It is easy to get the facts wrong. Today, with the increased use of artificial intelligence to write stories, create art, and search the internet, people are worried that it will be harder and harder to determine what is true and what is not — but “knowing the facts” has never been easy.
First, there is the chance of misunderstanding what we are told. Our previous experience tends to color how we interpret new information that comes our way. One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was provided before my first trip abroad: Set aside your temptation to judge what you see and hear until you have a chance to understand it. Understanding requires the ability to listen and absorb without judgment. That advice has helped throughout my career in journalism. Don’t prejudge the facts, and try to understand the history behind those facts.
They say it is the victorious who write history, so many of the historical accounts we find do not contain the perspectives of the vanquished; yet that perspective is important to truly understand what happened. I immediately think of Ken Burns’ documentary on the Vietnam Conflict in which he sought out Vietnamese survivors to get their side of the story.
Even authoritative sources can be wrong. That was brought home in John Warner’s Substack post about Disney’s decision to fire most of the staff at National Geographic, which it took over in 2018 as part of its acquisition of 21st Century Fox. Fox had taken a 73 percent stake in the prestigious magazine in 2015 as the nonprofit National Geographic Society, which has published the magazine since 1888, created a for-profit publishing arm, National Geographic Partners.
Disney has been engaged in cost-cutting measures since last fall, and this latest purge of editors and staffers at National Geographic has left the magazine with very few editors and writers, and it has eliminated newsstand sales. It will be relying on freelance contributions to keep the magazine going and make up for the staff losses.
Warner recalled that National Geographic, along with the World Book Encyclopedia, had been his sources for grade-school reports. “It’s obviously bad news that a mega billion dollar corporation decides to operate a legacy print institution on the cheap. While I think the physical book is here to stay, it seems possible the print media will ultimately go extinct or nearly so,” he writes.
Yet he acknowledges that the World Book Encyclopedia was not entirely accurate and, “National Geographic was infused with the spirit of white colonialism from its inception, a spirit which its readership would not have viewed as biased, but as correct. Non-white people from foreign lands were frequently portrayed as ‘savages’ by the white adventurers producing material for the publication.”
Online information has replaced encyclopedias, with Wikipedia becoming the go-to place for student research. Warner recalls, “I was teaching a first-year writing and communication course at Virginia Tech when Wikipedia first became prominent. As instructors, we were cautioned to tell students not to use the site as a source in their research because of its unreliability. … Better to stick with the library and the sources that have been approved and vetted by the authorities we trust.”
However, “Soon enough, teaching students to use Wikipedia productively as part of their research processes became an explicit part of the course. Over time, that teaching became less and less necessary, as students arrived in my college course already well-versed in its use and its limitations.”
As for authoritative sources, “All the biases that infuse the old World Book Encyclopedia are present in academic literature too. We are also still in the midst of an almost two-decade '“replication crisis” in the sciences where huge swaths of once sacrosanct findings, particularly in the behavioral sciences cannot be reliably reproduced.”
The passage of time reveals the mistakes of the past, but new mistakes are always possible. Vigilance is necessary to sort through the massive amounts of information now appearing from diverse sources. To be vigilant requires curiosity — about everything. That includes poring over historical documents and delving into new areas of knowledge with a hefty dose of skepticism.
Warner concludes, “making sense of the world is a never-ending process where we rinse and repeat what we think we know against what we encounter in the world on a daily basis. If you can embrace curiosity and not become overly fixed in a position, it can actually be a pretty interesting way to live.”
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