Check your perspective before you check the facts

The fact checkers may be compromised by their own view of the issue.

To be Catholic in a post-christian age is to suffer many misconceptions. One example is the idea of papal infallibility. Many assume the doctrine requires Catholics to hold that the Pope makes no mistakes.

But the actual terms of papal infallibility is narrowly defined. So much so that it hardly ever applies. In fact, there are only two papal statements that all theologians agree meet the criteria. One is the Immaculate Conception of Mary. The other concerns her assumption into Heaven.

Without getting into a theological debate, there are other statements that might qualify. But these are subject to debate. And, despite the papacy being 2000 years old, there are precious few of them. So if the Pope predicts good weather for the weekend, it’s no sin to pack an umbrella just in case. Nor are Catholics obliged to go along with the Pope’s musings on economics or science. In such matters, he works from imperfect knowledge (as do we all).

The socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw seems to have understood this. Though no fan of the Catholic Church, he characterised the doctrine as relating only to ‘‘certain historical matters on which he has clearly more sources of information open to him than anyone else’’.

He observed that, compared to ‘‘our infallible democracies, our infallible medical councils, or infallible astronomers, our infallible judges, our infallible parliaments the Pope is on his knees in the dust confessing his ignorance before the throne of God…’’

If he was writing that today, Shaw would have added ‘‘fact check’’ websites to his list of modern infallibles. The events of last week show why.

As we know, the United States fired around 60 missiles into Syria as retaliation for the Assad regime’s bombing of Khan Shaykhun. The World Health Organisation and others say the regime used sarin gas in the assault on the town. The US government says the use of chemical weapons called for a military response.

But how can this be? After all, Syria agreed to surrender its entire stockpile of chemical weapons in 2013. A year later John Kerry, then Secretary of State, claimed that ‘‘we struck a deal where we got 100 per cent of the chemical weapons out’’.

Politifact, a Pulitzer prize winning site run by the Tampa Bay Times, looked into Kerry’s brag. When promulgating its ruling, it allowed for the fact that some loose ends remained. Nevertheless, it declared that the substance of the assertion was essentially true.

Before announcing the metaphysical reality, Politifact did not actually send reporters to Syria. It relied on expert advice. Either that expert advice was misinterpreted – or it was wrong.

‘‘Fact checking’’ has become a prominent side industry fo the American media. To a lesser extent, media in other Western countries have followed suit. But it has never really caught on here.

Somebody tried to set one up in 2014. Nobody paid it much heed, though. As far as I can tell, it quietly and irrelevantly died before making it to the election. Radio NZ also seems to tried its hand at it, without much impact.

Let us hope things stay that way. It is not that we should not trust the media. News consumers rely on the media getting it right regularly and with justification. When reading a news story, we assume that the names, dates and basic descriptions are correct. And they usually are - but thanks to an awful lot of tedious triple-checking by the reporter.

When you think about the deadlines involved, it’s an everyday miracle. But proclaiming (or seeming to be proclaiming) incontrovertible truths on controversial issues is a different matter. The fact checkers may be compromised by their own view of the issue.

There will always be the temptation to short circuit debate by characterising subjective policy preferences as questions of fact. And groupthink can also be a problem given the media is not ideologically diverse. This is something many journalists will openly admit is an issue. Those who do not are in denial of the empirical evidence they claim to love so much.

A 2014 Massey University study, for example, showed that 22 per cent of New Zealand journalists considered themselves Centrists. Just 16 percent said they were on the Right and fully 62 per cent said they were on the Left. Looking at the last decade of election results, do those percentages reflect the sensibilities of modern New Zealand?

In the last American election, a staggering 96 per cent of donations made by journalists went to Hillary Clinton. Given what we know about human nature, I’d say that counsels caution. If you’re unpersuaded, consider Khan Shaykurn again. In light of the sarin attack, Politifact has retracted its 2014 ruling that Kerry was mostly right.

That’s something no pope has ever had to do.