Taking Stock: Rules for Myself

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Commentary

“​I had always thought a primary job of the press was to be skeptical of power—especially the power of the government. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, I and so many others found that the legacy media had shown itself to largely operate as a messaging platform for our public health institutions. Those institutions operated in near-total lockstep, in part by purging internal dissidents and discrediting outside experts.”

So begins David Zweig’s report, the tenth in the Twitter Files series. His report shows how Twitter, like other social media platforms and the legacy press, seemed to promote content that reinforced the establishment narrative. At the urging of the White House and government agencies, Twitter suppressed views and even scientific evidence that ran to the contrary.

We live in partisan times. It’s what makes opinion columns and news reporting so predictable. It’s also what makes it hard to have a calm and productive discussion of a contentious issue with a friend or family member who disagrees with you. I will discuss this wider state of affairs in the media and conclude with a few suggestions—New Year’s resolutions for me that may be helpful to others.

How Government and Media Frame the Narrative

MSNBC rejected the political stance of Fox News but mirrored it in appealing to a particular audience and ignoring or ridiculing those of other views. Legacy press such as the New York Times and Washington Post dropped all pretense of objectivity and fairmindedness. They seemed to me to republish the same column many times a day. They abandoned any pretense of balance or fairmindedness in favor of fitting their news coverage as well as their editorial and opinion columns to their predetermined narrative. The New York Times expanded its digital reach as it narrowed its audience to urban, educated liberals. More than 90 percent of that readership identifies as Democrat. Some of its best-known journalists such as Bari Weiss left the paper or were pushed out. In her scathing resignation letter, Weiss condemned the hostile work environment and the paper’s lack of interest in understanding half the population, the half that elected Trump.

As she observes, “a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper [The New York Times]: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.”

It isn’t simply that the press and news media have become more partisan than ever. Some reject the idea of discovering and publishing the truth without fear or favor. The very concept of truth and the duty to seek and tell it is immoral, they say, in view of the critical threat we face from the other side.

The press’s reception of the Twitter Files is typical. There was little coverage of the files’ content, of the evidence that showed how the White House was directly pressuring Twitter to suppress views, including those of top experts, that differed from those of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The focus instead was on the way Elon Musk released the files via independent journalists. And, of course, the message was that “Doctors are exasperated by the persistence of false and misleading claims about the virus.”

The files also show how those who write for the media need to be skeptical—not uncritically accepting and amplifying the current line of public health institutions and the administration.

But it’s also a mistake to automatically believe any alternative view without good evidence and sound reasoning, just because it’s alternative. Despite fierce denunciations by the Chinese regime and by other scientists, Dr. Alina Chang has investigated the lab leak theory of COVID origins (which she finds plausible and worthy of further investigation) as well as the official line that blames bats and Wuhan’s wet market rather than its Institute of Virology. She finds conclusive proof neither of the lab leak theory nor of the official explanation blaming transmission from bat to human via a wet market. But like the authors of other recent studies of COVID origins, Chang notes the absence of any evidence of the animal–human transmission theory despite years of investigation.

New Year’s Resolutions

In this challenging media and press environment, I have formed some guidelines for myself—call them New Year’s resolutions. I intend to follow them—which I have not always done in the past—in my writing and in discussing political or ideological differences with family and friends.

1. Don’t Trade Bullet Points

The first resolution is to avoid trading talking points or bullet points, ones I find or others find in the media, to support an existing view or challenge another’s without taking the trouble to understand or explore either.

If a friend raises what he thinks is a knockdown argument that he finds in the New York Times and I find the standard answer to it in the Wall Street Journal, are we advancing our understanding, or acting like puppets or talking dolls or acting the principal parts in a Punch and Judy show?

2. Examine Underlying Assumptions

Is it not more helpful to see how views on widely different issues cluster together into rival visions of reality? If you’re against all gun control, you’re likely opposed to mask mandates; if you support defunding the police, you likely also support measures that redistribute income. In his book, “A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles,” Thomas Sowell shows that, though the issues we debate may have nothing to do with each other, they predictably cluster together in ways we don’t recognize. The opposing views reflect radically different visions of how the world works. Knowing how a person views drug laws is a good predictor of how he or she views education or military spending.

One Sowell calls the unconstrained vision. Some call it the utopian vision. We associate that with utopianism, with the idea that we can solve problems by reason, unconstrained by human nature or by the past. It emphasizes the good intentions of policymakers rather than the practical results of their policies. In that vision, an enlightened leadership seeks to impose itself on the masses through education and compulsion.

The opposite, constrained vision, assumes that societies develop traditions, laws, and customs based on the experience of generations, in families, faith communities, neighborhood associations, and markets. It implies an attitude of humility and gratitude toward our predecessors, as opposed to one of contempt for the past that C. S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery.” The job of each generation is to learn from the traditions and culture it inherits, to preserve it, and to leave it improved by the wisdom it acquires from its own experience. It learns, preserves, and reforms through what Bari Weiss calls a “process of collective discovery.”

At least we should examine the assumptions we’re making about the proper role of the state or such principles as free speech and religious freedom rather than starting and ending with the politicians and parties involved in a particular struggle of the day.

3. But Is it True?

One way to kill a serious discussion is to ascribe to the holder of the view you oppose a base motivation or to distort his position to make it appear ridiculous or nasty. Can you repeat back to your interlocutor what he’s saying in a way that he himself will recognize as fair and accurate? Can you assume, at least for the sake of argument, that she’s arguing in good faith because she thinks her proposal will best address the problem at hand and not because she’s ignorant, bigoted, or hateful? Can you in the terms of the legal principle, hear the other side (audi alteram partem!) before dismissing it?

You may or may not be right about the motivation of the other (all he thinks about is himself, he doesn’t care about those who are poor, weak, or vulnerable). But do I understand what he’s saying and, in this case at least, is it, in whole or in part, true?

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), one of the greatest minds in the history of the West and of the Catholic Church, asserted, many centuries before the enlightened liberal champion of liberty and tolerance John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), “We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject, for both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in finding it.”

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.