The Perfect Channel
I have a question for you. Let’s say you wanted to create a media channel that was unbiased, scientific, truthful, fact based, insightful – what would it look like? How would it be different from what currently exists? How would it be funded? And how would it protect itself?
Perhaps it would look like an independent body that fact-checks and confirms/disproves statements made in a systematic regular basis, and of course, this body would need to slowly gain trust over time. Perhaps it vets other media outlets and looks for political biases there. Ideally, anyone who disperses the news would have a relevant educational background in that topic and would be unbiased.
But is it possible to truly be unbiased? Or is the idea of being unbiased simply a figment of our imagination?
Does the investigation of truth presuppose a slant towards one direction or another because ultimately, it’s our values that will determine which facts we want to give priority to?
In other words, when someone like John Oliver criticizes a media channel for being biased, is he not biased himself?
Does he not choose to ignore a part of the picture and only see what he wants to see, or more accurately, what he’s paid to see?
No matter who you are, whether an individual, or a company, or thinker you are self-interested, and somewhat self-deluded. You must be to some extent. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have a coherent philosophy you can express to other people. So, there is a fundamental dishonesty at the root of people who claim to see the truth as it is, because no such thing exists.
Even as I try to be objective myself, I am choosing to ignore the valid criticisms that each side has for the other. I am choosing to give the highest priority to intellectual honesty, but on what grounds? Is it not possible, that by favoring absolute honesty, I am giving cover to those who perpetrate more injustice?
Now, this worries me, because as you can imagine, it has profound implications. If you choose deception over the truth for the greater good, then will you undermine the goal that you are seeking to accomplish?
Some say that we now live in a post-truth world. I don’t agree. I think we have never lived in a truthful world. Everything we have ever believed in, has been, in some way or another, predicated on some fundamental lie. In the past, it may have been some bizarre religion, or some political illusion we have constructed. More recently, we may base our philosophy on humanist grounds. But what is beyond doubt, is that we are defined by the ideas of the epoch we live in. Even the way we think is defined by which space in history we occupy.
This does not mean that there is no such thing as truth. It may simply mean, that the only thing that is always true, is that our idiosyncratic inclinations define how we judge the world. Everyone sees only part of the truth, everyone acts on limited information, everyone is partly irrational.
Everyone is biased.