By Eric Valentine
“The media lies,” she said.
That was the way my friend who desperately wants to fully re-open her brick-and-mortar shop ended our conversation about how she’s not going to get the COVID vaccine, at least not anytime soon. Her inaction may be one factor then in delaying her shop’s ability to get back to normal.
“Patriots on the Capitol. Patriots storming. Men with guns need to shoot their way in,” wrote retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Larry Rendall Brock, Jr., on social media while he stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. He thought he was trying to save his country from a violation of voters’ rights, he didn’t think he was causing the violent overthrow himself.
While we—at least some of us—can look at these examples and feel confident these folks got caught up in a false belief system, not everyone can. In fact, some people who hold beliefs similar—or far more absurd—than these examples are getting elected to office. Case in point: U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene from the 14th District of Georgia. She has made numerous headlines in recent days for her recently held beliefs, one whopper involving lasers from space funded by elitist Jews causing wildfires in California. She took some of them back when she addressed the House of Representatives, which promptly removed her from her committee positions where the actual work—beyond voting yea or nay—of Congress takes place.
So if a government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth, it seems the people need to get a better hold on what is true or false. But how? It’s not like the media has always been spot-on or bias-free in its covering of issues. And the very nature of science is to keep asking questions and doubting conclusions.
Philosophers have racked their brains over the millenia trying to define and fully understand truth. The best they’ve done is come up with something called correspondence theory. That’s a fancy way of saying that what you hold as fact in your mind corresponds to what bears out in a mind-free world. Case in point: You believe eating kale daily cures heart disease. You then eat kale daily and after a few months, let’s say, all your medical tests show zero signs of heart disease.
But correspondence theory doesn’t necessarily take into account something experimental psychologists call the third variable. That is, what cured your heart disease may have been the regular exercise you started doing or the changing of your job to one with less stress or the fact that you ended what was a toxic relationship. Many factors, including kale, could have caused the positive result you wanted.
And this is the question the media and the people who absorb media must ask themselves every day. Did you consider the existence of a third variable? I believe the most powerful third variable is whatever we want to believe, whatever we already hold to be not just true, but important. That is where all of our biases lie (pardon the pun).
So before you read your next news article or turn on your next podcast or view your next newscast, take a moment to write down the things you not only believe but also the things you believe to be important. Once you have that frame of reference in front of you, you’ll be better able to see why it is you are believing or not believing the things you read, hear, or see.