By Natasha Josefowitz, Ph.D.
LA JOLLA, California — Investigative journalism has in the modern day been the heart and soul of any good newspaper, holding powerful people to account to the rest of us. It’s always represented the bravery of publishers. Are they willing to anger advertisers and political bigwigs who might be their friends? Fearless journalism is hard to come by. Today it is “The story.” New language is making it imperative due to words like “fake news” and “alternate facts.” What are these if not a conscious effort to confuse and mislead a vulnerable public? For example, if someone doesn’t like a news story, he/she can just keep saying over and over it’s not true, it’s fake, and soon people believe what they are saying even with absent proof.
It is not only the written word that has lost out; it is equally the advent of technology which makes it possible to take a photograph of anyone’s head and place it realistically on another body, possibly a naked one… or place a photograph of a person next to another in a friendly pose when neither had ever met. Voices can be altered to sound like they are saying things that never came out of the mouths of unsuspecting people. Perhaps most concerning of all are the outright denials of truthful, fact-based investigative reporters; as if a denial is an effective rebuke.
According to a report from Global Investigative Journalism Network, the need for investigative journalism has never been greater to “expose abuses of power, curbing corruption, fostering transparency, promoting accountability and strengthening democracy. It looks into human, corporate and government behavior and seeks prompt corrective action from people, agencies and institutions which can right the wrong it exposes.”
I recently had lunch with Lorie Hearn, who established an investigative reporting operation called inewsource in San Diego in 2009. She had been the metro editor of the San Diego Union-Tribune and so had extensive experience with watchdog journalism. The kinds of stories that get reported by her non-profit investigative newsroom include the plight of homeless students, animal cruelty, income inequality, toxic plumes, methane gases, refugee resettlement practices, traumatic brain injury, hospice care, the border wall, just to name a few. inewsource checks and double-checks who says what, accuses whom, lies about, conceals from, distorts—and so corrective action is taken and the public becomes aware of the inconstancies perpetrated on it. Hearn’s newsroom backs up its facts with documents and data and shares all that source material with readers. A wonderful guarantee of transparency that all news organizations should practice.
So while I congratulated Lorie, her team, and all the media who check and recheck its facts, it made me ponder our own propensity to withhold painful truths from ourselves. I am talking about our denial of our bad behaviors, our wishful thinking, our complacencies about the wrongs we witness, our lack of courage to confront the lies, to interfere when we see poor treatment of others. To admonish and correct all in the pursuit of truth, we need to start investigating our own behaviors. What are we not willing to see, not able to hear, not wishing to understand—all of which might shine a less than complimentary light on ourselves. Yet it is only when we have identified our biases, prejudices, ambivalences, fears, and incompetencies that we can begin to evaluate and investigate what we see, hear, read in order to discover the validity, the truth of what is presented to us. We need to talk to others, read materials from accredited sources, get expert opinions and draw conclusions only when we have looked for facts that contradict our beliefs, not just facts that support them. Our brains tend to accept ideas we already believe in, ideas that fit in our frame of reference, thus reinforcing instead of questioning. That’s harder to do than ever today with polarized TV commentaries that play to our emotions and social media bubbles that just bolster what we feel comfortable hearing. Those biases become “truths.”
According to John Dewey, American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer: The keys to critical thinking is to maintain a state of doubt and to carry on systematic and protracted inquiry. Our brains fall prey to cognitive distortions. It overgeneralizes; it magnifies and overestimates or minimizes and underestimates. This can have an impact on impending dangers and on our abilities to cope. Interestingly, it all goes back to Socrates “know thyself” translated into contemporary terms: Lead an investigative life!
© Natasha Josefowitz. This article appeared initially in the La Jolla Village News. You may comment to natasha.josefowitz@sdjewishworld.com