Our Objective US Press; Protecting American People from the Truth Dr. Gerry Lower
OpEdNews.Com
With the 20th century emergence of "political correctness," the
free American press has struggled to attain "objectivity" in
reporting the national news, a struggle ostensibly in the interest of
fairness and honesty. As a result, the press has done a remarkable
job of keeping the American people from comprehending their current
situation and their current relationships to the larger human world.
Objectivity ... "an object, phenomenon, or condition in the realm of
sensible experience independent of
individual thought" (Webster's Collegiate) is a virtually
mindless journalistic approach toward a similarly mindless social
objective. Objectivity relative to what? By what value-laden
criteria do we interpret the "news," by the values of Democracy,
the values of crony capitalism, or the values of traditional western
religion?
What we are after, of course, is a touch of honest human truth in American
political reality, truth which is true for all observers and thinkers,
truth independent of gender, cultural background or special interest.
But, there is NO truth "independent of individual
thought," the individual being the only known source of ideas, true
or otherwise. No group of individuals, no human organization, has
ever had the ghost of an idea. Objectivity implies a truth
independent of human existence and there is no such thing. If there
were, it would be relevant to nothing human.
The honest human truth, of course, is what Science ultimately provides,
i.e., a pan-cultural knowledge base applicable to all people. In
other words, insofar as honest truth and human consensus are objectives,
the path to that end is via Science and human knowledge, not via
objectivity.
The American concept of "objectivity" is a presentation of the
"facts" (just the facts) outside of any larger, definable
historical or knowledgable context. The absence of that context
provides for intellectual mayhem, life in the here and now and the here
and there, here today and there tomorrow. That absence also provides
a general "dumbness," an inability to agree on how the world
currently works and a general inability to agree on how the world ought
work, should Americans choose once again to be a Democracy.
What we are being told by current American culture is that objectivity is
the path to honest truth and comprehension, "independent of
individual thought." Unfortunately, facts disseminated outside
of a definable human context do not even constitute knowledge; and there
is no path to human truth apart from human knowledge.
For the past half century, Americans have been living in a virtual sea of
disjointed, unrelated facts provided ad libitum, without knowledgeable
content only for lack of knowledgeable context. Objectivity has been
promoted in the name of "political correctness" and societal
blindness to a greed-driven corporate America dedicated to
"progress" (defined as the pursuit of profit and power) at the
expense of any and all human value systems that might get in the way,
i.e., family values, community values, national values. This is,
literally, the path to corruption and downfall.
As a result, corporate capitalism has made effort since World War II and
the emergence of a "military-industrial" corporate aristocracy
to realign itself with fundamentalist religion, the values of which have
previously provided justification for imperial, colonial and capitalistic
self-rightousness, pre-emptive conquest and dominion.
"News" in America has been driven into the black box of
"objectivity" and is, on its own merit, not worth reading
because it does not provide very much in the way of human knowledge.
News commentaries and analyses, on the other hand, properly rely
upon and embrace the factual "news" and they also provide
interpretation.
The American press remains effective at getting the "facts"
recorded and disseminated but, due to its devoutly anti-philosophical
nature, it has been largely a failure at presenting those facts within an
honest human context and largely a failure at nourishing comprehension and
concensus. Such a press is no friend to the people.
The "war on terrorism" has been reported factually but
interpreted in the absence of a larger historical context, a larger
Democratic context and a larger knowledgeable context. This is just
another indication of how far America has been coerced away from its
nascent values.
In a genuine Democracy, all "news" consists of empirical facts
and inferences interpreted relative to the values of Democracy. This
is, in fact, part and parcel of preserving our chosen values. This
is, in fact, how simple this business of Democracy really is. You
see what you get and you get what you see. If you do not like what
you see and what you get, e.g., lies and unfairness, you get a new
government.
We make life in America seem so extraordinarily complex that ordinary
mortals are deemed beneath comprehension. The cause of this
complexity is blindness and ignorance and the absence of the larger
frameworks which would allow a measure of comprehension. From the
bottom up, everything in Science can be made exceedingly complex. >From
the top down, everything in Science is elegantly simple.
Here is where natural philosophy comes to human aid. No matter how
complex the problem of infectious disease might have seemed at the turn of
the century, the Germ Theory of Infectious Disease and its simple personal
approaches to the prevention of these diseases was comprehensible by a guy
who just fell off a bar stool. If the people cannot comprehend a
thing, it is not worth comprehending. Bush World is absolutely
incomprehensible. It comes from the bottom up, it is complicated by
religious conjecture, it is all over the damned place and it points
nowhere but down.
Who cares about objectivity? It is simple human truth that the
people need most of all. The American press has already produced
more "objectivity" than is necessary to maintain a status quo
that has failed all but failed the people.
We might all take Samuel Butler's insight to heart,
"I care about the truth not for
truth's sake but for my own sake."
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Dr. Gerry Lower lives in Keystone, South Dakota. His new book,
"Jefferson's Eyes - Deist Views of Bush World," can be explored
at www.jeffersonseyes.com and he can be reached at tisland@blackhills.com.
