The Truth About the Media
by Chris Nagel
Department of Philosophy
California State University, Stanislaus
In News and the Culture of Lying Paul H. Weaver cited survey results showing a sharp decline
from 1973 to 1983 in public "confidence in" the press and TV as sources of information (1973 numbers are to the left, 1983 to the right):
"great"
"some"
little
press - 23%; TV - 19%
p - 61%; TV - 58%
p - 15%; TV - 22%
p - 11%; TV - 12%
p - 49%; TV - 51%
p - 39%; TV - 37% Weaver's claim was that "mendacity" was endemic to news media, but his account really interpreted it as an epidemic of bad practices that were to blame in explaining, as Weaver's subtitle put it, "why the news is not the truth." Some of the frequently cited causes are:
All of these have their merits and faults. Basically, they all construe the situation of news media as a relation of power between media and something or someone else, each construed as entities or agents pursuing an interest of their own. In short, under these views, mendacity is indeed an epidemic, a disease, and the healthy condition of news media, truth-telling, could be restored through some kind of therapy.
A more contemporary view of the situation would suggest that the situation of news media is a complex of relations of power, in which the function of truth-telling serves as a means of deploying power. In this case, "false" as much as "true" news would spread a juridical epistemological control over lived events, comprehending them as episodes in a recent history. Whether anything true or false about a bombing in Yugoslavia is presented by news media, the act of that presentation operates upon Yugoslavia as a site of the production of discourse permitting sentences to be composed, debates to be waged, points of view to be argued, documents to be created or destroyed. Whatever happens in the dark there can become a matter of discussion in clean, well-lighted places.(1)
Or else the function of the deployment of power works, ironically, to overcome the tacit intelligibility of the situation by means of a simulacrum, for instance, printed in the New York Times or broadcast over CNN. The bombing enters the realm of the true only upon its representation, so that the representation is the truth of the bombing. In that case, the bombing in Yugoslavia is not taking place, but perhaps the bombing on CNN is.(2)
I think all of these analyses miss the point, because all of them presuppose that news media have a truth-telling function at all. Instead of allowing this presupposition to guide my analysis, and thus putting a limit on it, I adopt a version of the phenomenological epoch�, set aside the presuppositions I bring to bear in my ordinary experience of news media, and focus on what appears in that experience itself. News media consist of statements and pictures that depict a set of objective meanings. News reports reconfigure the meaning of a set of terms shared in common by the audience of the news. To understand what news media do, we should focus on the conditions of this reconfiguration of meaning-both the necessary conditions and the actual conditions.
The phenomenological concept of objective meaning is developed by Husserl in Ideas.(3) Husserl claims there that the objective sense of a phenomenon is one that is constituted as the meaning of the phenomenon for all. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty says that this meaning is constituted when "[o]ur perspectives merge into each other, and we co-exist through a common world."(4) In this shared act, we attend to a common object, and while none of our perspectives taken singly is identical to this common object, all of our perspectives pertain to the common object, or, what is the same thing, the objective meaning of a phenomenon.
The measure of truth or of rationality in this intersubjective constitution of objective meaning is a matter of controversy. Let me stipulate what seem to be the required features. One criterion is the iterability of this meaning in multiple acts of consciousness. If this meaning is absolutely unique to a moment and place, it is not objective. But this criterion does not demand that the objective meaning be frozen in a specific form, never to be revisited. Indeed, the further acts of consciousness which reiterate objective meaning can make modifications; when these modifications are once again the correlate of a shared act, the modified meaning is again objective. Another criterion is that the meaning counts for the community which repeats it, in the sense that the phenomenon to which the objective meaning is attached is given to members of the community as the appearance of that very objective meaning.
An undeveloped theme in phenomenology of intersubjectivity concerns the form that dialogue or co-constitution takes, and the impact this has on the objective meanings produced in these acts. While phenomenologists have extensively explored the notion of intersubjectivity, under headings that more or less resemble the concepts of authenticity and inauthenticity, little attention has been paid to the impact of this range of lived experiences of intersubjectivity on the objective meanings constituted thereby.
My view is that the constitution of objective meaning is an essential function of intersubjective community, and that the authenticity or inauthenticity of intersubjective relations with others makes a difference in the objective meaning constituted by the community. Authentic intersubjective meaning constitution produces objective meanings which articulate the lived or given experience of the phenomenal object. In a genuine relation of co-constitution, my phenomenal experiences meet those of others face-to-face; our authentic act of meaning constitution genuinely risks and genuinely [places together] our subjective perspsectives. As a result, the meaning constituted in this authentic relation vividly and genuinely evokes the evidence of perception.
An inauthentic intersubjective community is one in which the members are not co-present, not co-operative in the constitution of meaning. This cannot mean the absolute absence of members of the community, since that would mean the lack of any community at all. Alfred Schutz describes such inauthentic encounters with others as encounters in which some participants are included as "contemporaries," as "fictions," etc. - others who are referred to while absent, or unreal others whose perspectives are accounted for without givenness or evidence.(5) The intersubjective community in question is the one in which the media take the role of an interlocutor or partner in dialogue. Yet this partner is one whose presence to me is unlike the presence of a genuine interlocutor, for numerous reasons.
One worth mentioning is the fact that the media are a set of interlocutors I can switch off or throw out. Their worth as interlocutors is dependent on our taking them up as such. This reveals the conventional status of media as partners in dialogue: they only count for me as partners when I admit them, and this admission is in no way based, as it would be with real interlocutors, on their genuine presence, on the givenness of their subjectivity in my encounter with them. I admit persons into dialogue because they are persons; why should I admit what is manifestly not a person? On the other hand, the media do not present a personal perspective-not one that I can engage in myself, nor one that engages me in dialogue. What this means for the interpretation of news media is: (1) when I am watching Tom Brokaw on the NBC Nightly News, I pay attention (when I pay attention at all), not to a genuinely co-present real other, but instead to a fictively composed quasi-other, who I call "Tom Brokaw." It is this "Tom Brokaw" who I see on the news. If he counts for me as an interlocutor at all, it is only in the limited way that I can fulfill on his behalf. That is, the "Tom Brokaw" each of us hears is for each of us our own individual "Tom Brokaw." While I certainly do not have any real basis for bestowing any trust on the words of this "Tom Brokaw," I am furthermore far more responsible for maintaining "Tom Brokaw's" continued currency and relevance than Tom Brokaw is. The "Tom Brokaw" I hear on the NBC news engages me in dialogue only when and as long as I watch NBC Nightly News. In addition, I can only engage in dialogue with "Tom Brokaw" by watching. He is an interlocutor, one that is, for me, utterly inauthentic, never really co-present, but with whom, when I watch the NBC news, I am nevertheless engaged in a dialogue which establishes objective meanings about the world.
So, the necessary condition of the possibility of any mediated reconfiguration of objective meaning is an inauthentic intersubjective relation.
Inauthentic meaning constitution produces objective meanings with some degree of privation of genuine evidence for the members of the community who compose the meaning (meanings that are more or less obscure to members of the community who share in them, meanings that evoke only dimly the evidence of perception). The objective meaning of the bombing in Yugoslavia is, for me, utterly privative of genuine evidence. In fact, I only believe there is such an event, or a situation that could be reported as such an event, on the basis of accepting the conventional standards of news media. (These standards themselves are, for me, only minimally tied to genuine evidence, or to perceptual experience, through my own encounter with writing for a school newspaper. For others, the genuine evidence underlying the acceptance of the convention might be more substantial-they might be working journalists, for example.)
The question of truth in news media can now be referred to these possibilities of the constitution of objective meaning, as a question of the kind of community enacted or instantiated in or through media. Is our encounter with others through media an authentic intersubjective relation? To ask the question is to reveal the absurdity of supposing that media could maintain authentic interrelations. The others we encounter through media, especially through institutional organizations of media, are never authentic others present to me in evident givenness. The phenomenal attunements we share are only those supported by the media themselves-e.g., the "shared" experience of watching the same television program or reading the same newspaper. This is the objective meaning constituted in discussing programs later, around the proverbial water cooler, or through usenet groups. The interlocutors here more or less genuinely engage one another's perspectives and thus give meaning to the private experience of the program.
But at the level of interpretation relevant for this question, these are "shared" experiences of ready-made objective meanings, rather than phenomena. That is, we do not attend, in reading newspapers or watching television programs, to mere phenomena, but instead we advert our attention to the meanings depicted in newspaper stories or TV programs. So even as we gather to give objective meaning to the battle in Yugoslavia, for us who have experienced this bombing through news media, the meanings are already given through inauthentic mediations, and no dialogue could recover a genuinely given experience. The news media have already established what counts for me and for the rest of us news consumers the scope of the objective meanings of these events. (It would be possible authentically to constitute the objective meaning of the phenomena of newspapers or of television, but this we have in fact already achieved and surpassed in our typical encounter with these media. The authentically constituted meaning of these phenomena is simply that they are the media we take them ordinarily to be.)
But to understand how the media constitute meaning, or, what is the same thing, how we use media or the media intervene in the constitution of objective meanings, we turn always to the depictions of meanings by the media.
Two implications of this analysis:
(1) To use media in the way that they are organized to function is to take part in these inauthentic relationships. There is no way to make sense of the news media otherwise.
(2) To the extent that media dominate our understanding of the world (by our choice of use), this objective meaning counts for us media consumers. We can and do use the media as means of producing objective meanings in the world, and in this we select for ourselves meanings that are founded upon inauthentic communities of discourse. The risk of perspective seems less great; we seem to be more in control (indeed we are-we decide who to watch, whether to watch, that it is good to watch); we take up an inauthentic community instead of the real one, and adopt its standards of judgment. The news media are a special instance of a range of contemporary social relations in which the standards of objectivity are set through a dialogue that is sustained by our commitment to inauthenticity and the lack of genuine evidence.
The news media cannot be faulted for failing to tell the truth. The notion of "truth" as applied in the accusation is one that could never be satisfied by media as a concrete social form. We have tacitly consented to mediation instead of truth.
1. Cf. Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality.
2. Cf. Baudrillard, Jean, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.
3. loc. cit., secs. 135 ff.
4. loc. cit., p. 354.
5. See Schutz, Alfred, The Phenomenology of the Social World, secs. 36ff.