REFLECTIONS: Darwin

[EDITORIAL NOTE: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Saul Friedman (bio) writes the bi-weekly Reflections column for Time Goes By in which he comments on news, politics and social issues from his perspective as one of the younger members of the greatest generation. He also publishes a weekly column, Gray Matters, on aging for Newsday.

The 200th birthday of Charles Darwin on February 12 reminded me of one of the reasons my business, journalism, is failing us and itself. I call it “on-the-other-handism,” the stupid idea that there are two sides to every story. More often, there are many sides. And sometimes there is only one side. But because too many traditional reporters still worship the gods of objectivity and impartiality, they’re failing to tell the truth.

For example, there is no other side to the discovery by the 16th century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way round as the Catholic Church held at time and for 300 years.

But the objective and entirely impartial journalist would write, “Mr. Copernicus, who is a Pole, contends that the earth revolves about the sun but the Pope, who is infallible in such matters, says that’s not true; the earth is the center of the universe. The Pontiff said of Copernicus, ‘It’s only a theory.’”

I believe this sort of journalism is at least one reason why, according to a Pew poll, 63 percent of Americans living in the 21st Century, reject Mr. Darwin’s idea that all life on this planet evolved over millions of years. I would guess that’s a greater percentage of such ignorance than in any other civilized country. Most of these Americans would say, along with the Pope, that it’s only a theory, because the impartial press has faithfully reported both sides and thus told us a lie.

When I worked in Detroit researching a story on extremism, I spoke with a leader of the secretive, right wing John Birch Society, who was going on about the anti-religious secularism he believed was at the heart of Einstein’s theory of relativity. “Relativism means there are no absolutes, like God, he said. “Relativity is only a theory.”

I replied, “But the bomb worked.” I wrote that and it helped ridicule the John Birch Society to death in Detroit.

(My friend Warren Kornberg, former editor of Mosaic, a scholarly journal published by the National Science Foundation, offers this: “A theory, in science is not just a hunch waiting to be proved; it’s the most reasonable conclusion to be drawn from a mass of evidence so convincing as to lead to no other synthesis.”)

I have no quarrel with those who choose to reject science for faith or who believe in a religious explanation for their place in the world. Most Americans believe in a literal heaven, which is their right. But as a reporter, I object when they seek to impose on me or my children what I know to be demonstrably untrue; our glorious Grand Canyon is not 4,000 years old and men did not live with dinosaurs, except on The Flintstones.

The point is that journalism, which has the tools of science and reason and investigation, is supposed to challenge ignorance, not perpetuate it. And its job is to question conventional wisdom before accepting it.

Too often, however, my colleagues have not done their job. And part of the reason is “on-the-other-handism.” I think it was New York Times economics columnist, Paul Krugman, in commenting on why the previous administration got away with so many lies that led to war, suggested that too many straight reporters felt compelled to give both sides, as in: “The administration says Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, but liberal critics say otherwise.” Or, “Scientists say the earth is round, but administration sources say they have evidence that it’s flat.”

Don’t laugh. Writing both or many sides of the story, when good reporting and your instincts tell you that one side is wrong, is what got us and keeps us into two wars. Theodore Roosevelt, who invented the term “muckrakers,” once suggested there is no middle ground between one side that says the grass is green and another that says it’s red.

But we continue to see this conventional journalism when Washington reporters give equal credibility to the arguments of Republicans who got into us into this mess, that government shouldn’t spend money in times of need, despite evidence to the contrary from most economists, including a couple of Nobel winners like Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz.

It’s as if reporters decide there’s no right side. (This fetish for on-the-other-handism translates to a fetish for applauding bipartisanship as a virtue and partisanship as an evil, as if one can always split the difference to find truth.)

But as Robert Fisk, the fine Middle East reporter for the UK Guardian writes, there’s more than bad journalism at stake when reporters “prefer impartiality over morality.” And it wasn’t always so, he said, recalling the coverage of World War II by reporters like Ed Murrow and Rebecca West. Was there another side at Nuremberg?

Fisk, who was in Lebanon when Israel invaded a sovereign nation to attack Hezbollah and destroyed much of Beirut, did not equally and impartially tell both sides of that story. His stories reflected the horror and immorality of the violence of war. Only when reporters began to tell us the reality of the Vietnam War did we begin to get out. Some day perhaps the world will be equally outraged, if American reporters summoned the courage to tell us what really happened in Gaza when Israel used horror weapons on children.

Today, a few of the best reporters, like Dana Priest of the Washington Post, and Seymour Hersh, of the New Yorker, have dug into how America has fought the so-called “war on terror” and uncovered such outrages as extraordinary rendition, CIA black sites and Abu Ghraib. If newspapers are failing, it’s partly because they telling both sides while a few reporters, bloggers and satirists like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are finding ways to tell truth.

Recalling the writing of great war correspondents of the past, Fisk wrote, “These reporters were spurred, weren’t they, by the immorality of war. They cared. They were not frightened of damaging their ‘impartiality.’ I wonder if we still write like this.”

Not if we continue to report, as I heard just the other day on CBS’s Sunday Morning, that on the other hand, some say Darwin was wrong. My science journalist friend, Warren Kornberg, reminds me of Tevye, in Fiddler on the Roof, who says at last, “On the other hand…No! There is no other hand!”

[At The Elder Storytelling Place today, Norm Jenson explains how A Coincidence occurred.]