FirmhandKY
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FR:
Serendipity.
I ran across an article that I think sheds some light on my point of view:
The Bias of Veteran Journalists
Lane Wallace
Apr 5 2010, 8:30 AM ET
Many times, at parties and in other conversations over the years, I have vociferously defended fellow journalists against charges of bias in their work. Particularly journalists working in the lowly field of print journalism, as opposed to TV.
...
But within those caveats, I've always maintained that the majority of professional print journalists, anyway, try very, very hard to get the story right. But recently, I had an experience that gave me a new perspective on the issue.
A few weeks ago, I attended the public launch of a company's product that had, until that point, been kept tightly under wraps ... The reason I was there was because I'd been interviewing the company's CEO over the previous several months for a book project. But that also meant that while I wasn't an expert about the industry in general, I was in the odd position of knowing more about the company's "secret" product than any other journalist in the room.
... the reporters' questions weren't geared toward getting a better understanding of those points. They were narrowly focused on one or two aspects of the story. And from the questions that were being asked, I realized--because I had so much more information on the subject--that the reporters were missing a couple of really important pieces of understanding about the product and its use. And as the event progressed, I also realized that the questions that might have uncovered those pieces weren't being asked because the reporters already had a story angle in their heads and were focused only on getting the necessary data points to flesh out and back up what they already thought was the story.
...
The journalists at the press conference didn't have a bias as the term is normally used; that is, I didn't get the sense that they were inherently for or against the company or its product. They just appeared to think they knew the subject well enough, or had a set enough idea in their heads as to what this kind of story was about, that they pursued only the lines of questioning necessary to fill in the blanks of that presumed story line. As a result, they left the press conference with less knowledge and understanding than they otherwise might have had. And while nobody could have said the resulting stories were entirely wrong, they definitely suffered from that lapse. Especially, as might be expected, when it came to the predictions they made about the product's evolution or future.
...
... a research study done by U.C. Berkeley professor Philip Tetlock ...
"The central error diagnosed by Tetlock was the sin of certainty, which led the 'experts' to impose a top-down solution on their decision-making processes ... When pundits were convinced that they were right, they ignored any brain areas that implied they might be wrong."
Tetlock himself ... concluded that "The dominant danger [for pundits] remains hubris, the vice of closed-mindedness, of dismissing dissonant possibilities too quickly."
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It's a tricky balance to try to strike--in part because assuming we know the salient points of a topic or story isn't an obvious, conscious bias as most people define or understand the term. Indeed, "practically all" of the professionals in Tetlock's study claimed, and no doubt believed, that they were dispassionately analyzing the evidence. But it's a reminder that we all have, as Tetlock put it, the potential to become "prisoners of our preconceptions." And that sometimes, even if we think we know the story, it might be worth asking questions as if we don't. Every now and then, we might hear or learn something that, as long as we're open to hearing it, might change our minds about what the real story is.
I think that too many "pundits" and "reporters" on both side of the political divide are guilty of hubris and arrogance, and think they already know what "the story" is about, when it isn't necessarily so, or even so half of the time.
I'm a firm proponent of critical thinking, and learning of the ways of propaganda and manipulation.
Firm
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