09 March 2017
Delivering The Truth
A focus on the arteries.
By John Watson
Politics by its very nature spawns slogans and also those descriptive expressions which bob along in their wake. We all remember the “wets” of the Thatcherite era, and the “big tent” of Tony Blair; time was when you could not go into a cafe without hearing these terms being banded about as though they were pregnant with meaning. Well, now the vogue is for “post truth”, an expression quite remarkable for its vacuity.
“You just have to accept that we are now living in a post truth age” some sage will claim, beard wagging knowledgeably, and there will be a general nodding of heads in agreement, accompanied perhaps by the occasional tear of mourning for the honesty which, after centuries of purity, the world has alas forsaken. It is all rot of course. You can only have a “post truth” age if it was preceded by a “truth” age. When exactly was that and how on earth did we all miss it? Was there really a time when rulers laid things out fairly before the public, admitting their own errors and weaknesses? Perhaps a few politicians have done that for a very short time, but never more than a handful and, even then, only until their own record of misjudgements made such a course impractical.
In reality the public have only ever had access to a sanitised version of the truth, dressed up to suit the political objectives of those peddling it, and the history of that goes back to the first occasion on which a protoplasmic globule stood on a rock in the primeval swamp and began to make a speech. Since then everyone has lied like Trojans and that goes for historians, politicians, the Church and the public as a whole. Everyone that is, dear reader, except of course for you and me.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If governments really told the unvarnished truth about the risks they were taking, they would constantly be being forced to resign. Many dangers never come home to roost, and keeping the public in the dark can turn out to have been good practical politics. With a religion which allows that doubts are human (how else could Thomas have retained his sainthood?) it would be tedious in the extreme if religious leaders were to feel under an obligation to make a confession to the public every time that they felt a tad uncertain.
But if we are not witnessing the onset of a “post truth” age, there is at least a change in the way in which facts are presented to us. As always, politics follows technology and the starting point must be the extraordinary amount of material available on the Internet. It is a kaleidoscope of colour, much of it is put there by the establishment: politicians, churches, journalists, academics, commentators, pamphleteers and many others, no doubt containing much the same mixture of propaganda and half-truths as it always did. What is new is the pile of information which would not previously have found a platform: photographs by amateurs, tweets, posts on facebook, blog entries and all the outpourings of nutterdom. Once they would have been confined to the public bar by the costs of publishing them further, but now that the constraint of publishing costs has disappeared they spill out into the ether like rubbish out of a broken black bag.
The trick is, of course, to know which sources can be relied on and which cannot. That was always a problem but now it is a bigger one because of the volume of stuff and the difficulty of tracing its antecedents. Sources which are reliable on one topic may not be reliable on another. For example a newspaper which publishes expert reports on the Premier League results may be dangerously erratic on the question of exactly which Second World War aircraft are to be found on the moon. What is needed is a way of sorting grain from chaff, institutions with a truth hallmark whose reports can be relied on. Where are they to be found?
A similar problem was encountered in the days of empire by bankers who wished to provide finance for imperial expansion but did not know enough about the borrowers to distinguish good risks from bad. What were they to do? To keep out of the markets would mean to lose good profits; to send agents to enquire into the status of each lender would be prohibitively expensive; to lend without knowing would clearly be dangerous. Their answer was to lend to businesses whose bonds were accepted by respected merchant banks known as “accepting houses”. If Rothschild’s say accepted a bond they guaranteed its payment. That meant that the lender who took the bond could rely on Rothschild’s having done proper due diligence and, even more to the point, could look to Rothschild’s for payment if the borrower failed. Rothschild’s of course would charge large fees for their endorsement of the bond and for accepting the risk.
Although this was just a solution to a financial problem and a system for guaranteeing debts, it does have a lesson to teach us in relation to creating authoritative sources of truth. For success it depended on an alignment of the interests of those analysing the credit of the borrowers with the task they were to carry out. If the accepting house called it wrong, the accepting house picked up the loss. Now compare that with the position of commercial news sources. Their revenues come from advertising and advertising is driven by circulation. In the very difficult commercial environment in which they exist, it is imperative for them to produce stories which their readers find attractive and to please their advertisers too. That isn’t to say that they all succumb to the temptation to distort; in fact most of them nobly struggle against it. Still the tensions have to be acknowledged and there are less scrupulous “news providers” amongst the bloggers at the foot of the food chain.
So how is the grain of truth to be sorted from the chaff? The press will no doubt continue to do its best but, as budgets for journalists contract, it increasingly needs to be supplemented by institutions which are isolated from commercial pressure. There are already many of these, not just the BBC but also independent research houses such as the Institute of Fiscal Studies which worked hard to expose the falsehoods used by both sides in the Brexit campaign. The challenge is to get their conclusions before the public in a sufficiently attractive and authoritative format. Who will do it? The press? No doubt in part, but theirs is a diminishing medium. Bloggers? Possibly, but they often have their own agenda? Online magazines? We at the Shaw Sheet certainly buy into that one.
In a typically British way we will no doubt experiment with all those, and others too, until a winner emerges. As the blatency with which facts were distorted in the Brexit and US polls demonstrates, however, we had better get on with it.
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