Politicians, News, and the Victors Who Wrote History

Applying the philosopher's toolkit to power and its records

Of all the categories of information we're asked to evaluate, none is harder than the ones written or spoken by people who have something to gain from our believing them.

Politicians want our votes. News organisations, whatever their intentions, operate within business models that reward attention over nuance. And history, the longest running record we have, was for most of its existence written by whoever held the pen, which very often meant whoever had won.

None of this means truth is unavailable in these domains. It means the tools for finding it need to be sharper here than almost anywhere else because the incentives to distort are stronger here than almost anywhere else.

Separate the claim from the performance

Reading politicians: separate the claim from the performance

Political speech is a genre with its own rules, and the first useful move is recognising that a politician's words are doing at least two jobs simultaneously: conveying information and performing identity for an audience. Philosophers of language, following J.L. Austin's work on speech acts, distinguish between what a sentence says and what it does. A political statement is very often doing far more than stating a fact. It is signalling loyalty, assigning blame, or manufacturing urgency, and the factual content can be almost incidental to its real function.

The useful discipline is to ask, of any political claim, three separate questions rather than one:

1. What exactly is being asserted, stripped of its emotional framing.

2. What evidence is offered for that specific assertion, as opposed to the feeling the statement is designed to produce.

3. And what would the same speaker say if the facts pointed the other way; if the honest answer is that they would say the same thing regardless, you are listening to identity performance rather than information, and it should be weighted accordingly.

Reading the news: structure before content

News deserves a similar, but distinct, approach because the distortions here are usually less about outright falsehood and more about selection and framing. What is covered, what is left out, which quote leads the piece and which is buried in the ninth paragraph: all of this shapes belief as powerfully as any individual sentence does. A well-established finding in media literacy research is that most people absorb a story's framing, and the emotional conclusion that framing invites, well before they engage with any individual fact within it.

The practical remedy is not cynicism toward all reporting, which would throw out a great deal of careful, honest work along with the bad, but a habit of triangulation:

1. Reading the same event across sources with different institutional incentives,

2. Noticing which facts appear consistently across all of them, which is a reasonable marker of what actually happened,

3. And noticing which facts or framings appear in only one, which deserves more scrutiny before being absorbed as settled.

   
   

History, and the honesty of asking who held the pen

The observation that history is written by the victors is old enough to be a cliché, but clichés earn their status by being true often enough to survive, and this one has held up remarkably well under the scrutiny of modern historiography. The discipline of history itself has, over the past century, become considerably more self aware about this, developing methods precisely to correct for it: reading a period's sources against one another, actively seeking the accounts of those who lost, were colonised, or were otherwise written out of the dominant narrative, and treating the absence of a group from the historical record as itself a fact worth investigating rather than evidence that the group's experience didn't matter.

What this means for the individual reader of history is not despair at the impossibility of ever knowing the past truly, but a more honest humility about any single account, including the ones taught with the most confidence in school. Ask, of any historical narrative, whose interests it served to tell the story this way, and whose account is missing. The absence of an answer to that second question is not proof of bias, but it is always worth noticing.

The common thread

Politicians, news organisations, and historical record keepers are not equivalent in their reliability, and treating them as uniformly suspect would be its own kind of intellectual laziness, a retreat into blanket cynicism that asks less of the mind than genuine discernment does. But all three share a single vulnerability worth remembering: each is produced by people or institutions with interests, and those interests shape what gets said, what gets left out, and how confidently it is delivered.

The discipline is the same one this whole series has returned to again and again:

1. Ask who benefits,

2. Look for what corroborates independently,

3. And notice when the story arrives with more certainty than the evidence actually supports.

It will not make you immune to being misled. It will make you considerably harder to mislead, which, in the domains that shape how a society governs itself and understands its own past, may be the most important application this discipline has.

Kathy Postelle Rixon is Chair of The Philosophical Society: Oxford, a researcher of philosophy of mind and physics, and shamanic practitioner. You can contact her at kathy@magicinharmony.com or visit her website at www.magicinharmony.com.