“Fine. But I seriously don’t believe you.”
That’s what the monotone slow-talker with black eyeliner said to me when I told him that, no, I didn’t have any money for him. I was eighteen years old and waiting with some friends for a train from Munich to Salzburg to take us back to school at the end of the weekend. He opened flatly with, “Don’t mind the makeup,” as though the scrolling black curlycues and paisleys decorating the majority of his face were just an unfortunate sunspot that had appeared—nothing to do with him, see—rather than a bizarre indication of what he had been up to in the hours previous to our early morning run-in.
“Don’t mind the makeup,” and “Fine. But I seriously don’t believe you,” the comments that bookended our brief interaction, have since become staples in my lexicon. I quote that eyeliner fellow whenever the occasion arises; delivering the lines with the prerequisite deadpan monotone that was fashioned, I can only suppose, in admiration of Ben Stein and aided by extensive use of narcotics. This was back before Germany was on the Euro and most of us had spent the last of our weekend’s budget of Deutschmarks buying breakfast. But even if that hadn’t been the case; even if my pockets had been replete with surplus cash, my answer would have been the same. “No, sorry. I don’t have any money for you.” He persisted, flatly requesting smaller and smaller denominations before finally concluding our interaction with a condemnatory, “Fine. But I seriously don’t believe you.”
It was a funny line given the circumstances—as though his credulity was essential to my well being—but I appreciated picking up the line nonetheless because I’ve found myself saying the same thing in response to the media a lot these days. Clickbait headlines. Social Media posts formulated to induce viral outrage. Newscasts so steeped in assumed bias that it is breathtaking.
Fine, but I seriously don’t believe you.
Journalism as an institution was created to report the who, what, where, when, and why of current events. Those five questions formed the bones of every story. Nowadays, however, finding those details in a given article feels like voluntarily treasure hunting in the midst of an Orwellian Two Minute Hate. Either these reporters are really bad writers, or the media seems to have an active disinterest in pursuing and conveying the facts in clear and concise terms. They have abandoned their noble journalistic origins, clamouring to be an instant Commentariat instead, interested only in shaping your interpretation of those facts with correct groupthink. That is, if you can get the facts at all. The who, what, where, and when—the once essential contextual pillars of every story are often hidden in the miasmic narrative of why. The interpretation is always paramount over the details.
This is an era where clicks determine editorial direction and anonymous ‘sources’ whose unverified claims are belched all over the airwaves nonstop until the next outrage. Who are these sources, though? What is their credibility? Shouldn’t such details matter? Where is the editorial integrity that held back a story unless a source was willing to go on the record, or their claims could be corroborated elsewhere? It was that editorial restraint and character that made us trust news media in the first place. It was those abandoned standards that demarcated the journalists from the gossip-mongers.
“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” (John Adams)
Word, John Adams. However, those with the means and agenda have created a workaround: promote the notion that there is no such thing as objective truth and watch this pesky factual problem evaporate. ’Facts’ are less stubborn if the truth can be whatever you want it to be. If truth is not inviolable, then it is merely a matter of narrative opinion. The facts of biological sex must be changed if they do not correspond to the subjective nature of how an individual might feel. A human life becomes the dissociative ‘products of conception’, rather than an unborn baby dismembered alive in the womb. The cultural slump away from adherence to the principle of objective truth leaves us all vulnerable to the manipulation of narrative. And this is the first reason why I seriously don’t believe the media anymore. If there is no recognition of objective truth, then there is no such thing as fact. All that remains is someone else’s narrative.
The second reason for my media disdain is that everything is a crisis these days. No matter what, it is always the worst that things have ever been. How else are you going to get people’s attention in the age of 24/7 news? Whether it is clickbait headlines that always imply that someone is trying to keep something from you, or the fear that sells you new diets; the politics of indignation and victimization; or disaster movie plots sold as planetary realities, fear is the primary tool of manipulation. Fear of loss. Fear of destruction. Fear of not having the correct virtuous opinions in the face of an online mob. Fear is the conduit by which we receive much of our information from the media.
“The world is on fire! This leadership is unhinged! We’re careening toward destruction!”
Ho hum.
If everything is always a crisis, then it seems like nothing really is. You would think that at some point someone in one of these newsrooms would have internalized the lesson in the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Soon we will need a new word to describe actual crises—one that won’t get bandied about based on partisan political expediency. (I suggest ‘hullabaloo’. Besides being fun to say, having to say it with TV anchor seriousness would drastically cut down on flippant usage. “Local emergency agencies sprang into action to deal with the humanitarian hullabaloo created by rising flood waters…” But I digress.)
There is a third reason, too, for my media disbelief. Culturally speaking, we have squandered a valuable trait of our Christian inheritance—that is, healthy skepticism. It may seem like an anachronistic juxtaposition to put skepticism as a legacy of faith, but that is only because we have drifted far from understanding the intellectual foundations of Christianity. In so doing, we have deranged and diluted our definition of what constitutes skepticism. The meaning has come to be synonymous with doubt in the Judeo-Christian God, rather than the mechanism of examination of any given assertion. Many ‘skeptics’ parrot Richard Dawkins with the same surety as though he were God and his word was the final one. These people often haven’t examined the matter for themselves, they have only found someone else in whom to believe. As Bob Dylan aptly sang, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.” They have chosen their own high priests to mediate between them and ‘truth’; having taken on the identity of skeptic without participating in its action by conducting their own search. The reason for this is pure laziness of the intellectual, spiritual, and physical variety. We cannot be bothered to search out a matter for ourselves, and so instead we piggyback on someone else’s analysis.
That is not the tradition bequeathed to Western Civilization by Christianity. The Berean Christians were described as being of “more noble character […] for they received the message with eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” (Acts 17:11) The Bible itself commends and recommends that individuals devote themselves to the examination and discernment of what is true.
But test everything, hold fast to what is good. (1 Thessalonians 5:21)
But solid food is for the mature, for those who have had their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. (Hebrews 5:14)
Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. (1 John 4:1)
I could go on and list other verses pointing out the same thing. Test, discern, practice, because there is no end to the kinds of deceptions that we will encounter in the world. And the thing about a deception is that it is good at looking like the truth—particularly when delivered to us from slick and serious-looking newsrooms by people who are often undiscerning themselves.
The end result of healthy skepticism is not doubt, but a reasoned and reasonable belief in the truth. Skepticism is the means by which we should be testing every claim so that we can—through practice—discern what is good and what is evil. This is the hard way, though. There is no room for intellectual, spiritual, or physical sloth. This is daily practice. We should not abdicate our individual responsibility to discern by delegating the task to opinion-makers, politicians, celebrities, or even the news media. You, and you alone, are responsible for the things you believe. And, the things that you believe will determine your whole life. But that is a subject for another article. In the mean time, the next time the media dresses itself up in crisis and hides the details and attempts to shame you into joining their groupthink, you too can respond in a flat monotone, “Fine. But I seriously don’t believe you."
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