I can't believe how many times the reality vs. perception theme has popped up in my life over the past few weeks. Well, actually, I can believe it. Unless, of course, it just seems like a lot.
I have a friend who says that our understanding of the true spiritual world is only clouded by our perceptions of who we perceive ourselves to be and what we perceive our relationships with others to be. That once we tear away the veil of these perceptions we will see our true relationships with God, the universe and man. Pretty heavy stuff. But definitely food for thought.
One of my recent blogs entitled The Supposition Press has kindled a lot of debate between some of my readers as to the nature of perception. The issue at hand was, can a journalist be unbiased?
One point of view says that everything we say and do (and report upon) is flavored by our perceptions, biases and prejudices. The other side claims that a rational impartiality, merely seeking to inform, can remain unaffected by bias and that facts are facts.
I started the debate by proposing that when hard facts are unavailable, the press is willing to ask suppositional questions in order to stir the debate. The purpose either being to raise awareness to promote an agenda (revealing a bias) or to sell more papers. I do not believe all journalists exhibit a strong bias. But even a claim of rational impartiality can be biased because who we are determines what we consider to be rational.
When I was a tech rep in the printing industry I constantly had to explain to my company that even if our product was perfect, if the customer perceived he was having a problem with it -- we had a problem. In this case, the customer's perceptions were his reality and affected our reality.
And perceptions can come in many flavors and degrees ranging from hatred of certain things or people, to prejudices based upon our upbringing and social background, biases reflecting our interests, passions and intellectual pursuits, to something as simple as our opinions. But all of these factors serve to alter our perceptions, causing us to view different realities. Thus, facts are not always facts.
One man sees a flag draped coffin and his eyes well up with tears of pride and patriotism, while another sees it as a symbol of waste and incompetence.
I am reminded of the parable of the three blind men encountering an elephant for the first time and they are each asked to describe it. The man by the tail says an elephant is like a rope. The man by the trunk says an elephant is like a small tree. The man by the body says an elephant is like a wall. They were all right. They were all sincere. They were all wrong.
Maybe my friend is right and we need to tear away the veil of our perceptions. But until then, if we can just admit that our view of the world may be partially based upon our preconceptions, there may be hope. Or at least the perception of hope.
2 comments:
I'll start with irony: I'm responding while listening to Tool's "Vicarious."
Your example of your experience in the print industry brings up another facet of your original post: Sales.
While in the industry, your job was to make the customer happy. Even though you were the expert, it didn't matter. If the customer perceived a problem, there was a problem, and I'm guessing you did whatever you could to fix it.
Of all the people on staff at the newspaper where I work, I respect the sales staff the most. Because their job is to sell a product that does not always make people happy. Getting someone's name wrong in a wedding announcement is one thing. But we've had people cancel their subscriptions because a letter to the editor made them mad.
Journalists (in my perfect world, anyway) are asked--nay, ordered--to consider their biases when writing stories. When I was an editor, I would assign stories so reporters could confront their biases. That is our product. Our sales staff sells a product that presents the facts.
News events can be reported impartially. It happens every day. It is VERY possible to report the facts while leaving biases out. Any reporter who can't is being intellectually dishonest; or, at best, a little too sensitive. What matters is that we get you the facts.
In other words, I can't tell you if that flag-draped coffin is a symbol of pride and patriotism, or of waste and incompetence. But you deserve to know about the flag-draped coffin in the first place.
And for anyone who still believes that the media is filled with liberal editors and reporters, take heart. The publishers and CEOs who hire them are conservative.
It is true that what a person perceives usually becomes their reality and this in turn is what creates their bias. This is something that we all have and to not admit to it does not mean that it is not there.
Facts are not always what they seem to be. Case in point is a telephone survey that my wife participated in recently. One of the questions was: "Do you have a problem with immigrants?" She asked back if they meant illegal immigrants or all immigrants in general and was told that the question didn't differentiate. So how do you answer something that could have two possible divering views? No matter which way the question is answered it will not give an accurate answer to the question yet this poll will become a "fact" and be reported as such no matter how flawed.
I noticed that mojoe assigned stories to reporters with the expressed purpose of confronting their biases, biases that did not exist in his previous comments. The question too is how much influence does sales have, along with individual bias, as to what is considered a worthwhile story? You read on a daily bases the reports of deaths and destruction in Iraq but try and find anything to balance that like schools and hospitals being not only opened but modernized and women becoming more inclusive in all roles. Is that the fault of sales or personal bias? And what happens when there is a deadline and all of the "facts" are not available? Is the story still published and is it filled out by a reporter who has no expertise in that area?
Careful with perception and reality, Joseph Goebbels became a mastermind of turning percetion into reality through the media.
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