The Weaponization of Facts

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The “opinion/fact” distinction figures prominently within American political-media culture. It is inseparable from the “pundit/journalist” distinction that it supports.

The orthodox paradigm goes like this: Journalists trade only in facts.  Commentators or pundits, on the other hand, are presumably not interested in facts, for their mission is to impart their opinions.

Since journalists are concerned only with facts, journalists as journalists resist indulging their prejudices and biases.  They impartially report what they refer to as “the news.”  Notice that events, facts, deemed newsworthy exist objectively in the world, and it is the job of journalists to identify them, as if these facts were like criminal suspects in a line-up.

The raison d’être of commentators or pundits, in contrast, is to share their opinions.  They are expected to be partial, biased.  Pundits are not journalists, and anyone who takes them at their word, or who takes seriously their commentary on the events of the day, makes a category error.  Whether it is Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow, popular pundits from across the political spectrum — including, specifically, Carlson and Maddow themselves — have exploited this distinction between journalists proper, the merchants of facts, and pundits, entertainers of opinion, in order to defend themselves in lawsuits that have been brought against themselves and their employers.

Predictably, rival partisans seized upon the disavowals of journalism by the likes of Carlson and Maddow as admissions that they are propagandists, fakes, uninterested in facts.  In reality, though, and purely for litigious purposes, these pundits were doing nothing more or less than defaulting to, for their own ends, the fiction, continually endorsed by our political-moral culture, that there is indeed a hard line (or any line at all) between objective, impartial, fact-based journalists and subjective, partial, opinion-based pundits.   

Yet the most towering figures and the greatest thinkers that have ever lived, both from the East and West, have long debated the ontological status of a “fact.”  What is a fact?  How is a fact different from an opinion?  People for thousands of years and from around the world have (in their own culturally and historically specific vocabularies) pursued answers to these questions precisely because every philosophical tradition has affirmed the difference between reality and perception.

This is the ultimate metaphysical problem: we know what appears to be real.  But what’s ultimately, or really real?

The epistemological problem is inseparable from the metaphysical one: how can we know what’s really real?

After all, since our judgments as to what’s real or true depend upon our perceptions of what’s real or true, but since we also take for granted that our perceptions are fallible — that they are shot through (inescapably) with bias, a bias that will be reflected in the language that we use to supply characterizations of the things that we talk about — how is it that journalists can neatly bracket their biases, transcend their perceptions, and somehow still perceive this puzzling class of entities that only they supposedly have the ability to access, this curious set of objects called “facts” that, unlike opinions, are supposed to be “cold” and “hard”?

Are facts atomized entities in the world, separate things from one another, like stones in a rock garden or cars in the dealer’s parking lot, that journalists pick out and showcase for the benefit of the public?

Since all reporting, all referencing, must be done in language, and since the selection of terms that goes into describing people, events, and issues will inevitably be a function of the value preferences of the describer, how is a fact different from an opinion?  For example, take the issue of abortion.  There is no value-neutral way to characterize this.  Even the term “abortion” itself loads the deck.  From the standpoint of those who wish to see it be as inexpensive and accessible as possible, irrespective of a woman’s reasons to opt for it and, quite possibly, regardless of the time that it occurs in the pregnancy, “abortion” mitigates against their position.  Hence, partisans of this stripe prefer to talk about “reproductive rights.”  However, from the vantage of those who oppose abortion categorically, the term “abortion” undermines, or at least weakens their position, for it conceals what amounts to nothing less than “the murder of the unborn.”   

Those who champion “reproductive rights” or “the right to choose” refer to “the fetus,” whereas those who are “pro-life” refer to “the baby” inside the womb.

This is just one issue, but it illustrates the impossibility of using value- or bias-free terms when describing any and all issues — i.e., topics that, by definition, are controversial.  So how is it that journalists manage to do what neither pundits nor any of us has ever been able to do and emancipate themselves from their opinions, their biases, their perceptions, their values?

The question is obviously rhetorical.  They have done, and can do, no such thing.

To repeat, the binary distinction between fact-based journalism and opinion-based punditry upon which our political-culture has long relied is, and has always been, a fake.

Image via Pxhere.