The new reality? I was in a brief email exchange yesterday with the managing editor of NowPublic, Mark Schneider. NowPublic publishes blog posts in a new-sy manner, similarly to Newsvine and Tailrank. It’s citizen journalism in a very naked manner. He reminded me about the idea of ‘truthiness’.
Comedian Stephen Colbert coined the phrase in a skit about Bush’s decision to invade Iraq (video here):
And that brings us to tonight’s word: truthiness.
Now I’m sure some of the Word Police, the wordanistas over at Webster’s, are gonna say, “Hey, that’s not a word.” Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true, or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart.
Later, moving from the mainstream to social media, he expanded the theme onto the susceptibility of Wikipedia to vandalism. (*sigh* the video is here). Out of character, Colbert told the Onion AV Club, “Truthiness is tearing our country apart … Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty. People love the president because he’s certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don’t seem to exist. It’s the fact that he’s certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country.”
I don’t think it’s too much to guess that he’s talking about WMDs and Osama. It means false-trust, stuff that sounds right to people but hasn’t been proven.
The American Dialect Society, the wordanista mafia, obviously felt the power of this. They selected ‘truthiness’ as their word of the year for 2005 on January 6 2006.
Back to citizen journalism, the Wikpedia slur has gained ground. ‘Truthy’ is almost always a slur. It’s drawing a massive and unwarranted divide between trained journalists, who always get it right, and bloggers, who fail at this abysmally. (can Google do sarcasm yet?).
And this is where those of us who care run into difficulties. On the one hand, many of us instinctively feel that citizen media is the way forward. Journalism is too often an old-boys’ network. Influenced by the demands of advertisers and political funding, the editorial policy of almost any commercial news organisation seems tainted. Class, gender and race agendas can delete alternative voices. And as Mark Schneider reports, there’s nothing intrinsically more truthful or trustworthy about the news you read in mainstream media:
News editors for the most part rightly assume that if the originating producer is credible, the story is credible. One might view this as a kind of “delegated trustâ€, obviating the need for fine-grained fact-checking or re-interviewing news sources. It certainly saves a lot of time and money. And for the most part, this shared universe of trusting belief rarely creates embarrassment for its members.
The days of ‘three independent sources’ for any news story are over, thanks to Murdoch and the pressures of having two journalists produce ten stories a day. It’s not their fault, but journalists have been undermined. Nonetheless, someone employed by a media agency of some sort is assumed to have papal infallibility over time. They are journalists, they have press cards, so obviously they check facts, get three independent sources and report alternative points of view. Yeah, right. We have all read and seen such biased, unresearched crap in mainstream media that I don’t think any educated person really believes that any more.
And then there’s the other side of the coin, Colbert’s wikiality and truthiness. Some guy posts that it’s America’s 750th year of Independence (they didn’t — but it’s the best piece of satire I’ve seen all year and I want you to read it — come back in a minute, eh?). Can we just make stuff up? It’s on the web, some other guys link to it saying it’s true, so it has to be true, right? People start to believe it. Back in the mainstream. Somebody makes up a reason to invade another country. They get the press to spread it, and they will because that someone is newsworthy to the mainstream. That’s dreadful too. It’s in the mainstream and it’s in the blogosphere. A shared universe is a question of trust. And who do you want to trust? Two shared universes collide in the debate between citizen and mainstream journalism.
Recently, Seth Finkelstein wanted to do some research into the recent ‘non-lethal arms to be used on US civilians’ story. He had a hunch that the story wasn’t quite true. Then, in a shock ‘blogger-does-more-than-write-about-others’-views’ move, he actually did some work that he wasn’t paid for. He phoned the military, obtaining a transcript from the Defense Writers Group. What the transcript proves IMHO is that military tacticians should *never* speak to any kind of press, badged or otherwise. They are just too cold. But Seth ultimately feels his time was wasted — his research wasn’t going to get mainstream coverage — so what is he, some sort of unpaid freelancer for those who happen to find what he’s done? He’d uncovered some sort of truth, but was it truthy?
So where are we? Are we condemned to a truthy perspective? I don’t go down the ‘everything is relative’ line, because the prevailing truth is always connected to power. But maybe we always were. Hello French postmodernist Jean-François Lyotard:
Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major – perhaps the major – stake in the worldwide competition for power.
Knowledge as a commodity = truthiness. It’s a market we all have a stake in, finally. That’s the good news.
The bad news. I am also thinking about Seth Godin’s All Marketers are Liars. He says a successful marketer (publisher, journalist, blogger, advertiser) finds a story that fits their audience’s world view. I am scared by this book, though I know a lot of what he writes is correct (some of his other books are more empowering). We can’t just give up on more truthful, though, even if we are all truthy.
To wrap up and get things back to what’s real now, the big deal is checks and balances. Who has the most and best of these? People who broadcast? They’re trained, full-time and might get fired in the case of a cock-up. Or maybe, when push comes to shove, it’s easier all round to brush mistakes under the carpet. Or is it people who narrowcast, like bloggers. The people who open their own truthiness to comments, debate and trackbacks, people who are picked up on mistakes (even here) in a level playing field?
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