I used to jump from one media outlet to another to try to understand what's going on in the world. Even when reading about the same subject matter, there seemed to be variance and disparity in reporting which turned me into a fact finder. Fact checks are very time-consuming.
The best way to know what is going on in the world is to be there. Of course, that is impractical for most of us. For example, Siavash Saffari, a professor at Seoul National University mentions that because of internet blackouts, reaching his family in Iran is extremely difficult. When brief phone calls are possible he gets on-site information from friends and family members experiencing the menace. The rest of us, with or without confidence, must rely upon media outlets to tell us. Much nonsense is presented to us, bordering on bias, leasing, and propaganda, or "phony claims" as Saffari mentions. We must consider the source and read between the lines — that is, use inference to try to understand what is meant by something that is not stated or written explicitly or openly.
I euphemistically call the nonsense "baloney." Those who are a bit bolder call it by the scatological expression "BS," meaning to talk nonsense, especially with the intention of deceiving or misleading. BS prevails as the synonym of choice.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian-born British philosopher who taught at Cambridge University, devoted his energies to identifying and combating what he regarded as insidiously disruptive forms of nonsense. To illustrate and arrive at the accurate central features of non-factual claims, he listened to a friend convalescing from a tonsillectomy, announce hoarsely "I feel just like a dog that has been run over." Ludwig responds perhaps ruthlessly honest, "You don't know what a dog that has been run over feels like." This bit of trivia is theory without fact, and thus, BS. I fancy that we need “Lugwigs” working for media outlets to abate intense infectious opinions.
The media sometimes bombards us with mendacious information. Therefore, we cannot come to "correctness" (verifiable conclusions) as we lack expertise and thus, we resort to subjective sincerity.
The concocted stories of some media outlets are one-third bogus, one-third defensive and one-third elusive and that is how baloney is born, as one author postulates. Our attitude toward non-factual statements is generally more benign than our attitude toward outright lying. However, some believe that it is a greater enemy of truth than blunt lies. It very well seems that many have a lack of concern with the truth and an indifference to how things really are. Some outlets own the subject and continue to feed us baloney. If for nothing else, they supply us fodder for serious bull sessions.
I am consciously awakened to the fact that "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."
The author ([email protected]) published the novella “Beyond Harvard” and teaches English as a second language.
Source: Korea Times News
