by Kevin Donovan

Created on: January 15, 2008

Finding Security in our News Niche

Daniel Moynihan once reprimanded a colleague with the statement, "You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts."

It was a late afternoon in my hotel in Beijing, and as I often do when I'm away on business, I plugged in my laptop, went online and put CNN on the TV as background. On this day, the words "A chemical spill in China. . ." were immediately followed by silence and a blank television screen. The government had determined that I was not entitled to those facts. How nice that a third party could remove from my shoulders that burdensome responsibility of divining the truth!

Although we can be grateful that such heavy-handed censorship is not the American way, that does not mean our system lacks in its ability to obscure the truth. On this side of the planet, we simply use a different method; whereas in China they control the flow of news to their population through the absence of facts, we rely on the far more subtle, multiple versions of facts to meet demand.

Yes, the new millennium has witnessed our descent into a world that now entitles us to our own facts. The concept of truth is less relevant to us a reality made obvious by the continuous supply of its multiple versions from a vastly wider range of media sources. Somewhere within the fog of war and fear, we became unmoored from our reference points of credibility, from our Cronkites and Brinkleys, and other accepted sources "of record." Any responsibility we might have once had to shoulder the burden of finding the singular truth among disparate sources has been overwhelmed by that latest opium of the masses: breaking news!

What's really going on around us? It is I believe an unfortunate convergence of fear, money and weakness.

Let's begin with fear. Our shared trauma of 2001 set in motion a collective need for security. Security has two distinct components: the physical component, which is concerned with safety, and the mental component, which is fulfilled by certainty. The political and economic forces within our society are disproportionately concerned with the mental component because that is the one that drives revenue and wins (or loses) elections. Whether or not we are physically safe is much less relevant than whether we think we are, and so the manipulation of that state of certainty is focused on what will make us think we are more or less safe rather than actually improving safety. This is why the highly visible kabuki dance

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