Red Pills Cause Blind Spots

Believing you've seen through illusions is the biggest illusion

Fifteen years ago, I thought I’d found the antidote to media misinformation. Having twice quit jobs at Reuters (where news was used to hawk gambling screens to banks), and resigned from the New York Times (which enabled the invasion of Iraq), I’d become fixated on ways to counter propaganda.

Laurence Fishburne in The Matrix (Warner Bros., 1999)

In 2009, I applied for a Knight journalism fellowship at Stanford University. My plan for research aimed “to define a more democratic news agenda, and develop tools that help it take root”. An accompanying submission described the problem as I saw it:

“Most media frame reporting with the assumptions of dominant groups, because they see their job as telling us what the powerful say and do. Other voices are heard, but their views rarely shape background narratives, so news gets skewed to suit governments, big business and the military.”

Instead, I suggested that journalists needed new principles. Their overriding aim should be “to challenge concentrated power”, and frameworks for doing so should be shared with activists, helping them to reach a wider audience with “alternative views [that] are distilled into clearly sourced arguments”.

My ideas to facilitate this were a mix of Wikipedia and Noam Chomsky footnotes, compiling nuggets from officialdom and media reports that might otherwise vanish down the memory hole. As my application put it: “A prototype database would collate referenced facts, and present them as bullet-point primers on topical subjects”.

In hindsight, this was hopelessly naïve – a full-time archiving project with no obvious commercial value. It also assumed that facts might be persuasive in themselves, which seems debatable at best. Unsurprisingly, it failed to secure me a place at Stanford. By then, I’d pretty much given up on a career in journalism anyway. Instead, I hung out in India as a yoga bum, then did an M.A. in yoga history and segued into teaching.

Although these ideas kept on bubbling away at the back of my mind, I’ve come to see them as part of the problem they sought to address. In a way, I sort of knew that at the time – I’d spent years critiquing media activists for twisting information to bolster a case. This included a vituperative exchange with Chomsky, which took 8,500 words to establish that he didn’t dispute facts about the Srebrenica massacre, despite praising “careful and outstanding work” by someone who did. As I later reflected:

“In my experience, Chomsky doesn’t, as [Chris] Hedges suggests, ‘defy the cant of the crowd to speak the truth.’ When it suits him, he crowds out truth with cant of his own. He casually, and needlessly, minimizes, ignores or otherwise denies crimes that aren’t being ‘minimized or ignored in mass culture’, if doing so helps to sell arguments about American malevolence. This wilfully misleads activists who don’t know better, because they think he’s telling them awkward truths.”

In other words, it’s possible to criticise one thing (in this case, U.S. foreign policy in the Balkans) without suggesting that another (i.e. Serbs committing war crimes) was invented to justify it. It might sound weird to spell that out, but it’s now quite rare to hear “both sides” of a story. Part of the reason is a polarising shift in how news gets reported and shared online, combined with the ubiquity of tribalist thinking.

Yoga philosophy cautions against this. Two thousand years ago, the Bhagavad Gītā said the lowest form of knowledge “attaches itself to a single causal factor as if it were everything”.¹ The agitated mindset that drives most debate is the same sort of thing, yielding only “understanding based on distinction”.² Genuine clarity is “when one changeless existence is seen in all beings, undivided in their diverse forms”.³

One might wonder what citing these lines has to do with the media, but they seem more insightful than my Stanford proposal. To quote something written a few years before that – a book titled Letters to a Young Journalist, by Samuel Freedman: “Being adversarial sounds righteous, except when it is a mere reflex, just one more way of imposing black-and-white absolutism on a world washed in greys.”

I felt conflicted the first time I read this in 2006. It sounded more like a cop-out than an end to injustice. Even so, I could see it was subtler. “Great journalism,” argued the author, “comes from the curmudgeons, the dissidents, the lonely individualists, who insist on pursuing what fascinates or outrages them and tracking it to the ground.” It’s also more persuasive when it engages with rival perspectives, taking them seriously. If everyone can recognise themselves in a story, it’s more like the truth.

The problem today is that the slightest concession to another point of view is often thought of as weak. This is one of many drawbacks to social media’s discordant echo chambers, compounding the “culture war” pressure to conform. Looking back, I see I thought this was the answer. “Unless reporters set agendas themselves,” I wrote in 2009 after printing a fake Financial Times, “they just serve someone else’s.”

Objectivity is clearly elusive, if what that implies is a “view from nowhere”. Everyone has an agenda, and even if one thinks it’s suppressed, it reveals itself in choices about whom to quote, as well as the narratives framing a story. The most common default is a party line – from an editor’s preferences to prevailing social norms.

The solution is neither to pretend that one has no agenda, nor to report from a biased perspective, openly committing oneself to promoting a certain view. The only values that influence reporting should be universal. In retrospective defence of my Stanford plan, I wanted to see what they’d look like if shaped by compassion. It was never my aim to devise a new dogma, or to demonise deviants from right-thinking, but I see now how easily that can develop from noble intentions.

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1. Bhagavad Gītā 18.22 (translated by Nicholas Sutton).

2. Bhagavad Gītā 18.21 (translated by Nicholas Sutton).

3. Bhagavad Gītā 18.20 (translated by Nicholas Sutton).