Meaning of Military Deaths

We had five soldiers from MN die this past week in either Iraq or Afghanistan. I listen to MPR all the time, so I've had a reasonable number of opportunities to hear of the tragedy of losing our soldiers.

Today was an interesting departure for MPR. The person they talked to was a military person that had formerly had the job of informing families, so the focus was on the value of the sacrifice and the importance that the military places on dealing with the families.

Over the previous years when Bush was president, the standard MN military deaths reporting on MPR involved interviews with the family and friends of the lost soldiers and almost always included the obligatory voice saying something about "optional war", "we were lied to", "he went into the guard never expecting to be deployed", "this is a senseless loss", etc.

I'm often struck with how significant the more subtle bias differences are. The vast majority of people that I know of a somewhat moderate to conservative leaning either never would or no longer listen to MPR -- they simply get irate as to the level of bias inherent in the reporting model.

My sense is that with the increase in media forms, capacity and diversity, Americans less and less listen to each other. Many Americans pine away for the days of Walter Cronkite -- yesterday MPR devoted the noon program to an hour on him. The idea was "EVERYONE trusted Walter", and that was a GOOD THING. One man should tell millions what to think as long as he is a left winger!

Naturally, the points that were covered in the interview were that he was one of the first on Watergate, he decided the Vietnam war was going to be lost in '68, and it was interesting to hear him talk about "favorite presidents of his life", FDR and Kennedy. He didn't want to go to "worst", but it was pretty obvious "Reagan and Carter". Carter because he was a failure, Reagan because he successfully "rolled back the new deal" in Cronkite's words. Strange -- last I checked both Social Security and Medicare faired quite well under Reagan (HUGE tax increases) and it was under CLINTON that welfare reform happened. But I digress.

The point is that from MPR and the general MSM view, their ought NOT be "competing political views" -- we ought to all "listen to and believe Uncle Walter". We ought to all use our "freedom" to "freely" believe the same thing.

How does that happen? In general, subtly -- each little story about soldiers dying, the economy, natural disasters, etc is "crafted" ... naturally by the views of the reporters, not a "conspiracy" to fit into the narrative of their world view. All humans have a world view narrative, and we all have "confirmation bias" to accept that which fits our view and to reject that which does not.

So must we all just live with our own stories, not being able to understand each other and believing that there is no truth? In my opinion, not if we are willing to accept the wisdom of the ages and to fight the confirmation bias by being able to cogently argue as many points of view as we can. I think the best we as humans can do for knowledge is "approximation", but that means that some approximations are FAR closer to reality and truth than others and there is ALWAYS room to improve your own approximation!

Our tendencies are the same -- and will NEVER be completely modified, because we are all human, but it may be possible to temper them by at least being able to listen to both sides and ideally to be able to argue either side reasonably well.