Facts a la Tartare

Boeuf a la tartare is what fancy restaurants call raw hamburger. Some people like it that way. Some people distrust all this "processing" of news described above. They want their facts raw.

A student asked the late great Philosopher-Mathematician Alfred North Whitehead: "What's more important, ideas or things'?" Said Whitehead: "Why, I should imagine ideas about things." Deeply imbedded in U.S. education is a contrary attitude: ideas are not trustworthy; facts, especially "all the facts," are. Have the hairy-chested factual gourmands who think they want all the facts ever faced a real plateful of them?

"All the facts" about the simplest news event--say, an automobile accident--would (if anybody were fool enough to collect them) fill a library: the metallurgical engineer's report, the traffic expert's report, the highway engineer's report, the psychiatrist's report, the oculist's report, etc.--and they would contradict each other. "All the facts" relevant to more complex events, such as the devaluation of the franc, are infinite; they can't be assembled and could not be understood if they were. The shortest or the longest news story is the result of selection. The selection is not, and cannot be, "scientific" or "objective." It is made by human beings who bring to the job their own personal experience and education, their own values. They make statements about facts. Those statements, invariably, involve ideas.

All journalists (even the women at the well) select facts. The myth, or fad, of "objectivity" tends to conceal the selection, to kid the reader into a belief that he is being informed by an agency above human frailty or human interest.

The myth of "objective journalism" reached its height about 1938-39, before the Hitler-Stalin pact, before the sharp cleavage of war reminded the Western world that the famed "two sides of a question" are not always, or even often, equal. In the confusion of the late '303, TIME departed from the principle of its prospectus, and announced that it was practicing "objective" and "scientific" journalism. It wasn't. It never will. Nor will anybody else.

TIME in the 19303 was reporting the facts about Germany, for example, in a way that clearly showed TIME'S working hypothesis: that the Nazi Party was very bad medicine. It reports the Communist Party today against the background of a similar hypothesis. The five or six editors and correspondents most directly concerned with Britain approach that subject with very different emotional attitudes; they meet at present on the following working hypothesis: Britain is in a bad way, and may well be in a worse one a year hence; but all we know about that country leads us to believe that it will somehow come through.

TIME'S prospectus promised that "no article would be written to prove any special case." It tries hard to keep that promise, while standing on another statement in the prospectus:

"The editors recognize that complete neutrality on public questions and important news is probably as undesirable as it is impossible, and are therefore ready to acknowledge certain prejudices which may in varying measure predetermine their opinions on the news."

Among the prejudices acknowledged were:

Faith in the things which money cannot buy.

A respect for the old, particularly in manners.

An interest in the new, particularly in ideas.

TIME is not dispassionate about news. It cares about what's going on in the world, and it hopes that its readers care. TIME, seeking a truthful summation of the news, knows well that it can be wrong. But the possibility of error is no excuse for failing to try to communicate the sense of the news. The people will act (or fail to act) on whatever information they have. They are not allowed to wait until "all the facts" are in, and computed by machines not yet invented.

Over its 25 years, TIME acquired in some quarters a reputation for "impartiality" which it did not seek and does not want. Fairness is TIME'S goal.

What's the difference between impartiality and fairness? The responsible journalist is "partial" to that interpretation of the facts which seems to him to fit things as they are. He is fair in not twisting the facts to support his view, in not suppressing the facts that support a different view.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.