Healthy skepticism trumps blind faith

A healthy sense of skepticism — and the ability to add and subtract– should be two well-worn tools in any news reporter’s old kit bag, as a story in Thursday morning’s newspaper aptly illustrated.

The Associated Press dispatch told of a group of gung-ho World War II veterans who plan to sail a 58-year old Navy LST (landing ship, tank) across the Atlantic Ocean to Alabama come hell or high water, despite a strong warning from the Coast Guard that the rust bucket is unsafe.

“It’s full speed ahead. To hell with the Coast Guard,” the president of the LST Association for former tank landing ship crewmen said, and the captain, identified as Robert Jornlin, would set sail with his merry band from Gibraltar by Monday.

It was a great story, until the alert reader got to a paragraph that began, “Jornlin, 61, of Earlville, Ill., served during the Korean War aboard a tank landing ship …” and, doing the math, discovered an even better story: If Jornlin served in the Korean War he had to have been absolutely the youngest LST crewman in history, seeing as how he would have been 11 years old when the war began in 1950 and 14 when it ended in 1953. Obviously, there was either a typographical error in respect to Jornlin’s age, which would be the charitable supposition to make, or the reporter succumbed to what 19th century author and deep thinker Thomas Henry Huxley termed “the unpardonable sin of blind faith” in taking someone’s word on the skipper’s military record, when healthy skepticism might have served him better.

Skepticism is “the highest of duties,” Huxley believed, and journalists aren’t the only species that would be well advised to operate on that principle just now, considering all of the blather coming out of Florida in the never-ending presidential election hawg wrassle.

Watching the fancy suits from the big-city law firms struggle in trying to outsmart the good-old-boy country lawyers from the Florida outback is great sport, as long as one understands that it’s all a big game in which what the lawyers say is rarely what they mean.

In my half-vast research on the subject I have determined that an observer won’t be far off the mark in assessing the situation if he assumes that the truth is the opposite of what he has just heard. As well, he should assume that in these high-profile made-for-television spectacles each move made by a lawyer for either side is often made more for the public’s consumption than for the court’s edification.

The latter assumption proved to be valid on Wednesday, opening day of the hearing of a case in which Seminole County Republican election officials stood accused of making a potential election-nullifying blunder in placing voter identification numbers on Republican absentee ballot applications.

The lawyer for the Democratic activist who brought the lawsuit was tying up the better part of the afternoon reading from depositions of witnesses who were not in the courtroom. As the man droned on, the lawyer for the Republicans stood up to suggest to the judge that he was wasting valuable time, since the material being read aloud had been agreed upon by both parties and the judge could read it for herself later.

The Democratic lawyer hemmed and hawed, trying to think of a way to say what he meant without having to actually say it. Cornered, he finally admitted the obvious: It was necessary for him to read the depositions aloud, Your Honor, because – even though Your Honor was of course the sole arbiter in the matter – this trial was being watched by the entire country and it was of the utmost importance that the public understand just why it was that his client was proposing to disenfranchise 15,000 voters by throwing their votes in the dumpster in order that Al Gore, firm believer that every vote must count, might pull a rabbit out of the hat and fulfill the will of the people by assuming his rightful role as president. (The rough translation is mine. The message delivered was most assuredly his).

So the dirty little secret of this melodramatic soap opera was out: How things play in Peoria is every bit as important as how they play in Tallahassee, no offense to Your Honor.

The camera didn’t miss recording the smirk on the face of the Republican lawyer who had gotten his adversary to admit that he was playing to the cameras and spinning the public, even as the Republican lawyer played to the cameras and spun the public in the opposite direction – without being forced to acknowledge it for the record. But, hey. That’s show biz.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.