In Jamieson’s piece, she discusses the important of 3rd party credible institutions. These institutions need to remain trustworthy to serve as the basis of arguments, without such institutions, debates are spent arguing what is the truth from the lies and any rhetorician can base a convincing argument in falsehood. She notes that the need for a general basis of education is paramount, as the 4th president states in her article, “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance”. In the conclusion of her article, Jamieson discusses how although the founding fathers hoped those “honor with office will … “discern the true interest of their country””. She presents the challenge most politicians find hard to reconcile; the role of government officials to be both discerners of truth and the “deep-pocketed deceivers” they need to be to get elected.
In class, we discussed the media’s role as an assumed credible institution. We concluded that although the media’s job is to transfer knowledge, as discussed in Jamieson’s article, most news providers have some bias to their reports. As a good discerning citizen, a person should look at multiple sources when listening to the media. Although the provider may present a topic as non-bias, it may leave out relevant sources or the sources themselves filled with more opinion than fact. Such examples were present in Jamieson’s article.
We discussed the article topic of the implication of the demise of fact in response to the election. A large percentage of the candidate’s time in the past few debates has been spreading falsehoods and accusing the other of doing so. During the election, the class agreed to seek caution when looking for truth related to political issues. Turning to third party, credible, fact seeking organizations such as Jamieson’s own called “FactCheck” will be important in making an educated vote this November.