Sarah Palin

The human mind abhors randomness. It finds order even when there is none. We instinctively try to make sense of the world we see around us.

Investigating police and prosecuting attorneys come to a conclusion, often on a hunch, about who committed a crime, and then they try to fit together a convincing story to demonstrate that conclusion. In the process, they do not seek out evidence that conflicts with their story, and when they stumble on such evidence, they downplay it or explain it away. The defense attorney’s job is to construct a contradictory story, and will proceed with similar biases.

Journalism works in the same way. A journalist must have some kind of organizing theme in order to decide which facts are worth reporting and which are not. Without such a theme, one would just have randomness, like the selection of photographs in the movie Rain Man that the autistic character took on his trip across America.

Journalists must guard against becoming too committed to their themes, to the point where they cannot see contradictory evidence. Dan Rather’s demise illustrates this danger. He became so convinced that Bush had gotten special treatment in the National Guard that he could not see that documents given him were obvious forgeries. (That they were forgeries is obvious to me, but perhaps not to others. However, I spent about ten years designing typefaces, and I especially enjoyed working on monospaced typefaces, they sort of typefaces that a typewriter produces.)

In the past few days many in the mainstream media have sold themselves on a theme that Sarah Palin is too inexperienced to be Vice President, and that McCain improperly vetted her. In the process of trying to tell this story, they seem to have not noticed what was obvious to many of us hicks in the hinterland, that this woman has a natural gift of charisma. Most of the delegates knew that they were going to witness one of the greatest performances ever delivered at a Republican convention. I suspect that very few of the mainstream media expected it.