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Truth in the News
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21896 |
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Section : |
EDITORIAL
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| Issue
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12 / 1993 |
861 Words |
| Author
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
The theme in Currents in Modern Thought this month deals with bias in the news and the decline in objectivity in reporting. This phenomenon is genuine, but I should like to place it, if only briefly, in a somewhat broader perspective.
There is such a thing as objectivity, but it is not a simple phenomenon. All knowledge involves interpretation, not a direct correspondence between an external referent and an internal representation. Furthermore, no individual could receive all the information in the environment. A mental set determines how one scans for, as well as interprets, information. This can produce misperception, even in the hard sciences, a phenomenon the noted physicist Irving Langmuir documented in his famous pamphlet Pathological Science. Thus, partial and mistaken perceptions and interpretations are inevitable.
These phenomena are social as well as individual. Thus, we tend to perceive and believe what those in our circle perceive and believe. And we tend to select for inclusion those who share our perspectives, although this may involve a kind of drift of the kind that occurs also in genetics.
When I was a young man, I was hired to do the first draft of United States Foreign Policy: 1945-1955 for the Brookings Institution, which then was conservative in political orientation. They thought I could do this in one year by drawing on the previous studies they had done. When I checked a few of the footnotes in those books, they were so misleadingly used that I quickly decided we had to work from scratch. My assistant did a case study of Finland and wrote that the socialists were working with the communists. When I remonstrated that the socialists were vigorous opponents of the communists and that she must be referring to the Socialist Unity crowd, she became incensed, argued that all socialists were the same, and doubted that anything I wrote would be printed, whereupon I began using Aesopian language.
I thought this was the nadir until I began reading the revisionist literature in the sixties. A famous book by Gar Alperovitz claimed, for instance, that the objection by American officials to Stalin's arrest of sixteen Polish underground fighters in the closing period of World War II was part of the effort to produce a cold war and that the American officials privately admitted that the sixteen were guilty of the charges against them. However, as Alperovitz had to have known, they were invited to Moscow for negotiations under a safe conduct that had been arranged with Stalin by Churchill and Roosevelt, and then they
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