The problems inherent in this article are made worse because the author's denial of the existence of truth is in the context of a response to Terry Anderson, who spent half a decade as a captive of terrorists because he was trying to tell the truth about events in the war he was covering as a war correspondent.
Let's be clear here. The author isn't just saying reporters need to avoid taking sides in a controversy by presenting both sides’ version of the truth and letting our readers make up their own minds once they have the facts. (That would be entirely appropriate.) He's not just saying truth is often hard to determine — after all, it's often painfully evident that both sides may really believe they're right and neither is deliberately trying to cover up the truth.
What the author is saying is much more serious. After quoting a number of modern philosophers and other commentators who question whether truth exists, he comes to the conclusion that “Good journalism starts with the truth – about the many guidelines the journalist is restricted by. Good journalism starts with being humble – about the fact that there is no such thing as truth. Or as Richard Feynman, the physicist, put it: ‘we never are definitely right, we can only be sure we are wrong.’ Let's start with this. It would be more than enough. Right, Terry?”
This approach to journalism, while claiming to be “humble,” is in fact coming perilously close to saying all news is propaganda because, as the author points out, editors at the Atlanta headquarters of CNN and the Qatar headquarters of al-Jazeera may not want some stories reported.
We all know bad editors and bad publishers exist, and sometimes good editors and good publishers make bad decisions.
To go beyond admitting that obviously true fact and argue that there is no such thing as truth risks turning reporters into propagandists.
I fully grant that truth is sometimes really hard to find. I fully grant we sometimes make serious mistakes in trying to find it. Even beyond that, I fully grant that as reporters, in many (probably most) cases it is our job to present both sides’ versions of the truth, not to take sides on which of those versions is true. Obvious exceptions include things like Nazi death camps, the Soviet gulags, the devastation caused by Mao's Red Guards, or modern horrors like North Korean prisons, where governments are deliberately committing horrible atrocities and often trying to hide their violations of human rights from public view. Any right-thinking moron with half a brain should be able to see that mass murder and torture of people who disagree with their government is wrong — but let's not forget that Stalin was effective in convincing too many Western journalists that he was greatly improving his country during some of the worst years of his terror campaigns, and Hitler and Mao did much the same thing with their own people.
To deny that truth exists at all is to deny the entire purpose of journalism. If we're not in the business of trying to tell the truth, we don't deserve the protections of the First Amendment because we're no better than the corporate or government PR people who we're supposed to be holding accountable for their actions.
Slanted news reporting first starts with an editor’s decision on what is and isn’t news. See my tagline.
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As American conservatives we in no way support the ideas and
actions of monsters like Hitler and we are even philosophically
farther from Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot than than our liberal coun-
terparts. Our beliefs fall within what should be historically ac-
ceptable boundaries yet the vast majority of political reporters
treat our ideas and those who expouse them as evil incarnate.
Why is that? Is it because journalism professors prefer to spawn
activists of chosen issues to real critical analysts?
I used to hear that the job of the Fourth Estate was to make the
powerful uncomfortable. In our time it is only true if the power-
ful are conservatives.