In American politics in 2004, there are very few facts. Instead are mostly-biased speculation and opinions of what's currently happening. Such is the theme of the editorial in Sunday's SJ Merc, Our Fractured Discourse, By Mike Antonucci, which says:
The box-office success of ``Fahrenheit 9/11'' appears to be heavily driven by one of Michael Moore's fundamental themes: that he's supplying vital information we don't get from the government or a gullible mainstream media.
In that context, the film is not as much about Moore's contempt for President Bush and his war on terrorism as it is about what the public can know and trust -- or simply wants to embrace as validation for what it already believes.
``Fahrenheit 9/11'' conveys a black-and-white clarity about staggeringly complex issues of war and social justice, provoking a hallelujah chorus from like-minded moviegoers. With equivalent passion, detractors have lambasted the film as transparent propaganda.
For everybody else, that leaves ``Fahrenheit 9/11'' as a maddening symbol of a nation groping for facts. We are largely united by our sense of national crisis, yet we are wildly divided by what we think we know about it.
``That is the question: How does anyone know anything today?'' said Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
For Delli Carpini, ``Fahrenheit 9/11'' is just the latest flash point amid the confusion and controversy generated by a ``breakdown between news and entertainment, and between fact and opinion.''
...
If the discussion is expanded to high-profile reporting failures -- such as the New York Times' recent admission of serious lapses in its coverage leading up to the war in Iraq -- our information society seems to be flirting with a reliability meltdown.
Separating facts from semi-facts, speculation and loose assertions is a job that has become, perhaps ironically, much harder as we've been deluged with new sources of information. We're already worried about the weaknesses of the mainstream press, and now unsubstantiated ``news reports'' fly around the world by e-mail, gaining strength by virtue of their computer-accelerated repetition. And with Moore's instigation, we're sitting in theaters trying to sift through the allegations about distortions and falsehoods in his film.
...
``If you have the slightest familiarity with the World Wide Web,'' said [legal expert Jeffrey] Toobin, ``there's more diversity of information than our parents could conceive of, let alone see.''
With that much diversity, of course, comes the potential for more conflicting ``noise,'' rather than clearer news.
...
Consider Weblogs, the online journals that exemplify the ease with which anyone can use the Net to be his own publisher. Commentary by those writers, notes interactive media consultant Brian Reich, generally is unhesitant about declaring biases, such as political memberships or business interests.
By contrast, says Reich, the assertions by the established media that it's impartial or balanced in its coverage of news are received by cynical consumers with ``a wink and a nod.'' The concerns of those consumers are not only about the quality of news coverage, but the hidden and undeclared biases that determine what's selected for any coverage at all.
He added: ``The news is what the news tells us the news is, but that doesn't mean that's all the news that's out there.''
Interestingly, this is the point of
Rohit's
PhD thesis: that decentralized systems need to take into account the different opinions; that there is no single value for the truth of a statement. Instead, there is only the truth according to a source; software systems of the future must cope with the same lack of consensus that exists so openly in the difference-of-opinions in the politics of the 2004 United States.
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