Let’s Bring Uncertainty Back

It’s an old trope in journalism: The rookie reporter is given a half-thought-through story idea by the editor.

“But I don’t know what I’ll find,” protests the reporter, fresh from a short lifetime in school where your teacher already knew the inquiry’s end point and you were graded by your ability to find it.

“That’s the point, kid,” says the editor, less fresh after a longer lifetime in a business where stories evolved and surprised and generally didn’t end anywhere predictable.

This moment increasingly seems like a relic of the past. Reporters are less often uncertain about the outcome of their story, for a variety of reasons. But the consequences of that loss resonate far beyond journalism—into, as Josh Stearns recently suggested on Twitter, our democratic DNA “rooted in informed publics” and into how we approach our fellow citizens and the future of pluralism in American society.

This story starts, as do so many stories about journalism and politics, with the explosion of choices brought by the internet in the 1990s and early ’00s (and, to a lesser, though equally toxic, degree by radio and cable television before it). When customers became able to choose their news, everything from the Daily Kos to InfoWars—traditional, objective journalism organizations—realized that they were in a battle with organizations that delivered a different product but used the same name: journalism. Even if you try to remove the political lens from the conversation, the business imperative for journalism companies was to behave more like other categories in the marketplace, and deliver a more reliable product to customers. And when you put that political lens back on, studies have shown, any sort of topical or political “bias” of a publication has largely been driven by its users, not its scheming owners or editors (though there are certainly scheming owners and editors, they’d be out of business unless the audience was asking for a particular sort of bias).

Increasingly, to keep customers happy, the editor and the reporter in the aforementioned story knew exactly what they’d find as the day dawned, because they knew that kind of story would make their customers happy. In the place of the thrilling exploration was the reliable trip down a known path.

There’s an upside to this, to be sure. Also gone are the false claims of objectivity that are basically impossible to maintain by a normal, thinking human being. Transparency has been slow in coming, but thanks to Twitter (ironically) and tools like Hearken, organizations are using transparency to bring readers more deeply into the reporting, making them better able to learn about the influences on a journalist and see, or even contribute to, the process of news-gathering. That should lead to a more honest promise from the journalist to the reader, but it also creates more siloes (a customer may appreciate that they know your bias, but they might now decide that your bias is so strong they don’t trust your story choices or reporting methods). That kind of siloing is the story we’ve read about for more than a decade: National Review and Fox over here. MSNBC and Vox over there.

Dig a little deeper, though, and you find something more worrisome than a lack of shared knowledge. It’s a lack of appreciation for uncertainty at all, from the audience and the reporter.

Rather than, “Go determine whether this idea works,” the assignment is, “Go write a piece that proves this idea works.”

The reporters who once greeted the day with the hope of uncertainty now see the logical path of their story pre-laid before them. Keep arriving at the same logical place day after day, story after story, and you stop appreciating the validity of a different logical destination (“Why would anyone think that? I keep proving that it’s wrong.”). It’s not long before you not only dismiss other ideas (the definition of anti-pluralism), but also grow to reject pluralism altogether (“Why do we have to have other ideas? We know the answers. We tell ourselves them every day.”)

For those not digging the journalism scenario, perhaps one closer to home is better. As we approach Thanksgiving, most of us are expecting to find opinions other than our own at the dining room table. Do you appreciate the opinions of those relatives you disagree with, or reject them altogether? That’s the heart of pluralism, the old Voltaire quote: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Of course, the Thanksgiving table is more likely to be a place of trust. I can get away with taking on my brother about politics because I trust that he’ll still love me. But, as we venture further from family bonds, do we still trust each other? As the political scientist Danielle Allen put it in her book, Talking to Strangers, “intellectual skepticism about policy is perfectly compatible with efforts to encourage citizens’ trust of one another and, more important, their trustworthiness in the eyes of others. Trust in one’s fellow citizens consists in the belief, simply, that one is safe with them.” We seem to have lost the ability to trust that our political opponents will keep us safe.

Now, some opinions are beyond the pale, and in the past two years we’ve dangerously moved the Overton window to accept a lot of alt-right swill, some of which genuinely makes us feel less safe as citizens. I’m not arguing that we should be sympathetic to a racist. Nor am I arguing in favor of both-sidism. The big advantage of the post-both-sidism era is that journalists are more empowered to come to a conclusion that one side is right and the other wrong and say so.

The opinions—and therefore stories—I’m talking about are those where there’s still debate, even though it might not seem like it from our current, binary discourse. So much of how we solve a particular public problem is a prediction. If we pull this lever here, a certain population, we hope, will be better off. If we stop this program, another population, we hope, will end its negative behavior. But, we don’t know for sure until we try it (despite the certainty of its advocates). Policy is necessarily an endless series of unpredictable events, waiting to see how citizens will assess the trade-offs inherent in any policy, and whether the desired result will occur. Until we try it, we won’t know if we, or our political opponents, are right.

Are you hearing any of that uncertainty in the public discourse today?

Maybe we don’t want it. Voters say that they want one-party rule. Their party, of course. But, as a group, we tend to deliver divided government, as we did last Tuesday. So, while we’re certain of our answers, we owe it to each other to listen to others’ answers to our problems.

Crucially, getting policy wrong can have terrible consequences, and we should mitigate the risks ahead of time. But experimentation lives at the heart of the American, uh, experiment. And uncertainty lives at the heart of experimentation. A good experiment can bring pleasant surprises, much like a good story. As Stearns put it in his tweet, hope is rooted in both possibility and uncertainty. Thus, we should approach these moments of uncertainty with hope, much like a reporter begins each day with the hope that the story might travel in an unexpected way, becoming a better story.

It’s that connection to uncertainty and hope that’s missing. When we acknowledge uncertainty, we allow for possibility. The best kind of reporting allows for possibility, and is therefore rooted in hope.