Objective Truth.

March 2, 2005 3:00 PM

For some reason I have become incredibly irritated with bad rhetoric. I'm talking about the obvious stuff, like lies told by politicians, but I've also become incredibly frustrated with half-truths and distortions told by groups whose causes I espouse. It's not that I want to be told what to think, I just want to not have to constantly churn through the layers of deception to get answers to even the most basic questions about empirical reality. I wish there was a special newsletter I could subscribe to, written by someone who was generous and smart and at least attempting to fairly describe the problems and solutions. So, do you have any go-to publications that at least attempt objectivity, without obvious corporate/radical/religious/middle-earthian bias? [disclaimer: let's not bring up postmodernism]

Further disclaimer: I am *fully* conversant in the debates about objectivity, and whether it is even possible. I don't want to *marry* objectivity, I'd just like to be in the same room on occasion.

posted by mecran01 to education (24 comments total)

FactCheck is a start.
posted by bricoleur at 3:09 PM on March 2, 2005

Are you looking for philosophical readings or just material in general? The Economist seems devoid of any particular, overt political bias in its news coverage.
posted by AlexReynolds at 3:22 PM on March 2, 2005

What topics are you looking to cover? I get that you want "just the facts ma'am" but I don't understand what topic.

For political discourse, I'm a big fan of The Ornery American, by Orson Scott Card (of Ender's Game fame). The spin there is socially conservative (marriage/religion) and economically liberal (regulation/public health). But at least he's open about what's opinion and rigorous about fact checking.

And while this might be a little off thread, the purely opinion Uncle Orson Reviews Everything is my first line of defense against crappy movies.
posted by JayDub at 3:35 PM on March 2, 2005

The Rivendell Reader.
posted by fixedgear at 3:43 PM on March 2, 2005

I like reading the Columbia Journalism Review blog (which I found of course, thanks to this Mefi post). It's a pretty good read, don't know if it's what you're looking for tho'.
posted by invisible ink at 3:44 PM on March 2, 2005

"Are you looking for philosophical readings or just material in general? The Economist seems devoid of any particular, overt political bias in its news coverage."

Huh? The Economist is extremely biased. What makes it great (I'm a subscriber) is that its bias is consistent, openly acknowledged, and easily detectable. Even though I disagree with them on many issues, I trust them not to distort basic facts - and I'll take that over spin masquerading as objectivity any day. So I'll go ahead and second the suggestion.
posted by googly at 3:51 PM on March 2, 2005

Financial Times is neat- most of their news articles are free online, but not their editorials.
MK
posted by michaelkuznet at 3:54 PM on March 2, 2005

I wouldn't trust FactCheck. Take this article on Social Security. They back up the Bush numbers (you know that ratio of workers thing you hear bandied about). If you follow their link you see the 1950 number of "16.5 workers per benificiary" had already dropped to current (3.x) levels by 1970, where it's hovered for the last 35 years. So it's misleading to use that 1950 figure. It's misleading to use "beneficiaries vs. workers" anyway because you can change the number of beneficiaries (e.g. dependents) independently of the total payouts.

FactCheck says nothing about this. Here's what they leap on as the misleading thing: in an AARP ad's photo, the hardly visible board in the background shows commodity trading, not stock trading.

Other, circumstantial reasons I dislike FactCheck: the site has the impersonal feeling of propaganda, and Cheney did endorse them, after all.

Places that claim to be unbiased wind up needing more critical salt than a place whose bias you know.
posted by fleacircus at 4:00 PM on March 2, 2005

Wikipedia is a pretty good first stop for nearly everything, and, for anything even remotely controversial, you can usually read the results of their various 'Neutral POV' challenges and responses. to see who's complaining about what.
posted by boaz at 5:17 PM on March 2, 2005

I'm sorry, I need to object to the "Ornery American" listing as an unbiased source. While I appreciate that JayDub acknowledges the spin of the site, I would very much like to point out that fact checking and open-mindedness is precisely what Orson has recently become infamous for not doing/having. In fact, the unabashed bias of Orson's site has previously been mentioned on MeFi.

That now-infamous article is filled with straight-up lies and distortions of the truth that are well-refuted on the site's forums. I give him credit for not deleting every dissenting thread on his site, but it's not where you go for truth, either.
posted by shmegegge at 6:38 PM on March 2, 2005

Places that claim to be unbiased wind up needing more critical salt than a place whose bias you know.

Bingo. Welcome to communication 101. Objectivity is truly out of reach; predictable subjectivity is the best we can hope for. I like Harpers.
posted by squirrel at 7:31 PM on March 2, 2005

The concept of a 'go to publication' for an objective view of the world is nice, but I don't believe it exists, or could exist right now. I believe we are in a "shakeout" period where formerly trustworthy institutions on all sides of the political / cultural spectrum are having their foundations shaken.

I believe that the best way to get a true sense of the world in this environment is to keep the media ecology you consume diverse. Predictable subjectivity is not enough if you only look at one magazine - Look at Harpers (a magazine I always enjoy) Last summer Lewis Lapham wrote a column about being at the Republican Convention before it even happened.

Maybe the convention was that predicatable, but that pissed me off.

Read Harpers, but don't stop there. Read voices from all sides. Memeorandum is a good place to find a mix of media voices (though definitely weighted to the right side of the spectrum).

I have pondered this question for a while, and I wonder what one could do to try and start building an institution like the one you wish for. Wikipedia, MeFi, and Ask MeFi are a pretty good start.
posted by extrabox at 8:20 PM on March 2, 2005

Jaydub: The spin there is socially conservative (marriage/religion) and economically liberal (regulation/public health). But at least he's open about what's opinion and rigorous about fact checking.

One would hope so:

Here's the thing that the drug-legalizers conveniently forget: Drugs are devastatingly harmful whether they're banned or not.
...
A person on marijuana would still live in a haze of irresponsibility.
...
Furthermore, since drug-takers are parasites on society, producing next to nothing, but consuming as much as any productive citizen, our whole society would limp along, dragging these useless anchors through the bottom mud.
...
The drug-legalizers like to paint an idyllic picture of "harmless recreational drug use." But there is no such thing as harmless drug use.
...
Drug users aren't tolerant, though they demand tolerance from others. Drug users are utterly, supremely selfish -- if it feels good to them, then they'll do it, regardless of what it might cost others, directly or indirectly.
...
Drugs are the enemy of every family. They're vampires that suck the life out of everyone they attack, and they especially prey on the young.

Had he qualified these statements as applicable mainly to meth or crack, he would be on firmer ground. Of course. the generalizations would still be inaccurate, but understandable. As it stands, he's just preaching to the choir.

I don't think you can ever be sure of sincerity. It can be taken for granted for objectivity is, by definition, impossible to find. But even those whose rhetoric acknowledges bias-awareness and meta-criticism, are to be taken with a grain of salt. Your quest will resolve with diversity and critical thinking, not a list of sources.
posted by daksya at 9:28 PM on March 2, 2005

Correction in last para, 2nd sentence:
for objectivity is --> that objective is
posted by daksya at 9:41 PM on March 2, 2005

Oops, just replace "for" with "that".
posted by daksya at 9:42 PM on March 2, 2005

The Straight Dope?

I was also about to say SpinSanity when I noticed it has shut down, but one of its editors, Bryan Keefer, is the assistant managing editor at the Columbia Journalism Review Blog, which invisible ink mentioned already.
posted by techgnollogic at 12:03 AM on March 3, 2005

Foreign Affairs (often linked to in MeFi).
posted by stbalbach at 12:08 AM on March 3, 2005

What googly said. The Economist is not valuable for its objectivity, it is valuable for its consistency and scope. Everything in it must be understood as having been through a prism of classic laissez-faire liberalism. But no lies and a decent attempt at covering the opposition view (in a jaded and how-silly-of0them tone), as far as I can tell.

(aside: I always thought Alistair Cooke's Letters From America tried hard to put things fairly. So it seemed from the outside, anyway.)

i think extrabox is wrong. This period is no different from any other - there was never a time when a publication such as you describe existed.

I honestly cannot think of a publication that meets your criteria. My solution has been to follow several divergently biassed ones and triangulate.

Thought: at least as valuable as avoiding political left-right bias is avoiding the primacy of English speakers, then white people, then Westernised Asians, then the rest, which typifies reportage in all English speaking countries. Virtually anything you can obtain on world affairs in another language, if you know it, or translated from another language, is likely to provide much you did not know.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:42 AM on March 3, 2005

For information on touchy social topics such as capital punishment, euthanasia, abortion, homosexuality, sex. ed., cults, sexuality, spanking, evolution/creation, etc., ReligiousTolerance.org does a reasonably good job of presenting multiple perspectives on the issue and the findings of any pertinent studies.
posted by raedyn at 6:38 AM on March 3, 2005

i_am-joe's_spleen: I was not suggesting that there was a time when there was a truly objective publication. But there was a time when mainstream mass media such as the New York Times or 60 Minutes were seen as far more objective than they are seen today, and could be credibly relied on to provide what was popularly perceived as an objective and fair picture of the world.

What's different now is that the biases of most media are now openly perceived, discussed, and sometimes even acknowledged by the media themselves. Further, scandals, such as the Jayson Blair incident at the Times or Rathergate at 60 Minutes have even brought into question the basic truthfulness of these once credible media voices, let alone their biases.

What's also different today, is that information is so mutable, being formed mostly of pixels and bits, that even information such as photographs and video can be convincingly modified and faked by almost anyone that can use a computer.

Finally, the internet has brought us a never before seen diversity of seemingly credible and authoritative media voices - an embarrassment of riches in some ways, but a diversity too far reaching for any individual to be able to fairly appraise.

Scandal, bias, information mutability, and information diversity are structural threats to the credibility of all information media, but particularly the mainstream media. This is the "shaking at the foundations" I was referring to.

These threats, combined with a world of increasing complexity, make it incredibly difficult for someone trying to sort through any issue with the goal of giving the issue a fair hearing.

It is as if you are a judge, and each of the parties to the case (an issue you are trying to figure out) are able to bring box after box of supporting evidence before you, for your review. Enough information it would take you years to sort through.

In a world of this complexity, it is so much easier to listen to what the "party line" is of your point on the political spectrum, and just go with that.

No employed person could possibly have the time to give all the critical issues that face our country alone, let alone the world, the fair hearing they deserve.

I think internet forums such as Metafilter, or the blogs, are the first stirrings of new mechanisms for taming the new complexities of our world, just as generations before us have had to tame the new complexities of their times. I just think that these mechanisms / philosophies still have a ways to go.
posted by extrabox at 8:03 AM on March 3, 2005

Stratfor cuts the bullshit out of international politics.
posted by fourstar at 8:14 AM on March 3, 2005

Places that claim to be unbiased wind up needing more critical salt than a place whose bias you know.

Seconded, wholeheartedly.

I frequently get paper junk mail from Mother Jones in which they claim to be exactly what you're looking for, but in fact they seem like pretty straightforward moderate-lefty fare to me.
posted by ikkyu2 at 8:15 AM on March 3, 2005

And while this might be a little off thread, the purely opinion Uncle Orson Reviews Everything is my first line of defense against crappy movies.

It's true, JayDub -- you've really gotta do your research before buying a cinema ticket these days, since so much 'criticism' in the media is really just promotion. Following a few movie reviewers with whom one agrees is imperative. That said, after a brief tour of Uncle Orson, he's not one I'd bother with -- I currently favor the likes of Elvis Mitchell and David Edelstein.

Great thread, BTW -- I strongly agree with extrabox:

I believe that the best way to get a true sense of the world in this environment is to keep the media ecology you consume diverse.
posted by Rash at 9:59 AM on March 3, 2005

Thank you for your suggestions, many of which look awesome. Orson Scott Card suffers from a weird sort of cultural schizophrenia, supporting freedom of thought on the one hand, and then claiming that weapons of mass destruction are going to be found any day now. I think he just likes being obstinate, or something.

Although I agree with the notion of a diverse media ecology, that's sort of like saying, "if you want to know the truth, read everything then think about it for a long time."

Anyway, thanks.
posted by mecran01 at 5:04 PM on March 3, 2005