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Patmos Rhodes

The Need for a Little Perspective or, coming to terms with “perception is(n’t) reality”

  • William Romanowski
  • Sep 26, 2024
  • 7 min read

Updated: Dec 22, 2024

October 1, 2024

(7-minute read)

Keywords: perspective; post-truth; journalism bias; Taylor Swift; Kamela Harris; coconut tree; Iraq War

 

The day after Taylor Swift announced her plans to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in this November’s presidential election 405,999 users visited vote.gov through the link she provided. The week before the government website averaged around 30,000 visits per day.

 

Swift said she went public with her support for the Harris-Walz ticket partly to counter AI-generated images that were circulating, falsely implying she was endorsing former President Donald Trump. She wrote in an Instagram post:

 

It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.

 

Digital media, and now AI, has made the adage, “seeing is believing,” as outmoded as the typewriter, a relic from a bygone era. We have reached a place where it is difficult to trust what we read or even see with our own eyes on the internet. Unchecked social media, the culture wars, and the polarized political atmosphere in the United States have only deepened our collective skepticism.

 

Commentators are alarmed by what they believe is a menacing trend. Longstanding beliefs about human reasonableness have come under scrutiny – even attack – raising questions and concerns in turn about the viability of American democracy. 

 

As Robert Weissman, copresident of Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization, said,

“It’s very hard to have a democratic society if people can’t believe the things that they see and hear with their own eyes.”

 

How Did We Get Here?

 

Once upon a time most Americans got their news primarily from newspapers and one of three TV channels, ABC, NBC, or CBS. Operating on the principle of public ownership of the airwaves, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was authorized to regulate broadcasters and issued licenses contingent upon the company serving the “public interest, convenience, or necessity,” three core concepts of democratic government.


Seal of the Federal Communications Commission.
Seal of the Federal Communications Commission.

The proliferation of cable channels not only fragmented the viewing audience but justified deregulation of cable television. Media companies now operate chiefly as profit-oriented businesses under minimal government oversight, rather than as trustees serving the “public interest, convenience, or necessity.” That set news programmers free to serve the parent corporation’s aims – whether the bottom line, journalistic integrity, or an ideological agenda.

 

Today, the public interest is largely defined by what people supposedly choose through the marketplace – not by diversity, quality, competition, or social value. I have long held the position that the media reflects a culture it helps to create. As expected, viewers gravitated to news programs that reinforced their own views.

 

Remember the 2003 Invasion of Iraq?

A Challenger 2 main battle tank crosses an Iraqi defensive ditch.
A Challenger 2 main battle tank crosses an Iraqi defensive ditch.

 

A study that was published after the Invasion of Iraq in 2003 demonstrates clearly the impact news media have on us by showing a disparity of perceptions on the war based on a respondent’s primary news source.[1]


One part of the survey was based on respondents' answers to three key perception questions:

 

  • Clear evidence that Saddam Hussein was working closely with al Qaeda has been found.

  • Weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq.

  • World public opinion favored the United States going to war with Iraq.


Just to be clear, all three statements are misperceptions. The breakdown went like this.

 

  • Fox viewers (67 percent) were much more likely than the NPR/PBS audience (16 percent), which was the lowest, to have the first misperception, that there were established connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

  • Thirty-three percent of Fox viewers believed WMD’s were found in Iraq as compared to between 19 to 23 percent who got their news from ABC, NBC, CBS, and CNN. Only 17 percent of respondents who relied on print media, and 11 percent who watched PBS or listened to NPR, held this misperception.

  • The same pattern prevailed on the question of world opinion. Sixty-nine percent of Fox viewers held the misperception; the NPR/PBS audience was the lowest (26 percent). CBS viewers were at 63 percent, ABC at 58 percent, NBC at 56 percent, CNN at 54 percent, and print media at 45 percent.

  • Can you see how people are left with different factual knowledge of the war based on whatever information they received from their primary news source? It is not hard to imagine them staking out conflicting positions – in support or protest – of actions taken by the Bush administration.

 

The Need for Some Perspective

 

No doubt you’re familiar with some version of the old saying: “Opinions are like assholes. Everybody’s got one.” An opinion is a judgment we form about something that is more than an impression, but not necessarily based on knowledge that is objective and unbiased.


A perspective, or outlook, is more essential. It is an individual and collective vantage point from which we make sense of reality, regardless of how conscious we are of it functioning in our lives. A perspective takes shape as a pattern of meanings, a hanging together of ideas, beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions with more or less coherence. It becomes our way of thinking about things, based on deep-seated assumptions about the purpose of life, the way the world works – or should work – what’s right and wrong.


Pattern, Perceptions and Reality.
Pattern, Perceptions and Reality.


Another way of thinking about perspective is as a model of reality. Nate Silver, statistician and founder of FiveThirtyEight, a website that offers opinion poll analysis, had this to say about reality models.





A model is supposed to describe something in the real world, and if you lose sight of the real world and it fails to describe the real world, then it’s the model’s fault and your fault for building the model, and not the real world’s fault. And that’s a lesson that people, I think, have a lot of trouble learning.

The more one’s perspective is loosened from reality, the more it likely to become entrenched in disbelief – the refusal to accept that something is the truth or reality despite the evidence that exists. And as the Greek philosopher Epictetus said, “It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.”


Perspective and Reality


In my previous post I made the statement, “Unless we’re all living in the Matrix, it’s safe to say there is an objective reality that we understand and make sense of based in some measure by subjective means.” In other words, in the quest for truth, one’s perspective operates in concert with the reality it purports to represent.


That said, there is an inherent tension that helps explain inconsistencies in perspectives and the nature of ensuing conflicts.


On the one hand, our beliefs and values are constrained by space and time, that is, cultural traditions and historical circumstances. The press had a heyday when the Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris told an interviewer that her mother liked to say, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” She used that adage to make a point. “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you,” she said.


Graphic description between cognitive bias, habit and social convention.
Graphic description between cognitive bias, habit and social convention.

On the other hand, a perspective is inescapably based on deep-rooted beliefs that are necessary for meaningful action. No matter what they consist of, we take these as articles of faith, so to speak. We hold them as beyond questioning and true apart from any discourse or argumentation. Perspectives then, have a religious character insofar as they have to do with bedrock beliefs about us and the world we live in.


Faith – deep trust, or certainty in something (or someone) – is a powerful force. But faith is not, or ought not to be blind, naïve, or uninformed (in describing reality), but constantly confirmed and validated by its exercise in personal and public life, and over time.


The Best Obtainable Version of The Truth


Fierce competition, smaller market shares, and diminished profits put pressure on every corporate division, including the news. For some commentators that meant skewing established journalistic principles, standards, and ethical codes.


But I think it fair to say that in seeking the truth, not all, but most journalists in the mainstream adhere to established institutional principles and norms designed to ensure unbiased reporting as much as is possible.


Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at a conference, “Trust. News. Democracy,” at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, April 9-10, 2024.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein at a conference, “Trust. News. Democracy,” at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, April 9-10, 2024.

I like the pithy phrase Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post (and Pulitzer Prize-winning) reporters of Watergate fame, routinely used to describe their purpose and method:

“The best obtainable version of the truth.”

Of course that requires some effort on the part of viewers.


Much is being written about how news networks can influence viewers through “agenda setting” (relentless coverage of a subject), “framing” (the way the subject is cast), and “partisan coverage filtering” (selective reportage that skews the subject, leaving viewers with a biased understanding).


Understanding perspectives and the role they play in navigating the post-truth media landscape is a good place to begin breaking out of our media bubbles. As Taylor Swift plainly put it, “The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.”


Take a Moment to Read:


Photo Credits (in order of appearance)


Endnotes 

[1] Steven Kull, Clay Ramsay and Evan Lewis, “Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War,” Political Science Quarterly, 118:4 (Winter, 2003/2004), 569-598.

William D. Romanowski is an award-winning commentator on the intersection of religion and popular culture and author of a number of books, including Reforming Hollywood: How Protestants Fought for Freedom at the Movies and Eyes Wide Open: Looking for God in Popular Culture. With his continuing commentary, he is trading footnotes for fiction, writing novels under the pen name (or nom de plume, as the French put it), Patmos Rhodes.



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