So where do you get your opinions from?

Or facts?

A recent edition of the London Times contained two opinion pieces about the Israel-Iran war. One, by an ex-UK Foreign Secretary, argued that negotiation would have produced a better outcome. William Hague lamented Trump’s terrible first-term decision to junk the nuclear agreement with Iran. Trump now says he is trying to get it reinstated.

The other piece, by opinion columnist Melanie Phillips, argued the opposite case: bombing Iran is Israel’s only option, given the “certainty” that the mad-mullah death cult in Tehran will use nuclear weapons once acquired.

That latter view - that Iran will use nuclear weapons to destroy Israel - was also expressed by Matthew Syed, another columnist, in the Sunday Times. Syed addressed head on the conventional ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ assumptions about nuclear war. Atomic weapons have never been used since 1945, mostly (entirely?) because of the rational fear that the inevitable reprisal would result in the annihilation of any first-user of the bomb. Syed essentially took issue with that word ‘rational’. He asserted that a death cult, such as the one he believes rules Iran, would welcome fiery death if it was also accompanied by the destruction of Israel.

Religious fanatics are different. Radically different. They want to die. It’s why it is not just conceivable but probable that an ageing fundamentalist leader would launch a nuclear strike against Israel, and feel closer to Allah as the inevitable response loomed large on the radar screen.

Syed substitutes ‘probable’ for ‘certain’ but others are less equivocal. Even then, ‘probable’ is enough for Syed to assert that Israel’s war is totally justified.

All of these arguments are mere opinions. They may be based on facts, on objective truth. They may not. How is anyone without verifiable knowledge of the intentions of the mullahs able to adjudicate this debate? We cannot. And yet many of us will pick a side, will choose which opinion is to be be agreed with. When the bar-stool bore tells you that “it’s obvious”, choose another pub to drink in.

On what basis will we pick a side? A mental toss of a coin? Simmering resentment against Israel for what they have done to Gaza? Dislike of the mad-in-the-head fundamentalists who terrorise the world and order assault and imprisonment of women for offending arbitrary dress codes? Will we even know why we have picked a side?

Many people ask me about ‘trusted sources’: “Where can I get news that is objective, fact-based and bias-free?”. Great question. I can only give an answer that is replete with my own biases.

First, if your information source is free of charge, it is worth what you are paying. There are, of course, exceptions. But most social media feeds are post-truth word salads and much of The Guardian (still sort of free) is unreadable. Most newspapers are so starved of cash they are, at best, unable to do their jobs properly. Many are just click-bait farms.

Second, there is still much to be trusted coming from the BBC - but be careful. I have never got over the equal weight (‘balance’) given to truth and lies during the Brexit Campaign. Any organisation that persists in employing Laura Kuenssberg (“The UK has maxed out its credit card”) has a lot to answer for.

Third, have more than one source. My go-to publications are The FT, The Atlantic, The Economist and The Spectator (the latter is my nod to BBC-style balance). I am enough of an ageing statistician to have a wide array of primary data sources. I subscribe to numerous Substacks.

Fourth, if your information source elicits a strong emotional response, ask yourself if you being played by the algorithm. They are designed to make you angry.

With these suggestion I reveal my prejudices and the fact that I remain a news junky. But many people are turning away from the news - according to one survey, 46% have tuned out completely in the UK. Given the relentlessly grim nature of the news these days that is, perhaps, understandable.

But the diminished nature of many media organisations - that fall in trust levels - is also making a contribution. Post-truthism and fake news also play obvious roles. Which is why I get asked that question with increased frequency. The news itself is awful. And we often have no idea whether what we are hearing or reading is based on anything resembling objective reality.

Many years ago I was having a drink, in Cape Town, with a self-described Afrikaner. Apartheid had only been over for a few years and he was reflecting on his experiences growing up with legally enforced racial segregation. He suggested that apartheid was something he had simply always known. “My teachers, my priests, my parents, the newspapers, the TV: they all said the same thing, they all told me that apartheid was perfectly normal. Perfectly OK”. I resisted the temptation to ask him why he was so incapable of thinking for himself or reading the foreign press.

Perhaps my Afrikaner acquaintance was just one of a group of truly awful people. But some of his tribe did dissent and suffered terrible consequences. Maybe a lot of people just kept silent for fear of imprisonment or worse.

While some of us may take comfort from the fact that 5 million Americans recently displayed an ability to think for themselves via protests against creeping authoritarianism in the US, we might reflect upon the fact that 345 million people did not. Some of the silent majority no doubt remain part of the hard core MAGA base, while many others are afraid for their careers or simply getting their heads bashed in. I wouldn’t be the first to compare such things with 1930s Germany - or today’s Russia or China.

Chris Dillow has at least part of the story here. The news is focussed on human interest stories rather than less salient or eyeball grabbing facts. The news focusses on events (soon forgotten) rather than trends (two decades of economic stagnation in the UK leading to Brexit and Farage as our next Prime Minister).

All professionals are vulnerable to professional deformation – a tendency, often exacerbated by groupthink, to fail to see that their training and experience has inculcated into them an incomplete and biased view of the world. So it is, I fear, with Nick Robinson’s claim that the Today programme’s ratings are falling because of “news avoiders” who no longer want to face the world’s problems…Many social developments – economic stagnation, the decline in crime, fall in global poverty and so on – are emergent. They are not the product of any single individual’s actions, so the journalists’ emphasis on human interest causes them to neglect them and the knee-jerk question of “who’s the hero or villain?” is the wrong one to ask.

The question of the day: “Is Iran committed to first use of a nuclear weapon?” Google that query and you get a host of results that speculate about ‘how close Iran is to building the bomb’. Next to no facts about the probability of first use. Maybe some questions are just too hard. To even ask.

Put the question of Iran’s intentions to AI perhaps? Multiple queries to different LLMs yields the same result: the overwhelming consensus is that Iran’s leaders have displayed lots of self preservation instincts. All publicly available information points to some degree of rationality. But we all know how AI can hallucinate.

So who do I believe? Syed or Hague? My judgement is that both Syed and Phillips’ arguments are terrifying but weak. I found little in them to convince me that Iran will use the bomb soon after building one. But what do I know?