by Curmie

The title for this two-part edition of Curmie’s Conjectures refers to a song by the Irish punk band the Boomtown Rats, “Don’t Believe What You Read,” which includes not only the title admonition but also lines like “I know most what I read will be a lot of lies / But you learn really fast to read between the lines.”  Part I of this exercise attempted to suggest something of the parameters of the problem.  As Jack suggested in his introduction to that piece, it’s not an exhaustive list of the various forms of journalistic chicanery, but I hope it served as a representative sample.

Here in Part II, I’ll attempt the daunting task of examining strategies to “read between the lines” and come at least a little closer to the truth of what happened in a given situation.  So, what to do?  How do we determine if that less-than-objective source we’re reading actually has this one story right, especially if it’s the only source about a particular story?  Boy, do I wish there was an easy answer to this one.  That said…

The most effective means of ascertaining the truth, of course, is to get different perspectives on the issue.  I think I’ve mentioned both here and on my own blog that when I was in England doing my MA (at the time “Don’t Believe What You Read” was released, as it happens), I’d alternate between reading the Telegraph, which leaned right, and the Guardian, which leaned left.  If the former said “X but Y,” thereby suggesting that Y was the more important point, the latter would likely say “Y but X.”  But whichever paper you read, you’d know that X and Y, though perhaps seemingly in opposition, were both true, and both worth knowing about. 

Of course, both the Telegraph and the Guardian were, whatever their political perspectives, both reputable news sources.  That’s a statement that would be difficult to make about many of the most prominent news media in this country in the 2020s.  Equally importantly, as suggested in Part I, the problem is often that we hear only from one perspective. 

There are three possibilities for why this should occur.  One, which is (alas!) probably the least likely, is that both X and Y editors make an honest decision that a story is or is not newsworthy.  Or X media outlet knowingly runs with a story that is either grossly distorted or fabricated altogether.  Or outlet Y, knowing the story casts their team in an unfavorable light, ignores it, hoping it will just go away.  At some point it becomes untenable to try to ferret out the true motives; the truth of the story may be a little easier to discern, although there are no guarantees.

A first stop might be one of those fact-checking sites, but there are two problems with that strategy.  First, those sites are likely to cover only those stories whose national relevance is immediately obvious.  Second, whereas the research they present is often solid, the conclusions, complete with cutesy “rulings” of “Pants on Fire” or “3 Pinocchios” or whatever, often bear little relationship to the facts the site itself has adduced. 

Moreover, as I wrote on my blog a few years ago, “fact-checkers care about context when it suits them to do so; otherwise, they’re the quintessence of literality.” They wouldn’t know a joke if it bit them in the butt, and they seldom care about relevance.  If you’re willing to treat these sites as you (I hope) do Wikipedia—as a source of links to reliable sources rather than as a reliable source itself—you might find them worthwhile… but you’ll still have to do your own work.

The most important thing you can do is to check the internal links in any article, and then to check the links in those links.  Eventually, you’ll get to the first coverage of whatever the story is.  Then look for any updates from that local newspaper or TV station.  The big media outlets tend to think they’ve covered a story if they’ve done a single report.  But the TV station in Dubuque or newspaper in Wichita is more likely to have a follow-up on a local story.

Look for recordings of the full quotation that’s been cited.  Is it word-for-word?  Was it appropriately contextualized in the article?  Was there any indication, orally or visually, that the remarks were intended to be ironic, or even sarcastic?  Is the rest of the speech coherent, whether or not you agree with it?  Do the tables, the photographs, the testimony, on which conclusions are based really prove what is claimed, or merely suggest the possibility?  Is there in fact any correlation at all between the evidence and the conclusion?  Finally, taking into account what we know of the source’s biases, are there enough verifiable facts to give the story credence?

So where does this process take us?  Let’s look at that story I mentioned in Part I, the one about a school de facto selling high school diplomas for a few hundred dollars.  In favor of skepticism: the immediate source, Peter Greene of Curmudgucation, is clearly biased in favor of public education, but really, that’s about it. 

In favor of believing what we read: Greene is up-front about his perspective and has never, to my knowledge, even come close to manufacturing evidence.  He censures both liberal and conservative attitudes, and the AP story he cites includes quotes from the principal of the school in question.  I tend to think the story is at least largely accurate, but there’s a voice (Bob Geldof’s?) in the back of my head telling me to be cautious.  When that voice warns you to question something your perspective wants you to believe, it’s probably a good idea to move slowly.

What’s more certain is that the story doesn’t serve the interests of Fox News, so their viewers won’t know the story exists unless the allegations are proven to be false, or at least wildly misleading: “those awful liberals are making stuff up again.”  Please note: I am not suggesting that right-leaning media have anything close to a monopoly on this decision-making process.

Ultimately, it’s quite likely that we can’t say for certain whether a story is true or false; the best we can do is place it somewhere on the continuum from the certain to the impossible, and to have a provisional answer to how important the revelations are if they are, indeed, true. 

All of this takes time we may not have in abundance and effort we may not choose to expend.  I was about to suggest that, at least as a preliminary tactic, we heed the Boomtown Rats’ advice as we, like Diogenes the Cynic (that’s some artist’s rendition of him in the image above), continue our search for that elusive honest man.  Then I remembered that the famous story about Diogenes distorts what has become his signature line: the Greek source text makes no mention of “honest.”  (It’s sort of, but not necessarily, implied.) And then I realized that there’s probably no more apt demonstration of the problem.

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