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Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Stanford University Professor Glasser on Facts and Truth

At Stanford Magazine, Stanford's own Professor of Communication Theodore L. Glasser asks us to consider this:
The Ethics of Election Coverage: A novel take on objectivity.

We agree fully with Glasser that many people on our planet, also many journalists, glibly pass off their biased personal opinions to the gullible masses as objective and neutral "truthy" thought-making, and that this is a common practice not just in the "election game", but also in academia.

Glasser writes inter alia that citing a person accurately, for example, may not necessarily be truthful in its finest sense (it can be out of context, it can emphasize a meaning never intended, it can be used merely to support the citing person's own twisted opinions rather than to obtain deeper insights, etc.), and we concur fully when Glasser writes, for example:

"What might be an alternative to objectivity, a better way to understand the role and responsibilities of a free and independent press?" . . .

We might describe what journalists write with the same sense of modesty Clifford Geertz uses to describe what anthropologists write: an “intrinsically incomplete” and “essentially contestable” account of the world. We might come to realize that, as Rorty insists, meaning endures in history, not in nature; there are no finally “correct” or “accurate” accounts of the world; all descriptions are interpretations in the sense that everything can be redescribed. We might [describe history] not as "a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts and events that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known truth" but "as a mysterious and malleable thing, constantly changing, not just as new information emerges, but as our own interests, emotions and inclinations change."

And that is the truth!