Jay Rosen is a media critic and professor of journalism at New York University. He’s been in Australia for the Melbourne Writers Festival, delivering a keynote speech on Why Political Coverage is Broken.
It includes a great quote from American journalist Ron Suskind on the first Bush White House:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
This nicely sums up the dilemma with reality. Think about reality, try to report it or grasp its essence, and you sacrifice being “real” (I think this is why I avoid taking photos – the effort required to capture the perfect shot can mean you end up missing it). Reality is an experience of the present moment, “something” that transcends all that we understand or can even express. Hence our reliance on art and music to represents what ultimately matters.
Bush (or at least Cheney and Rumsfeld) was right: reality is what we do, not what we think or say.
The danger here, of course, is that it can lead one to believe that all that is less-than-real, what can be contained, like thoughts, words and facts, is meaningless, of no true value. It doesn’t matter if there aren’t really any weapons of mass destruction. We feel there are (or more accurately, we’ve convinced ourselves of such a gut feel because we want to kick Saddam’s arse). This can lead to the phenomenon of reverse verification.
Says Rosen: “Verification, which is crucial to journalism, means nailing down assertions with verifiable facts. Verification in reverse is taking established facts and manufacturing doubt about them, which creates political friction, and the friction then becomes an energy source you can tap for campaigning. It’s a political technique.”
As he points out, this is the modus operandi of Rick Perry, Republican nomination for president. We also see it here in Australia, especially with the debate on climate change.
Julia Gillard takes a position on responding to climate change. Based on the science, we need to do this to achieve that by then. By adopting quantitative targets, she risks being seen as out of touch with reality. If she admits the science is meaningless, she’s hammered for imposing a regime of questionable worth (which is happening anyway).
Conversely, those that cast doubt on the numbers, something more easily done from opposition, can gain political credibility by appealing to our intuitive sense that reality cannot be quantified.
