Why not a loyal opposition?

Jay Rosen has some interesting thoughts about an exchange between Alan Feuer's alter-ego "T.R." (this reporter) and Bob Franken of CNN. Feuer's book is a remembered tale, not hard journalism. As such, Franken says the story is not wholly accurate, but mostly. He clarifies. The details can be found on Rosen's J-School blog, Press Think. Rosen discusses the skepticism of journalists and the Franken quote (in clarification) that "When I’m reporting, I am a citizen of the world."

I will make several observations from the perspective of my salon: skepticism doesn't mean sustained disbelief in the face of contrary evidence, and the press needs to learn the theory of the loyal opposition.

Journalists seem to frequently mistake skepticism for incredulity. Putting aside philosophical skepticism (which argues that we cannot know anything reliably) journalists seem to argue for a professional skepticism. The most common of these is scienticfic scepticism, which holds that ideas should be regarded as false until subjected to the scientific method, generally by reproducable results. Of course any discipline with a method of seperating truth from falsehood can argue a professional skepticism. Historians have a method for interpreting documents to seperate the true from the false (we might say the reliable from the unreliable, but we agreed to put philosophical skepticism aside). Such a method must be a critical method capable of satisfying skepticism by revealing what is. (Let's also put aside academic skepticism, and acknowledge any work will be open to criticism because the consultation of this or that source will better nuance any work.) Much of journalism seems to proceed without any critical method at all. Some of it consists of reportage, some of punditry, and some retelling of the spin of some interested party. Reportage is fine for the local fire at the lumber mill. Started at 2:50 AM, firemen at the scene at 3:14, three alarm, such and such vehicles present, time spent fighting the fire, any specicial techniques or devices, and so on. Punditry is naught but opinion, sometimes learned, sometimes not. Its never news, its always commentary. Acting as the outlet for someone's spin is just substituting someone else's opinion for your own (or finding someone else to voice your opinion for you.)

One of the criticisms of balanced reporting is that it often relies on nothing more sophisticated than the principles of reportage, tell both sides. Typically this tells us next to nothing. Is either side credible? Can either statement be falsified? If both statements appear true, how can they be reconciled? Suppose one wants to cover the Debra Burlingame criticism of the International Freedom Center at the WTC site. Like most contraversies, its a conflict of values and world-views. We might begin by testing to verify that both sides have a verifiable set of facts, or when discussing each other, have the same set of facts. Once we have that established, we are left with two different sets of values and world-views. One side, the Freedom Center consultants, argue that 9-11 was caused by injustice, and that the cause of injustice is earlier injustice, because as descreibed in Uncle Tom's Cabin, injustice harms both the perpetrator and the victim of injustice. One of the great arguments of the abolitionists was that slavery turns good people into cruel masters by the corruption of power over other people. Critics argue that responsibility need not be so diffuse as this. A specific event has specific as well as general causes. I am assuming that this second argument is the more common and needs less explanation. It sees a proper memorial as focusing just on the WTC events and its immediate causes, and these other, broader causes belong elsewhere or nowhere. Rather than just giving both sides a money quote and calling yourself done, or worse yet, depicting one side as sensible and rational and the other side as crazed lunatics, is terribly unsatisfying, because it explains little or nothing.

As a historian, I assume everyone is rational, until they prove otherwise. So when I see some action that strikes me as odd, my first instinct is to understand what set of ideas the person has organized to result in such a view of things. As such arguments always (or nearly so) come down to a set of assumptions and a method of organizing those assumptions. Thus I have a method that forces me to judge everyone to be sensible people until the prove otherwise (such as "my neighbor's dog told me to kill blondes and their boyfriends.") I don't have to agree with them, only understand that with a certain set of assumptions, their conclusions are reasonable. For example, I contend that farming is difficult on mountainsides because of erosion. If someone believes that the mountain has a spirit, and the spirit kills the crops, its a reasonable explanation of the effects based on an assumed cause (animism). If such a person asks the river spirit for permission to cross the river, they have a world-view that leads to a rational approach to such problems as where to farm and how to avoid drowning. Again, I have my own solutions to these problems which are based on an alternate set of assumptions. This is the difference between "I'm right and you're a reasonable person who is in error," and "What are you, an idiot?"

If journalists are going to be able to cover people in such a way that they recognize themselves rather than the MSM characature of who they are supposed to be, they need a reliable method of discovering what is and what is not. When I was in grad school, we had a required six hours of historiography. In one of the two semesters was an MA student in the J-school who was impressed at how much we spent thinking about our method, various sub-methods, and analyzing and criticizing them. Questions of how we selected good interpretations and good method from those that were poor or mis-applied were important to us as professionals in training. Other contacts I have had with people in J-schools or as practicing journalists confirm this sense that journalists lack a method and don't give it much thought. They offer some good reasons why such a thing is missing, and its hard to argue with the speed of the news cycle in short-circuting any in depth analysis. My own suspition is that if a method were in place it would not slow down the news nearly as fast as it would take veteran journalists to stop and begin applying a method now. Learning would slow things down. Apllication of an already learned method would have a much smaller effect.

Loyal Opposition will have to wait.