Americans are being bombarded (perhaps rightly so) with news media on the conflict between Israel and Hamas. This conflict is correlated to religious beliefs, implicating the Jewish faith and the Muslim faith, respectively.
Although now waning—if not diverted—at the same time (such as others in the world), Americans are also being bombarded with news media clips about the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
There is nothing new about these media bombardments under these conditions. The Internet has made communicating more efficient, but the formula is the same: tools of influence. [1] Sure, communicating was more difficult before the printing press, and before radio, and before television, and before the Internet, but where people are required, influence is necessary, one way or another.
We can recognize that influence is much easier under a paradigm of slavery, because the somewhat binary choice provided by the master is constrained for the slave. But, in free societies that are grounded in political choice, influence is adduced by convincing the human object voluntarily to do something. The rules of marketing, leadership, and politics all share the laws of physics: moving something, being to move (influence, manipulate) people. [2, 3, 4]
So says Master Archimedes:
Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum upon which to place it and I can move the world.
Indeed, Master Shakespeare’s Mark Antony had the crowd’s lever—being Caesar’s Last Will and the crowd’s selfish greed for inheritance. After Antony manipulated the crowd into becoming a raging emoting riotous mob to serve his political interests against his enemies, he said smugly in self-satisfaction, “How I moved them…” Yes, Antony made the crowd his slave, they just didn’t know it. Lo and behold, the beauty of rhetoric. [5]
In law school, law students are trained in objectivity and evidence, and they are also trained in the defensive and offensive use of rhetoric; that is, persuading. Stated another way, law students are trained to see what is, being the facts, and then also trained in how to present those facts to others in an influential manner to a self-interested result.
One of the first rules of testimonial evidence that is taught to every law student is credibility; that is, to assess the speaker. Who is the speaker, and how does that fact affect, and perhaps effect, the testimony? An astute listener of the testimony will adduce any bias or self-interest that bears on the testimony. [6]
Master Shakespeare had a great quip on this point. When Flavius asked the leader of the mob—being a shoemaker, “a mender of bad soles” —”Why dost thou lead these men about the streets?” Responded the cobbler, “Truly, sir, to wear out their shoes, to get myself into more work.” [7, 8]
If we see something first-hand—that is, if we see something with our own two eyes—then we can assess the event ourselves. However, if the event is conveyed to us by someone else, then the context also necessitates recognition of the speaker’s bias by the rules of hearsay. [9]
Now, evolved jurisprudence has managed a volume of evidence using a common sense rule about hearsay bias, called “admissions against self-interest.“ This is a rule that says that people are not naturally biased to admit something against their own self-interest. People are biased to admit what helps them, and people are biased to refuse to admit what hurts them. Therefore, if people admit something that hurts them—being contrary to nature—it is a very powerful implication of truth. On the contrary, saying something that helps the speaker’s self-interest—being consistent with nature—is, well, the natural bias of every liar or self-purposed rhetorician. This rule implicates natural selfishness. [10]
This concept of human bias in providing testimonial evidence is also implicated in the most essential systemic framework of trials themselves; to wit, the rules of trial questioning: An attorney cannot lead [by the nose] the attorney’s own favorable self-serving witness with questions that already contain the desired response. Indeed, the witness will simply follow along and confirm the attorney’s self-interested spoon-fed questions with simple, “yes, of course” answers.
Bias by self-interest is a truth killer. Everyone knows it, and the law reflects it. [*9]
Thusly, it is for the listener—as the judge and jury of the information conveyed (testimony)—to perceive any bias, self-interest, or rhetorical manipulations.
So, in assessing anything that is said to us by a purported witness, by a pundit, by an “influencer,” or indeed by anyone, the communication must first be placed into the framework of “considering the source” with a prudent degree of wise rational healthy skepticism. [11] The listener must step back objectively and assess who is the speaker, and whether the speaker is saying something self-interested, whether the speaker actually saw or participated in the event, the extent to which the speaker is qualified to frame any opinion being expressed, and whether the speaker stands to gain anything by the result (including perpetuation of any vested interest). And so on. That is, determining whether the speaker is biased.
These are simply responsible credibility determinations by an active listener and judge of the information being offered. After all, the listener is trying to be “moved” around (influenced, manipulated) by the communication.
So, to be convinced by testimony without considering the source of the testimony—that is, failure to consider the speaker as the source of the evidence—is foolish. The lesson to “consider the source” is time-tested wisdom. [12, 13]
The more astute is the judge, being the listener, the more finely granular will be the item that exposes bias.
All wisdom points to the effort—indeed all wisdom points to the duty to self and to society—to determine if bias exists by any form or personal attribute of the speaker.
Now, wait, hold that thought, because I might be ready to provide a contradiction, maybe.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gadsby) said, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.“
These human attributes of bias, these ever-present human attributes that every clever marketer uses, every clever rhetorician uses, every politician needs, every purchaser acknowledges—being the human attributes of old, young, male, female, non-binary, education level, minority status, religious, sexual preference, etc.—may not be used for hiring purposes by the Civil Rights Act.
Thusly, by negative implication, we might also take F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quotation to mean that anyone without a first-rate intelligence will become philosophically confused, and then angry, and then tend to lose the ability to function by the inability to live in a society that says, on the one hand, “To be wise, you have a duty to yourself and to society to find every attribute of human bias in order to make wise judgments,” but, on the other hand, “It is illegal to use these same attributes for making hiring decisions.“
Alas, although now often conflated, what must be in order to rectify a particular vertically scoped conflict is different than what is in order for general horizontally universal wise judgment. But, back to the bombardment of media.
If the messages trying to influence me are regarding religious conflict, and the speakers are members of one of the participant religious sects or another, or not at all, then it is appropriate if not wise to assess bias in the purported attempt to influence me—that is my right and my duty to myself and to others.
Accordingly, it is appropriate to correlate the volume quantity of messages hitting me with the quality of messages. That is, for example, how many messages do I get from people trying to influence me toward the views of Israel and how many message do I get from people who are trying to influence me toward the views of Palestine. Then, as to each of the messages, to assess the qualitative degree of perceived pre-existing influence and power from the speaker of that message with any attribute of perceived bias. For example, is the message from a Christian, Jew, Muslim, atheist, and/or from the president of CNN or Fox News, or Jordan Peterson or some other powerful position, or from an individual otherwise not recognized as having power or being an “influencer.” Such as it is, perhaps a statistical quantity/quality scatter-graph.
In considering the source of what might be trying to influence me as a function of quantity and quality of media content, I thought it appropriate to correlate it with U.S. statistics, understanding an inherent skew for a definition of categorical terms. Although imperfect, statistics are still rough tools to be given the weight they deserve.
According to somewhat dated, but still materially authoritative, Pew Report and U.S. Census, and other media, the United States is roughly approximately 70% Christian, 1%–2.5% Jewish (7.6M) and 1%–1.5% Muslim (3.5M), more or less. (We understand that statistics are imperfect, but the issue is whether a variance tendency is material and whether a challenge is itself sufficiently unbiased.)
On a religious note, there is a reason that some people think that Jesus had blue eyes, light skin, and was nicely shaven with flowing brown hair. Perhaps it is true.
The issue is not what is decided, but rather how it is decided. Time-tested wise decision-making is an objective thoughtful process of “considering the source” and perceiving the tendency to bias by the person trying to influence us. Keeping our wits about us—lest we become Antony’s mob and the shoemaker’s fodder in wearing out our souls.
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[2] The Recipe to Make Bud Wiser [Branding, Part I] [#GRZ_142]
[3] Marlboro Man; You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby. [Branding, Part II] [#GRZ_143]
[4] On Empathy: To Give Empathy Is a Blessing; To Need Empathy Is a Curse [#GRZ_106]
[6] Pro-Life or Pro-Choice? Chapter 1, Bias [#GRZ_91]
[7] https://shakespeare.mit.edu/julius_caesar/julius_caesar.1.1.html
[8] Shakespeare, English Language, and Other Such Items [#GRZ_62]
[9] The Four Horsemen of the Social Justice Apocalypse [#GRZ_122]
[11] On Leadership and Trust. [And, Should We Trust the U.S. Government?] [#GRZ_160]
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© 2023 Gregg Zegarelli, Esq. Gregg can be contacted through LinkedIn.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/news-source-influence-resultant-decisions-gregg-zegarelli-esq–ijcze
The statements or opinions made in this article are solely the author’s own and not representative of any institution regarding which the author is affiliated.
Stand for America® is a series of publications written by Gregg Zegarelli intersecting philosophy and traditional American values published by Technology & Entrepreneurial Ventures Law Group. Printed or reprinted with permission.
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