Trust Is for Suckers
Trust you? Yeah, right.
That’s what I used to say to anti-abortion demonstrators when I was writing for mainstream media. I meant it at at the time, but they were wrong to trust me. Because the story that got printed ended up showing them in a somewhat skewed light. Not because I meant to do that or because I was aware of it, but because — even with my editors’ best efforts — they couldn’t take my bias out of the story.
That was back then, when I tried to hold on to the idea that I could be an objective reporter of news and events. The immense failure of this is a huge reason of why I’m now what I call “journalist 2.0” — I’m still reporting, but no longer do I pretend to control my filters — in fact, reveling in them has created exactly the opposite effect — more people seem to trust me now that I assure them I am untrustworthy. (Yes, by a prior post, that trust from them is based on their own self-orientation.)
This is why Howard Zinn is so amazing — He is perhaps best known for A People’s History of the United States, which presents American history through the eyes of those he feels are outside of the political and economic establishment.
And guess what — media is INSIDE the political and economic establishment. And, perhaps more importantly, the political and economic establishment is inside US.
So no, don’t trust me. But trust my bias, it’s always there.
Previous Comments
You are in a restaurant. Pretty decent. You ask the waiter who had introduced himself “Hi my name is Jim and I am your waiter for tonight” a simple question:
“Do you recommend the lamb or the fish?”
Answer 1: “Oh, everything is good”.
Answer 2: “Take the fish, I tried the lamb earlier and while normally excellent it is not up to par today”.
Answer 3: “Get the lamb. We have lots of it and it has to go. Tomorrow we will no longer be able to serve it”.
Which answer do you trust most?
Why?
None.
Answer 1 is not an answer ; it’s like saying 50/50. It means you don’t know.
Answer 2 sounds genuine, it is both subject- and object-oriented, but then I don’t know if the chap’s tastes match mine or if he sees the same hue of blue.
Answer 3 is attractive because the lad has all to lose, including his job. Now, it doesn’t answer my question, and his answer just cannot be : we are supposedly in a fairly decent restaurant. If anything, it shows the manager has little discriminating skills when hiring staff, and that may extend to food, cooks and cooking. I trust I’d walk out.
So there’s a catch in this example: the restaurant is fairly decent and so must be all of the menu. Thus asking for a recommendation plainly means that you don’t know what you want. It also may mean going there is about something else: discuss business, take out or show someone around, so that the question really will be “what are you having?” and choose accordingly if one is polite. So the initial question has no fundamentals:
I trust my stomach or listen to my company 😉
As to Irina’s mentionning Howard Zinn, books are often written along the winners’ perspective and little question conventional wisdom or the establishment. Another good example is Amin Maalouf’s book : “The Crusades seen by the Arabs”. It gives a totally different picture.
Perhaps like financial disclosures you should be obliged to list your philosophical biases as best you can. Though to be fair, I say stuff like that all the time. Hah, hah – joke.