Since I’m talking on Saturday at BloggerCon about blogs and journalism, I’ve been thinking about what seems to me to be the central issue in this field: trust. Here is a semi-formed essay — consider it a sort of notes-in-progress.
Three weeks ago, reading a New York Times “Political Memo” piece (9/7/03) by Adam Nagourney, my eyes scanned the following sentence: “Perpetuating a widely circulated myth, a senior adviser to a Dean rival recently sent an e-mail message saying, ‘You do know that he is the Dean of Dean Witter, don’t you?’ He is not.”
It was the “He is not” that grabbed me: Its definitive tone. Its absence of attribution (no linking to supporting evidence possible in a newspaper, of course). Its assumption that the reader would simply accept its assertion. And my own willingness as a reader to accept it.
Because I did, the first time I read the piece. I trusted it. I didn’t ask, “Sez who? How do you know? Why should I trust you?” Which are the questions I would almost certainly have asked had I found such a statement on a Web page. I trusted it based on my years of experience reading the Times, on my faith in its still-formidable (Jayson Blair affair notwithstanding) editing apparatus, on my belief that the people who work at the Times are (mostly) devoted to getting the facts right.
But then I started wondering. And I got curious for myself. So I started poking around, using the same search tools available to everyone. And this is what I found.
If you search Google for “Howard Dean Witter” you will find a profusion of blogs and pages posted by people who don’t like Dean saying snide things about how he’s the Dean of Dean Witter. Many of them point to an August column by Jimmy Breslin which asserts that “His father was the head of Dean Witter stocks on Wall Street.” Comments posted here and there by Dean supporters challenge this statement by pointing out that Dean Witter is not a firm founded by Messrs. Dean and Witter; rather, a guy named Dean (first name) Witter (last name) gave his name to the company when he founded it in 1924.
Ahh — so Breslin got this wrong, the anti-Dean bloggers spread the bad meme, then others corrected the record, and Nagourney closed the case, right?
Not so fast. If you keep poking through the factual detritus on the Web you eventually find that Howard Brush Dean Jr., the candidate’s late father (he died in 2001), was a successful stockbroker. And Time reports that the firm he worked for, and indeed was a “top executive” at, was none other than Dean Witter (known at that point in its corporate evolution as Dean Witter Reynolds).
Assuming that Time can be trusted on that, as far as I can tell, we have the following facts:
*Howard Dean’s Deans are not the Deans who founded Dean Witter; BUT
*Howard Dean’s father was a top executive at Dean Witter.
In other words, Breslin and Nagourney were both technically accurate. Breslin’s statement “His father was the head of Dean Witter stocks on Wall Street” seems factually contradictory to Nagourney’s flat-out dismissal of the “myth” that “he is the Dean of Dean Witter.” But it is quite likely — unless I have completely bungled this little inquiry — that both are right.
The purpose of this exercise is not to cast aspersions on Dr. Dean for his stockbrokerly upbringing. My point is that facts in political debate are always at the service of perspective. “Facts all come with points of view,” as David Byrne sang 20 years ago. Facts are not the endpoint but rather the starting point for a political argument. But too often — among bloggers like everywhere else — we use them as a way to close off debate. “You’re wrong,” we say; or, worse, “you’re lying.”
We like to cordon off “fact” from “opinion” in our brains, but there is no bright sharp line between them. A fact can mislead depending on what other facts it is or is not juxtaposed with. (Jay Rosen has a good piece about this in relation to the hoary question of whether blogs are reporting or opinion.) Opinions need facts to give them persuasive heft, but facts need opinions to give them meaning. We all have lots of both. It’s how we integrate them that counts.
One way of defining honesty is this: Honesty is the quality of accepting new facts even when they run against your opinions. And that quality is what earns trust — whether you’re a professional journalist, a blogger, or any combination thereof.
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