“analysis, journalism, takeaways, jfk, assassination files, cia, declassified secrets, facts, news”
The recent release of over 3,800 documents related to the assassination of President Kennedy marked a watershed moment in the 50-year pursuit of answers about the violent demise of an American leader. The trove of secrets, long withheld by U.S. intelligence agencies, includes transcripts of conversations among J. Edgar Hoover, F.B.I. director; John McCone, head of the Central Intelligence Agency; and top Kennedy aides, as well as records of meetings at the highest echelons of government covering every conceivable avenue of inquiry.
In article published in The New York Times on Friday, reporter Matt Apuzzo breaks down the issues and outcomes that have been illuminated by the material. Some files shed new light on long-discredited conspiracy theories, such as that of Oswald’s murderer, Ruby; but others challenge some of the most deeply held beliefs about the Kennedy assassination.
Citing evidence uncovered in the documents, Apuzzo challenges the narrative that suggests the assassination was botched in some way — the all too familiar and not entirely convincing evocation of “what might have been.” A prior attempt in Dallas to kill Kennedy had been foiled by Secret Service agents, he reveals, citing the narrative of one assailant who fled the scene empty-handed. Explanatory errors in official accounts, he argues, tend to favor Oswald as a straightforward lone shooter.
But even in the face of this painstaking article, a stubbornly Deep State echo persists: Any release of information related to JFK’s assassination becomes an object lesson of political manipulation, eliding known facts or failing to provide a definitive answer. The usual and still-dominant conclusion is apparent in a headline from The Guardian, one of the most liberal news sources in the United Kingdom: “New JFK files confirm there is still no conclusive evidence of a conspiracy.” On CNN’s website, the headline, “New JFK files reveal inconsistencies,” indicates that no matter how many files are released, Kennedy’s assassination will never meet with a full and possibly exonerating explanation.
In framing the narrative, journalistic metaphors betray important gaps in semantic reasoning that betray the failure of mainstream media to abandon habitual binary thinking in favor of more complex and multi-dimensional storytelling. The search for closure, knowledge so complete it squeezes out any shred of mystery, creates a huge problem in information science — it frames evidence as propositional, i.e., either true or false, rather than viewing it as probabilistic.
From the earliest days of object-oriented programming, the word “uncertainty” has been a wholehearted expression of an unavoidable fact rather than a veiled excuse for continuing ignorance. When data is probabilistic, variance is just another indicator of epistemic progress. In science and engineering, if an article states that there is still “no conclusive evidence” on any point, it means that all available evidence has been exhausted or that it will cost more to continue an investigation than its conclusion could be expected to change.
In the news media and in science reporting, however, the apparent facts in any given story are most often oversimplified or distorted to fit an overarching narrative. This is not because writers, editors or journalists are nefarious characters, but because it is simply too expensive and time-consuming to digest, edit and present a full accounting of complex scientific ideas on a daily basis. Traditional journalism models are bankrupt, their costs shifting inexorably toward print as subscription revenues continue to decline in the face of new and free online information sources.
This is a structural problem at the heart of the mainstream media, and the temptation to oversimplify and systematically distort evidence has consequences. Consider the case of Promega, a manufacturer of molecular biology reagents and instruments that created a marketing metaphor for the complex and probabilistic character of results in scientific and engineering experiments. The slogan, “Life’son the edge,” does not mean that a particular product will result in a clear and bright line around a discrete set of laboratory findings, but rather that it is likely to help maximize the range of probabilities related to an upcoming experiment.
In the current era of fake news, gerrymandering and a near-total decline in traditional news literacy, the distortions of mainstream media are causing irreparable harm. Particularly given the current political climate, exonerating or failing to fully exonerate political leaders is a severe shortcoming, likely to increase public distrust of democratic systems of government, thereby playing into Vladimir Putin’s hands.
The people demand full and complete accounting of the evidence related to JFK’s assassination, and today’s release of so many long-suppressed documents does not seem to answer that demand.
Based on the text material above, generate the following tags for an article on this topic:
analysis, journalism, takeaways, jfk, assassination files, cia, declassified secrets, facts, news, probabilistic evidence, systemic distortion, mainstream media, fake news, distrust of democratic systems of government, and Vladimir Putin’s influence.
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