On being a skeptic

The more I live, the more skeptical I become. Is it a function of knowledge that as you gain more of it, the less certain you become? Some people may call this the road to enlightenment but I’m…ahem…skeptical. Skepticism can be a dangerous tightrope, like an agnostic walking the fine balance between belief and non-belief. The line itself can become the only reality and this can lead to a sort of myopia, or equally to a form of relativism where all knowledge becomes contingent, and absolute conviction is lost to a nebulous acceptance of all possible human conditions. The victim in this case is passion.

The journalist must, by definition, lack passion. Without passion or prejudice, a phrase normally applied to legal proceedings, can also apply to reporting. In a sense, journalists are judges, weighing information for its relevance and then formulating for the public a judgment on events according to their reading of the reality. Sometimes, we get it wrong. Completely wrong. Take for example the case of the hijackers who commandeered a Turkish airlines plane and landed it in Italy. The initial wire reports that came out said the hijackers were protesting against the Pope’s visit to Istanbul. The next day, that assessment was turned on its head. This was no protest; in fact, it was an act of desperation. A Christian convert who’d fled military service in Turkey and was being forcibly returned had taken control of the plane. He wanted to go to Italy and request political asylum.

One event, two opposing logics. In the one case, Muslims were at it again, using violence to make a statement, oblivious to the irony of their actions (the wire reports said the hijackers were upset with the Pope’s remarks linking Islam to violence). The western media jumped on it, with a passion unbecoming to journalism. In the second, this had nothing to do with Islam. It was political and humanistic: a person in a state of desperation resorting to a desperate act.

What is the truth? It struck me as indicative of media obsessions when the initial logic received a flurry of media attention but the subsequent explanation barely measured an integer on the journalistic Richter scale. Violent Muslims sell papers. Draft dodgers don’t. But as a journalist myself, and a skeptic, I have to wonder which is the real story. I have to question the sudden u-turn. When information is power, I have to wonder where the information is coming from and whose interests are being served by it. It’s all very neat and tidy when Turkish authorities explain that the hijacking was an act of desperation. Don’t worry folks, no Muslim fanatics here. Turkey loves the West. The Pope is welcome. I have to examine the facts without passion or prejudice.

Which brings me back to the nebulous space occupied by the skeptic. In philosophical skepticism, there is no resolution: skepticism is an end in itself. In the more prosaic sense, skepticism is more like incredulity, which, I think, is the type of skepticism I’m talking about. There is, in fact, no room for philosophical skepticism in journalism. If journalists succumb to it, it will mean the end of their trade. But doubt, incredulous tenacity, this is the hallmark of good journalism. The trick is to know the difference between the two.