A while back, I read a Letter to the Editor in my local newspaper deriding the paper for its biased coverage of the news. The writer went on the accuse the paper of presenting "Fake News," defining that label as the practice of giving emphasis to or being selective in the presentation of events so as to assign or support a certain understanding of, or conclusions about, those events. The writer then went on to demand that the news be presented objectively, without bias, so that he, and he alone, could then then determine for himself the meaning and significance of the events being presented.
Where do I begin??????
Neil Postman, that great commentator and critic of American culture has warned that the most dangerous program on television is the 6 O’clock News, because it represents itself as being true. To which I am quite confident that the person who penned the aforementioned Letter to the Editor would add a hearty “Amen!” The only problem is that Postman said this back in 1985, back when we all got our news from the “Big 3” – ABC, NBC, CBS – and the reassuring personages of David Brinkley, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Peter Jennings, back before “Fake News,” back in the “good ol’ days” when the News was still “true.”
Or was it?
In his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Neil Postman argues that television news has never been true, in part because “truth” is more like a commodity that is used in the service of TV’s real purpose – to entertain us. Of course, in 1985 this was not all that apparent to us because we all got our news from the same three network news sources and they all pretty much said the same thing. But today, with the much diminished market share of network television and the advent not just of cable news and Fox News but perhaps more significantly the proliferation of information sources over the internet and social media, it’s become harder to ignore the disparity of information between news sources and harder not to conclude that some of them must be biased, if not outright untrue – Fake News! (Just not the news source that I watch/read/listen to. Right?) So, how is it possible that various news sources, looking at the same news item, can tell completely different stories. And how can you tell which one, if any, is “true?”
Let me suggest an “Answer.”
First, there is such a thing as Fake News, but it’s NOT what the author of the of the aforementioned Letter to the Editor described it to be. It is not bias, or “slant,” or opinion. Instead, Fake News is intentionally constructed and disseminated false information. It’s often conspiratorial in nature, like “Pizzagate,” or National Enquirer type headlines like “The Pope endorses Donald Trump for President.” (After a bit of quick research, I could not find a single case in modern times where any Pope has endorsed any political candidate!) But this isn’t really the problem because, for most of us, this kind of Fake News easy enough to spot, and discard. But what about the rest of the news?
Postman is right to doubt the objectivity of television news and, by reasonable extrapolation, the objectivity of news by all of the newer electronic mediums, principally because of their business model – maximize profit and/or market share – combined with what he calls our “insatiable appetite for being entertained,” for being amused. He writes:
I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville. (Amusing Ourselves to Death)
Essentially, the media gives us whatever we are eager to read/watch/listen to and, with the increasingly segmented market and our increased sophistication in the use of algorithms to match information with these markets, the variance in the news that reaches us as individuals can be quite significant.
But this variance alone doesn’t quite answer the question of Fake News. After all, the fact that I like chocolate ice cream and you like vanilla doesn’t mean that vanilla is “fake”; It just means that we have different tastes. So, why don’t we come to the same understanding when it comes to the News?
I believe it’s because we don’t understand Objectivity and Bias.
Going beyond Postman and taking into account the more contemporary work of people like Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow) and Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion), I want to suggest that objectivity is an illusion, that bias is unavoidable and, perhaps, even helpful.
First, let’s look at the News itself.
Consider for a moment the coverage of some news event, maybe a “terrorist shooting” in Paris. There were lots of other shootings across the world on that same day – a soldier shot a civilian in Yemen, a Police officer shot a black man in some US city, a drug lord shot the son of another drug lord in Central America, a husband shot his wife in the community next to yours. And yet, the News CHOSE to cover the shooting in Paris and not the others. Why? Because someone made a conscious or unconscious decision that the Paris shooting was MORE IMPORTANT. This is subjectivity, this is bias. More over, once in Paris, the camera operator pointed the camera in a specific direction and the commentator interviewed specific people, asking specific questions. This too is subjective, this too is biased. In fact, to approximate objective News coverage would require the random selection of a location, camera direction, interviewees, and interview questions – or no questions at all. It would require that the News be nothing more or less than observation of randomly selected events at randomly selected places and times. This might be objective, but it would not be helpful.
“Just give us the facts!” we say, but therein lies our greatest cognitive error: We believe that there are facts to be given. As the British mathematician, science historian, and author of the book “The Ascent of Man” Jacob Bronowski explains:
One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the material world. . . . [but] One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable. There is no absolute knowledge… All information is imperfect.
Then, let’s look at us, the people watching/reading/listening to the News
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Things are, for each person, the way he perceives them.
- Plato, ~427-347 B.C.
Each of us likes to believe that we’re objective, that we approach the world without bias, without prejudice, that we attend to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. In fact, this is what the author of our Letter to the Editor is asserting he is capable of and demanding that he be given the objective facts necessary for him to do so. But this isn’t as easy as it sounds. As researchers like Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Haidt convincingly demonstrate in their writings, we as humans are amazingly resistant and even willfully blind to any information that conflicts with what we already believe to be true.
Moreover, this is not only true, but it is necessarily true because we as humans are not capable of consciously attending to all that is the world around us. Instead, we employ unconscious rules – heuristics – to help us quickly decide what to look at, what to listen to, what matters and what doesn’t, and what those things mean. Based on our past, we employ linguistic symbols (i.e. words) and construct Cognitive Narratives literally to give meaning to the world “out there.”
In a June 2012 Psychology Today article entitled The Myth of Objectivity, Dr. Russell Razzaque explains:
At the end of the day, of course, the only window we have onto the world “out there” is actually from the world inside our heads, so everything we see and do is still an inner subjective experience. Being aware of all this does not mean that we have to, as a result, abandon all hope of ever knowing anything, but what it does mean is that we should always approach what we believe to be “facts” with a degree of humility. If we say we are making a decision “based on facts alone” then, more often than not, we are actually fooling ourselves.
It is our nature – a good and essential part of our nature – to give meaning to all in the world that our senses give us access to. This trait – this capacity – may in fact be our most defining human characteristic. It is the meaning behind the Bible story where “the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.” (Genesis 2:19) We as humans work with symbols (especially words) and stories to make sense of the world for ourselves. This would not be a problem, except for the fact that we tend to forget that these meanings are of our own making and not in the things out there in and of themselves. In our absentmindedness, we begin to believe that we know something objectively. We begin to believe that our view of reality is, in fact, reality.
It’s called Fundamentalism.
We know this word as it applies to various religious extremes, but the principle of fundamentalism applies to any circumstance where one’s own personal construction of reality – or the shared reality of one’s affinity group – is believed to be the only reality, the only “Truth.” Fundamentalism is the absolute confidence in that absolute truth. This is the error of our writer of the Letter to the Editor. In his worldview, he believes has the capacity to discern objective truth and cannot help but see other representations of truth and/or reality as wrong and, perhaps, intentionally wrong. To him, they all are “Fake News.”
The problem is that the reality that we construct for ourselves is self-reinforcing: Once constructed, we see our world THROUGH that constructed reality, helping us see coherence and cause-and-effect in ways that form a pattern of proof – a cognitive narrative – that, at the same time, makes it hard for us to see anything that doesn’t conform to that reality, that narrative. As helpful as they may be, our constructed realities have the tendency of blinding us to the possibility that we might be wrong.
From time to time, I like to remind myself that the person I lie to most is myself, that the biases that are hardest for us to see are our own.
The trick to understanding “the worlds out there” is not to eliminate bias – which is impossible – but, instead, to recognize it and to take in into account. By recognizing our own reality as just one two-dimensional image that, when combined with the reality of others, works like a holograph to create a three or four-dimensional image, we then recognize and perhaps even appreciate bias for the added color and dimension that it brings to our lives. We begin to see that it is in the bringing of these perspectives together that we get our best glimpse of meaning and direction and purpose, and we begin to develop a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the life around us, and the life in us.
Therein lies the Role of Education.
At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.
- Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School
In the current push to create a bigger and stronger workforce, it is easy to get fixated on programs and classes that emphasize the development of stronger and more current competencies. Our U.S. President has even suggested that community colleges remove the word “community” from their name and become the true technical colleges that we need. For the record, being competent is good –
really good! But a quick review of the many articles on the most common reasons why people get fired and/or don’t work out in the job reveals that the matter of competence is NOT high among them. Being technically competent may be the key to getting a job, but it doesn’t appear to be the key to keeping it. In addition – and this is Postman’s point – having a good job may be essential to having a good life, but they should never be conflated as if they were the same thing. The work of education is to support, guide, equip, and enable not just good workers, but good people, good members of our communities.
It’s about going beyond Competence and working to develop Character.
This is not a new thought, but it is also not an outdated thought, and the following words should make as much sense to us today and they did back when they we spoken.
Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.
- Aristotle (a disputed attribution)
To educate a man in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society.
- Theodore Roosevelt
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Character development is something that fell out of vogue around the 1960’s when trust in many of our American institutions and their defining values began to erode. In response, we thought we could and should do something we called “values free education.” I know this because this was part of the education I received growing up as well as the model for education I was taught as I prepared to be a schoolteacher. Unfortunately, as we tried to make un-biased room for all values, we ended up affirming none and, in the process, failed to serve the purpose of education that Aristotle, Teddy Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King Jr. envisioned. In the absence of the kind of “Character” that Martin Luther King Jr. encouraged, we run the risk of graduating people who are technically competent but perhaps not fully understanding, appreciating, and/or developing some of the qualities of character that will help them to be successful in their careers and in their communities.
I remember one of my first encounters with what Competence + Character looks like, back when I was the Chief Financial and Operations Officer in Powell, Wyoming. I was looking to add a family room onto my home, making room for my growing teenaged son and his friends, and I needed a residential contractor to do the work. Asking around, I was repeatedly directed toward a one-man business named Mark. What I found in Mark was not just a residential builder but was also a lover of Russian literature, especially the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky….. and this made all the difference in the world. I won’t argue cause-and-effect but, from Mark’s perspective, while it was a vocational education that taught him the skills of his profession, it was his love for literature that helped give his exercise of those skills a more aesthetic quality and his company a well-earned reputation for integrity.
What This Might Look Like at LBCC
We at LBCC are BOTH a career-technical AND a liberal arts college, and this is not by accident. Being “comprehensive” is based in our belief that these two ways of looking at work and life have something to share with each other, something that together makes more of a whole, and something that can help us and our students develop the Character that leads to a life that enriches not just ourselves, but those around us as well. Let me suggest some of that dimensions of the Character that we hope to help build in our students.
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Humility: An appreciation for the subjective nature of our knowledge.
o Bronowski writes, “There is no absolute knowledge… All information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility.”
o The June 2012 Psychology Today article reminds us “we should always approach what we believe to be “facts” with a degree of humility. If we say we are making a decision “based on facts alone” then, more often than not, we are actually fooling ourselves.”
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Critical Thinking: Skillfully analyzing, assessing, and reconstructing our own thinking, and knowing.
o Education done right is not just the acquisition of knowledge and skills but also the development of our ability to critically evaluate all that is there for us to learn.
o Recognizing the subjective nature of knowing, we should develop our capacity to compare and contrast differing viewpoints, and subjecting our own viewpoints to that same process.
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A Passion for Diversity and Inclusion
o Recognizing the Interconnectedness and Interdependence of all people, acknowledging that our best sense of knowing is our collective sense and not our own in isolation or in homogenous clusters.
o Multiple perspectives and understandings brought together help us to “triangulate” around the thing that we are trying to understand and, in combination, work to create a more complete image, much like the construction of a holograph.
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The Belief in Something Bigger than Ourselves
o From the movie, Dr. Strange:
- The Ancient One: I never saw your future, only its possibilities. You have such a capacity for goodness. You've always excelled, but not because you crave success but because of your fear of failure.
- Dr. Stephen Strange: It's what made me a great doctor.
- The Ancient One: It's precisely what's kept you from greatness. Arrogance and fear still keep you from learning the simplest and most significant lesson of all.
- Dr. Stephen Strange: Which is?
- The Ancient One: It's not about you!
o Our employers and our communities need people who are not only competent but also have the ability and desire to employ their knowledge and skill not just to the betterment of themselves but for the betterment of their coworkers, employers, families, and communities.
But How?
Some suggestions.
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Give Example to a Foundation for Character through our embodying of our Values.
o Opportunity - Committing ourselves to the fulfillment of our potential AND the potential of others.
o Excellence - Committing ourselves to our highest ideals with honesty and integrity.
o Inclusiveness - Embracing the uniqueness of every individual, and promote the free and civil expression of each other’s ideas, perspectives and cultures
o Learning - Committing ourselves to the lifelong pursuit of knowledge, skills, and abilities to improve our lives and our communities.
o Engagement - Openly and actively connecting with others in ways that construct and preserve our meanings and our value as people in community.
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Develop and Make Full Use of Academic Freedom and the Freedom of Expression that enables us to see and learn from our diversity, acting on our belief that human capacity is best served by learning that is
o Not constrained by political power
o Not watered down by our insatiable appetite for being entertained
o Not diminished by the absence of a purpose that is bigger than ourselves
o Not limited by our tendency to listen only to what we want to hear
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Develop a strong Core Curriculum that is common to all of our Pathways so as to ensure that every LBCC graduate has been exposed to and experienced examples of the dimensions of Character suggested earlier.
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Incorporate into the Education we offer Real-life and Real-work experiences that broaden our students’ view of themselves and their world.
o Guided work experiences that provide supervised opportunities for students to learn from the exercise of their skills and competencies in a real work setting.
o International, Intercultural, Interracial, Intergenerational and other “Inter-“ experiences that multiply the opportunities for our students to compare and contrast their worldview with that of others, and learn from it.
o Co-curricular and other clubs, teams, and events that provide our students with guided opportunities to develop and exercise inclusive leadership and teambuilding skills
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Bring All of Ourselves to Work in a manner that provide our students with the broadest range of mentors and examples of what Competence + Character actually look like.
To What End?
In 1916, John Dewey wrote Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. In it, he asserted that democracy is not only about extending voting rights but also about equipping citizens with the ability to take on the responsibility to make informed, intelligent choices and decisions leading to the public good. He believed that democracy is not just a political system but an ethical ideal with active informed participation by citizens, exercising their ability to critically question and revise established beliefs and theories in the light of developments, pragmatically evolving to meet the needs of changing times.
For Dewey, If democracy was to work, it required informed, knowledgeable and wise citizens and, therefore, education had an essential and moral purpose, and a responsibility to nurture character as well as teach knowledge and skills. (from Reflections on the 100th year anniversary of John Dewey’s ‘Democracy and Education’ by Tristian Stobie, Sept 2016, Cambridge Assessment International Education)
102 years later, I still believe in the essential relationship between democracy and an educated citizenry that Dewey championed. Beyond competence, it is our role as educators to “nurture character,” to equip our students for intelligent and wise citizenry, “exercising their ability to critically question and revise established beliefs and theories in the light of developments, pragmatically evolving to meet the needs of changing times.” Contrary to the writer of the Letter to the Editor with which this paper began, our democratic society depends not on the rejection of everything with which we disagree as Fake News, but on the qualities of character to which our education is committed. Our greatest opportunity for learning – and for preserving our society – is not to be found in dogma but in our openness to that with which we fear, disagree with, or do not understand. And it is one of the most important roles of education to create this openness.
Others have tried to learn and failed. You cannot fill a cup that is already full.
- from the movie, Avatar
Yes, I made it to the top of Mt Kilimanjaro, 19,340 feet above sea level, but I must admit that success was not certain until the very moment that I arrived there. In fact, I need to admit/acknowledge up front that I would not have made it without the skilled support of our guide, Wilfred, and the encouragement and companionship of my friend Dan Rayfield. This was a shared effort, a shared success.
First, we met a group of about a dozen men who have developed a process for using cattle bones as a substitute for ivory, producing a variety of products that not only provide an income for them and their families but that also help to protect the area's elephants from poaching. Industrious, entrepreneurial, these men helped me see hope where I might have only seen hopelessness.
