Fake News

My graduate training in public policy has permanently tinted my figurative glasses and damaged me forever. It wasn’t always that way.

My undergraduate education was in Computer Science which, back in the day, was a blend of theory and application in mathematics and electronic engineering. Out of 120 semester hours in a four-year program, I took six semester hours (two courses) in the social sciences and another six hours in the humanities (again, two courses). I was a science nerd and I (wrongly) believed I benefitted from a liberal undergraduate education.

It wasn’t until my doctoral training I realized how my narrow science and engineering education hampered the way I saw life and rigged my critical thinking framework. I readily categorized too many things as black or white, right or wrong, just or unjust. My color palette didn’t include any of the shades of gray. And the absence of all grays meant I did little reading and inquiry to help me sort out the issues of the day. I read from sources and spoke with people who shared my own world view. And I did all of this before there was a Facebook!

In high school, my English courses were like stones in a creek. I skipped across them rapidly to get to the other side. The really big lessons in literature, like the ends do not justify the means, were crammed into short-term memory just long enough to satisfy a course quiz or an exam. Afterward, my memory was purged as I prepared for another course with its own set of quizzes and exams.

I missed the Reformation, the Magna Carter, the great philosophers, all of the issues of epistemology and what distinguishes belief from knowledge. I was exposed to seminal events in American History although the differences between justification of behaviors, like Manifest Destiny, and economic consequences were woven into the patriotic fabric of American pride. There was no downside to our westward migration. It was ordained.

This continued through the social programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. We took pride that only in America can everyone—anyone, really—rise above the circumstances of their birth to become a success story. Birth need not be destiny in America. All the precursors of success were there. Those who triumphed did so because they were motivated. Those who didn’t? Failure in America was always a personal failure among an abundance of resources and opportunity. How could it be otherwise?

My doctoral training started with a seemingly simple question: How do we know what we profess to know? To realize that truth and fact could change over time—indeed would change over time—was an unsettling proposition. We once believed the earth was the center of our universe. It was an article of faith all knew to be true. Later, we understood the earth orbited the sun instead. Talk about a shift in truth and fact!

The folks in my doctoral class were crazy smart, more liberally educated, and they instinctively knew that understanding a new theory or a social program based on accepted thought required us to start at the beginning. How do we know that which we believe to be true is, in fact, the truth? In every way we needed to be more like Copernicus. Our knowledge was an elaborate system of scaffolding, each level built on earlier work. Tearing down a section of unsafe scaffolding before we could build anything more was not viewed as progress. Too often we are willing to stand on shaky footing—the danger of collapse be damned. What’s that old proverb? Pride goeth before the fall.

Today the common refrain in some circles is Fake News. News reports are often followed by more reporting and analysis. And some of the following reports do differ. Sometimes, Fake News is, indeed, fake. Regrettably, too many of us are too impatient to wait for the second word on an important topic of the day. Instead, we build our scaffold even higher. We don’t do our homework. We don’t exercise our critical thinking skills.

Also, regrettably, some people make entire careers by knowingly, willfully, and even gleefully furthering the construction of dangerous scaffolds. It serves their purpose. It becomes their selfish means toward a less than beneficial outcome for others. Cynically, it becomes the theory, practice, and fulfillment of their very private ends. Clearly, there are winners and losers in Fake News. The progenitors exploit what an American political historian has aptly described as the “Paranoid Style in American Politics.”

All these many years later, I realize just how much I miss my former cohort of graduate students. They damaged me forever.

Copyright 2019, Howard D. Weiner