only way to win against them is to use a bigger
megaphone. Mr. Trump’s war with the news media is fundamentally
different from the tension between most other American politicians and
journalists. Mr. Trump (much like Mr. Putin) thrives on cacophony, in an
environment of ever-shifting realities that makes other people feel
disoriented and helpless.
In the past, Mr. Trump’s fights with the news media have generally
concerned journalists’ factual reporting that has conflicted with the
fog that surrounds Mr. Trump’s view of reality. Mr. Trump, in turn, has
sought to drown out facts with denials and attacks. But this time was
different: A reporter was asking him to speculate about something that
the reporter himself seemed to think was probably false. Mr. Trump’s
version of reality got a boost: There was no such thing as truth, only a
battle of opinions proffered by different actors, each of whom strives
to be loudest.
Speaking to MSNBC’s Chuck Todd the same day, BuzzFeed’s editor in chief,
Ben Smith, explained the decision to publish the report. It had been
circulating among journalists and politicians for weeks, he said, and so
had become an “object that is in play, that is having consequences for
the way our elected leaders are acting.”
Mr. Smith likened publishing the material to quoting conspiracy
theorists who believed that President Obama was not born in the United
States. A key difference, however, was that in the “birther” case,
journalists could say definitively that the conspiracy theorists’ claims
were untrue. They had actual facts to report. In publishing the dossier
on Mr. Trump, however, BuzzFeed stated only that it had been unable to
verify the allegations. It could not provide readers any help
determining the veracity of the report — except, perhaps, the readers’
own opinions.
In the essay “Truth and Politics,” Hannah Arendt pointed out that truth,
unlike opinion, is “beyond agreement, dispute, opinion or consent.”
Truth doesn’t change depending on how many people accept it. Writing in
1967, Arendt observed a worrisome tendency for factual truth to be
countered with opinion and thereby apparently transformed into opinion —
becoming subject to debate. She was worried that facts were being
disputed out of existence. We are now witnessing the same process in
reverse: Dispute is coming first, as though the opinions of a large
enough number of people who found this or that allegation “believable”
could produce facts where none had been observed or verified.
I have been here before. As Mr. Putin consolidated power in Russia, it
became more and more difficult for journalists to report facts. We lost
access to many institutions, while others became progressively less
trustworthy. With the president often lying or obfuscating and with all
of the government brought under the control of the executive branch, we
could no longer look to the courts, the police or other state
institutions to learn or corroborate facts — if we could get anyone to
talk to us or give us documents at all. Reality became squishy.
The same process is gaining speed in the United States. The
president-elect lies habitually. The news media are losing access to
information — not just because the incoming administration is even less
transparent than the outgoing one, and is openly hostile to journalists,
but also because full control of both houses of Congress is allowing the
Republican Party to make the legislative process more opaque.
At the same time, there is a crisis of trust in the intelligence
services: Many people argue that the F.B.I. acted to influence the
presidential election; some (including me) believe the combined
intelligence services’ report on Russia’s role in the election does not
stand up to scrutiny. On top of it all, a large part of the country
appears to have firmly replaced reality with a worldview based on opinions.
Sign Up for the Opinion Today Newsletter
Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists,
the Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world.
There are no ready recipes for dealing with this predicament. The media
scholar Jay Rosen has urged journalists to move to a model that assumes
less access and relies less on “players.” But this cannot compensate for
a loss in available, reliable information that journalists can report.
It seems inevitable that old rules like “multiple independent sources”
will be dropped because they have become untenable. But from my
experience in Russia, I know that this doesn’t end well. What is lost in
the balance is truth.
Masha Gessen, a contributing opinion writer, is the author of “The Man
Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin,” among other books.
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
