Stupid facts

Posted on August 14th, 2007 by lex

Tawanna Brawley. Duke LAX. Scott Thomas Beauchamp. The narrative.

It is one thing to assemble evidence and from them draw conclusions. It is quite another to start with a conclusion and then assemble supporting evidence. Too many reporters and their editors use the latter technique, because, as John Leo points out in his excellent Townhall column, they find the “story lines congenial” even when the facts – those stupid, stubborn facts – get in the way of “the narrative”:

If anyone ever starts a museum of horrible explanations, the one-liner by Newsweek’s Evan Thomas about his magazine’s dubious reporting on the Duke non-rape case — “The narrative was right but the facts were wrong” — is destined to become a popular exhibit, right up there with “we had to destroy the village to save it.”

What Mr. Thomas seems to mean is that the newsroom view of the lacrosse players as privileged, sexist, and arrogant white male jocks was the correct angle on the story. It wasn’t.

To be sure, this is not a failing exclusively of the newspaperman – we all have our cognitive lenses – but it is fundamental to their job to tell the rest of us what is happening and only then provide context and analysis. It’s also pleasant when the two are separated so that we who draw conclusions can distinguish when we are being informed and when we are being persuaded.

Surely choices must be made: We decline to sponsor newsprint dedicated to flights that land on time. But for stories whose signal value exceeds the noise threshold, the focus should first be on what the reporter knows about what actually happened. Most journalists do this fairly well, others – often quite prominent in their field – much less so. For them journalism is not so much a dry process of collecting events, it is a chance to change people’s minds, to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” to Advance Human Progress along those “congenial” lines of their personal preferences.

But now of course we have novel ways of democratizing knowledge. And, pace Professor John Cole, this matters.

What had been a monologue has become a conversation. Those that had been gatekeepers dedicated to controlling what gets out now find themselves besieged behind their castle walls by those who demand that the narrative be shaped by the facts, and not the other way around. They can no longer hide from us – or if they do so, the must show a great deal more subtlety than they have heretofore: Now we have access to the facts, all of them, even the uncongenial kind.

I like this better.

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