In January of 2004 I was engaged in a discussion on a discipline-related Internet discussion list regarding the role of the media ecologist in a time of war. The United States was nearly a year into what appeared even then to be a disastrous intervention in Iraq; the chief US weapons inspector, David Kay, having just finished his duties and resigned, said publicly that he believed the weapons of mass destruction over which the Bush administration had committed US troops to Iraq never existed. We were just beginning in January of 2004 to recognize what a truly abysmal job the assembled US news media had done in delivering to our nation the documentary, physical, and historical evidence that refuted – or at the very least undermined – the Bush administration's claims that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted a program for the construction of nuclear weapons, that there were high level contacts between the Iraqi government and al Qa'ida, and that Saddam Hussein had been complicit in the murderous attacks of September 11, 2001. It was within this context that I made what I thought to be a fairly common sense observation. 

I suggested that "the ethical/moral obligation of media ecology – and all – scholars is the pursuit (not the illusion of possession) of truth." One of my respondents – himself no fan of either the war in Iraq or the Bush administration – suggested nonetheless in his turn that my suggestion was "a tired and unproductive response" to the problem of perception, objective reality, and certainty in the face of an ever-increasing barrage of information. Surely, he said, we can come up with a better, more heuristic, more intellectually productive concept to impose upon the study of mass mediated communication than the troublesome and divisive concept of "truth." Truth, after all, is an illusion, a chimera that drives men to hate and to kill. "I'll even," he continued, "just for the sake of being polemical, suggest that as media ecologists, the 'all hail truth' response is an abdication of individual responsibility and an unacknowledged dismissal of our field of inquiry."

I was not persuaded by his argument four years ago and I remain unconvinced today. I invoked the apparently fearsome name of Truth not in an act of intellectual imperialism, not in an effort to impose a specific view of truth upon someone else, but out of what I saw as respect for empiricism. "First of all," I responded, "it is (or if it isn't ought to be) the obligation of scholars to pursue truth…NOT to claim to possess it, as the 'all hail truth' remark implies. To suggest that the pursuit of truth is 'unproductive' is to say that the pursuit of something-other-than-truth is instead productive. Fine. Productive of what? What is the end of random rumination? … I have no problem with anyone who wishes to pursue something-other-than-truth. But I think rather that it is here that you find the negation of our field of inquiry." The conversation went on in a friendly yet spirited manner, and I felt at that moment that my argument, supremely logical as I saw it to be, would win the day. And yet this respondent, and others on the list, seemed to find my attachment to the "unproductive" concept of truth embarrassingly quaint. Why? The distance between us was so great, and the prevailing attitude against truth so palpable, that I found myself asking, in my mind, "Did I miss this memo?"

Here's what I want to know: Is there or is there not such a thing as objective reality, and is it, in fact, productive, unproductive, or counter-productive to concern ourselves with its existence? If there is no such thing, then I would have to agree with the postmodernists that it is a waste of time (a tremendous waste of time at that) to concern ourselves with it. But if reality bears an objective existence outside of our awareness or belief; if, in fact, its existence impinges on us and on others without regard to our awareness or belief in it; then I think it might behoove us to pay it some attention.

(Excerpted from Chapter Two, "The Contentious Nature of Objective RealityAnd the Inarguable Value of Truth"

The Metaphysics of Media will be published in 2009 by the University of Scranton Press.