{"id":9463,"date":"2020-09-20T13:09:16","date_gmt":"2020-09-20T12:09:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cassandravoices.com\/?p=9463"},"modified":"2020-09-20T13:09:16","modified_gmt":"2020-09-20T12:09:16","slug":"covid-19-in-ireland-elusive-facts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/casswp.eutonom.eu\/index.php\/2020\/09\/20\/covid-19-in-ireland-elusive-facts\/","title":{"rendered":"Covid-19 in Ireland: Elusive Facts"},"content":{"rendered":"

No facts without Judgment
\n<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.
\n<\/em>Mr Gradgrind from Charles Dickens\u2019s Hard Times<\/em> (1854).<\/p>\n

These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.
\n<\/em>Albert Camus<\/a><\/span>, The Myth of Sisyphus<\/em> (1955).<\/p>\n

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote that \u2018facts, like telescopes and wigs for gentlemen, were a seventeenth-century invention.\u2019 The term is derived from the Latin \u2018factum,\u2019 meaning \u2018a deed, an action and sometimes in scholastic Latin an event or occasion.\u2019 MacIntyre was not dismissing the importance of gleaning evidence from sources, or deriving conclusions from scientific studies, but asserting that no fact is ever \u2018independent of judgment.\u2019[i]<\/a><\/p>\n

Over the course of the current pandemic, as a recent opinion piece in the British Medical Journal<\/a><\/span> puts it:<\/p>\n

uncontested facts\u2014things that are ascertainable, reproducible, transferable and predictable\u2014tend to be elusive. Most decisions must be based on information that is flawed (imperfectly measured, with missing data), uncertain (contested, perhaps with low sensitivity or specificity), proximate (relating to something one stage removed from the real phenomenon of interest) or sparse (only available for some aspects of the problem).<\/em><\/p>\n

Similarly, the historian E. H. Carr<\/span><\/a> considered facts to be \u2018like fish on the fishmonger\u2019s slab. The historian collects them, takes them home and cooks and serves them.\u2019 Thus partisan outlooks have always coloured understandings of historic events. Carr recalls: \u2018Our picture of Greece in the 5th century BC is defective not primarily because so many of the bits have been accidentally lost, but because it is, by and large, the picture formed by a tiny group of people in the city of Athens.\u2019<\/p>\n

Journalists and editors in writing \u2018the first rough draft of history\u2019 therefore make judgments in determining facts. Unsurprisingly, during a global pandemic Covid-19 deaths and diagnoses are given greater factual weight than the equivalent statistics for heart disease, cancer or influenza. This is quite apart from deaths in developing countries from tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria, which are set to double this year<\/a><\/span> in part owing to the intense focus on Covid-19 \u2013 particularly in Africa which by mid-August had experienced just 23,000 deaths<\/span><\/a> from Covid-19.<\/p>\n

Any journalist\u2019s judgment in determining facts is not necessarily a product of sinister machinations, but orthodoxies and received opinions are easily enshrined in news organisations that are patronised, or owned outright, by vested interests, which throughout history have \u2018manufactured\u2019 consent.<\/p>\n

Moreover, as Noam Chomsky<\/a><\/span> put it in a famous interview with Andrew Marr, there is \u2018a filtering system\u2019 that starts in kindergarten which \u2018selects for obedience and subordination.\u2019 Chomsky intimates that most journalists that rise to the top of major news organisations are conformists, including Marr.<\/p>\n