There’s a set of loud people on the internet who stake their authority on the claim that they only report the facts. Their brand is affiliated with logic and rationality. They claim not to spin things. You can trust them because they promise to tell you the truth. They say they don’t play the narrative game.
However, I don’t think this type of reporting is physically possible for anyone. The universe has an infinite supply of facts. Facts aren’t just studies and experiments. A fact is anything that has ever happened. Everything ever said. Everything ever done. By anyone. They’re all data points. Wouldn’t someone claiming to only report the facts have to report on all of that?
I think what actually happens is what humanity has always done. We use heuristics to search the universe of facts for the subset that makes sense. Then, we construct a story based on those facts. We build narratives.
In building these narratives, we are compelled to engage in fact-selection. Some facts are relevant. Some facts aren’t. But engaging in this selection process at all means it’s not possible to report only facts. We are omitting infinitely more facts than we can summarize and report.
When confirmation bias comes into play, this narrative effect becomes even more dramatic. Because the facts that get omitted are usually more relevant than the facts that get included.
So, we shouldn’t deceive ourselves into thinking that anyone has the capability to construct an exclusive view of the truth. Nobody can summarize an entire universe of information into a handful of facts. Everything is narratives. Everything is cherry-picking a handful of data points, using those to tell a story, and throwing away the remaining universe(!) of facts. It’s just not intellectually honest to pretend otherwise.
There’s a bright side once you recognize all of this. In evaluating narratives, there’s always more information to be gained in exploring what was omitted than by looking at what was included. Search the infinite universe of information for what else might be relevant. Your search space is enormous and you’re bound to find something interesting. Find out what was overlooked. The internet was built for this type of searching, and it can be surprisingly good at it.
Don’t buy the “just the facts” branding. You’ll get stuck in the narrative game without realizing it.