I have characterized the method of news journalism as collecting instances of opinion for the purpose of confirming an assumption of fact. The flaw of this method is that it never tests the existence of the fact directly. Objectivity is never obtained. Facts are never discovered. As a result, collection of opinions is guided by, what Freud called, wishful-thinking. The investigator wishes that reality would conform to her or his vision of reality -- a vision motivated by some deep, unassailable need in the investigator. Political interpretation of political preference polls is a good example of wishful-thinking at work. In the current Presidential campaign, most polls show President Bush and Senator Kerry very close with one candidate or the other being a polling point or two ahead of the other. (For example, in a two-way race, in a sample poll of registered voters, Bush might be preferred 46% and Kerry 47%, or it might be the other way around.) In most of these polls, the polling results are within the margin of error, which is usually +/- 3 basis points. What such results mean is that there is no statistically significant difference between the candidates polling results. The difference in numbers are not significant. Despite the lack of significance, journalists and political analysts will opine at length about how the polling results show one candidate ahead and the other behind. The polls show nothing of the kind. This interpretation is not a matter of statistical ignorance by commentators, though that is a problem, too; it is a matter of the commentator's wishful-thinking.
I have used the term, wishful-thinking, instead of the more common term, bias, because journalists have the notion that a fact can be revealed when bias is defeated by "balancing" one opinion by a contrary opinion. The problem with fair and balanced reporting is that it simply pits one opinion against another opinion, not a fact against an opinion. Also, I have not identified the flaw of journalistic method as stereotypical thinking; because stereotypical thinking is simply a version of wishful-thinking. The investigator's deep need for reality to be a certain way is simply hidden behind stereotypes. The stereotypes would be of course selected to conform to the investigator's wishful vision.
The problem of obtaining objectivity about facts in news journalism is therefore the problem of defeating wishful-thinking by journalists and the news media. Both modern science and court trials of fact defeat wishful-thinking by rejecting the prior assumption of fact. News journalism has no choice but to adopt a similar procedure. The journalist's first step, in investigating a possible news event, must be to hypothesize that there is no event at all. Evidence must be sought to prove there is no event. From the point of view of an event actually having happened, we would say that the investigator must start by searching for counter-indications. Only when the reporter fails to disprove that a news event is happening or has happened, does the reporter then look for evidence that it has happened.
Even after failing to prove the null hypothesis, however, the reporter must work with further null hypotheses. If an event has happened, hypotheses as to who, what, when, where, and why must be framed as null hypotheses. This method would be close to the clinical method of the scientific physician. The patient confronts the physician with a host of symptoms. The physician would soon be in a hopeless muddle if she tried to list all diseases that could produce the symptoms. Rather, the physician begins by looking for symptoms that would eliminate possible disease candidates, that is, by using the null hypothesis. When one disease candidate is eliminated, the physician challenges the patient's symptoms with another null hypothesis. Eventually, sometimes in a matter of minutes, the physician arrives at a brief list of diseases that cannot be eliminated.
The reporter's task is not more daunting than the task of the scientist, the jury, or the physician. The physician, too, works with transient phenomena, shifting symptoms, complex symptoms, and patients whose opinions as to their illness are usually incorrect. The reporter might not have the extensive scientific training of the physician, but with experience, her ability to use the null hypothesis would move her past the painful fallacies of contemporary news reporting. Reporter, heal thyself!
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