the BUFFALOg: But There Is No Truth

The Eason Jordan affair is heating up. Jordan, the head of CNN News, stated earlier this week in Davos that the American military has targeted journalists in Iraq. Now this would be a big story if true, but Jordan has absolutely no evidence to support it.

And outrage is breaking out all around the right-of-center blogosphere. A good round-up of opinions can be found at LaShawn Barber.

But Mr. Jordan has his defenders. In this posting on a weblog dedicated to the goings-on in Davos, I found a posting, The World Economic Forum Weblog: Are Bloggers Targeting CNN News Chief Eason Jordan?. You can guess where it's heading from the opening sentence.

Swarms of bloggers, in a furious feeding frenzy that I have only seen before in sharks, are tasting blood and moving in for the kill. What has now been dubbed "Easongate" by Rebecca MacKinnon has begun to leak into comics, hundreds of blogs, as well as the Washington Times (Friday 2/5/05 Op/Ed, "CNN's Line of Fire". I just saw on NBC's Chris Matthews show fellow blogger and political pundit Hugh Hewitt break the story on American television, promising that next week Easongate would blow open as big news. A lynch mob of bloggers is asking for Eason's head, and it seems that all of the excitement is moving towards a seemingly inevitable conclusion: the deposing of a news media chief disliked by the right, but apparently loved by an Aljazeera audience to whom he is supposedly pandering.

So I read on, curious to see how he would justify Jordan's statement and came across this eye-popper (no pun intended.)

Getting to the truth of this issue. The philosopher Karl Popper spoke of our inability to ever prove that something was true. We are only capable of constantly testing a theory, and so long as a theory can be tested and it is not proven false, it remains the closest approximation to the truth that we, as humans, will ever get. This is a basis for how modern science works. Modern journalism, on the other hand, occasionally resembles the Salem witch trials or the Spanish Inquisition. [link for Popper added]

There you are folks, there is no provable truth. If you can't prove a statement false, then its validity must be assumed. This foolish philosophy has gained popularity in recent years -- and why wouldn't it? Freed of the necessity to prove a theory, we can simply claim anything.

Global warming? If you can't prove it's false, then it's true. Genetically-modified foods? If you can't prove they're not dangerous, then they are. False CBS documents? Can you prove they're false? And on and on.

The left has taken to claiming that it is the home of reason, the last bastion of the Enlightenment. But these cockamamie anti-intellectual theories like Popper's all originate on the left which takes away a bit of the thunder. They start in the universities and from there they seep into our other institutions, most alarmingly into the law itself.

Now this Jordan-gate deal will die down eventually, but we shouldn't let him get away with making assertions like he did for which he can't offer even a shred of evidence. I rather like the Englightenment ideals we've been handed and would like to see them preserved.

Prove it, Jordan.

[UPDATE:] Jaquandor comments that I'm mischaracterizing Popper's theory and the man himself. And upon a quick (very quick) review of Popper and his work, I'll certainly admit that he is probably right.

I think, however, that I properly interpreted the intent of the writer in his defense of Jordan.