Dear Dr K,
Until recently, I thought that all news was the same, since all newspapers and channels were for the most part reporting the same events. It has since dawned on me that no two media outlets report events in the same way, and they all offer wildly differing advice on how we should think and feel about the news. I find this extremely confusing and I turn to your column for help, but I find that your answers are often self-contradictory, and I can’t tell if you’re being serious or sarcastic. Who can I trust to tell me what’s really happening in the world?
Slan Ted
Dear Slan,
The best way to know how to react to or feel about some current affair is to witness it first hand, but this is not always possible; besides, sometimes being in the thick of it can prevent us from having perspective on it. This is why we rely on the news media to tell us what is going on, and ideally, this should be fairly straightforward — something is happening somewhere, and journalists will gather information about it and tell us what happened. There shouldn’t be much of a difference in how different news outlets report the same piece of news. However, since there is often a difference, it is necessary for us to think about why this happens.
Having pondered the question for some time, I have decided that the only reasonable explanation is that we live in two or more parallel universes simultaneously, and each universe differs from the other in some minor details. These minor differences are the differences you see in the reporting of various news outlets, and these minor differences accumulate until they become significant.
Still confused? This may seem at first like one of my absurd, science-fiction answers to questions about the real world. You have accused me of being inconsistent, and I will readily confess to being so. The truth is, while I pretend to be something of an authority on the issues I discuss, I am really just as confused as you are, trying to work out the answers for myself as I respond to your questions. Thus, I can sincerely believe that we inhabit parallel universes, because it does seem that way to me sometimes. If you have ever watched a panel on a news channel where various “experts” and prominent people are called to weigh in on an issue and end up in a shouting match in which no one is really listening to anyone else, you might also feel that these people inhabit different realities; that they are so confident in their opinions that no one can persuade them otherwise, and therefore must belong to a universe in which there is only one truth and that truth is different from the truths of other universes. There are a few of us, however, who consider multiple truths and inhabit multiple universes.
If I am self-contradictory at times, it is because I am certain about very few things, and as a result, am mistrustful of people and media outlets that seem too confident about their version of the truth. There is always room for doubt; it is those people who deny doubt, those single-universe people, who are really missing something.
Yours questionably,
Dr K