Everyone should know by now that mainstream media has better things to do than home in on the truth. It’s not entirely their fault. First of all, what is the truth? Is it reported facts? Facts don’t tell a story and the media’s job is to tell stories. 

If the truth isn’t a set of facts, is it an interpretation? If yes, which one? Asking that question creates the leeway for any media to do whatever is convenient, including ignoring the role precise facts play in any interpretation.

That’s why media outlets spread narratives that first of all serve the interest of their owners, collaborators, backers or advertisers. But that isn’t enough. They also need to privilege narratives they know their chosen market segment appreciates and will react to with emotional engagement.

In other words and realistically speaking, establishing the truth will never stand as their primary objective. Instead, legacy media focuses on creating the illusion that what they cobble together represents the truth. Anything they produce will be designed for three purposes:

• the advancement of the editors’ preferred ideology,
• the promotion of what it deems its interests,
• commercial success obtained by appealing to its audience’s biases.

Once consumers of any media understand this, instead of simply trusting or mistrusting any source of news, they should seek to measure the “truth quotient” of a media’s reporting. Wise consumers of news, endowed with a modicum of critical thinking, know that whatever the source, its truth quotient will always be variable.

Alas, in today’s institutional and media landscape, we’re not supposed to know about truth quotients and their variability. Our educational institutions make no effort to prepare us for that challenge. A clearly biased outlet such as Fox News in the United States can shamelessly claim that their reporting is “fair and balanced.” It’s easy enough to see that it isn’t, but are we capable of analyzing why it’s a lie?

Our schools test us and reward us with diplomas for our ability to demonstrate that we can reproduce publicly recognized “knowledge.” This literally means the ability to repeat “acceptable” (and testable) interpretations of phenomena that our institutions have already approved. That kind of knowledge has value. But it is, by definition, inert. And it may even be faulty (biased) or incomplete. 

If we had been taught to care for truth, we would seek to cultivate a dynamic relationship with both discernible facts and modes of interpretation. This includes existing, already formulated descriptions and theories as well as ones that have yet to emerge. That capacity is what we call critical thinking. It defines a fundamentally dynamic relationship with truth.

Critical thinking and critical reading of The New York Times

This distinction between static knowledge and the dynamic process we call critical thinking will be helpful for understanding the context of an ongoing exchange I have with Gemini focused on reading the media. Some readers may be aware that over the span of about eight years, I’ve been engaged in a “debate” with The New York Times concerning the great “Havana Syndrome mystery.” During that timespan, the NYT featured a long series of articles affirming that microwave technology operated by a foreign adversary was the most “plausible” or “likely” explanation of the diverse symptoms initially labeled Havana Syndrome but later rebranded “anomalous health incidents.” More particularly, the newspaper consistently repeated a standard CIA narrative affirming that “evidence points to Moscow, which has a long history of experimenting with the technology.”

Anyone skilled in critical thinking should hear alarm bells ringing when confronted with an assertion introduced by the locution, “evidence points to…” Especially when the context includes no actual evidence but instead cites a source that claims to possess the evidence; in this case, the CIA. This phrase should immediately provoke a new series of questions: “What evidence?” “How much evidence?” “What else could it point to?”

It’s worth pointing out that we know something about the NYT’s idea of evidence. Some prominent critical thinkers have noticed a strong correlation between the paper’s reporting on items related to foreign policy and CIA talking points. I’m thinking, for example, of former NYT reporter Chris Hedges or Patrick Lawrence in his 2023 book, Journalists and Their Shadows, who got together recently to delve into the question of truth in the media.

If, like NYT, you’re tempted to  believe the CIA, given its mission of “intelligence,” is focused on the truth, you may have missed a significant piece of breaking news in 2019 (which, by the way, the newspaper of record chose not to mention in its reporting). I’m referring to then-US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s“no bones” confession in public: “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s—we had entire training courses.”

Curious about how the Havana Syndrome saga has evolved in recent years, I addressed the following prompt to Gemini:

“In the New York Times reporting on the Havana Syndrome for several years its reporters pushed the idea that Russia was the most likely perpetrator. The CIA explained in 2022 that there was no foreign perpetrator and that the phenomenon remained a mystery. I believe that the Times never acknowledged its own mistaken reporting. Have I missed something?”

Gemini concluded a long, detailed answer I haven’t reproduced here with this short paragraph:

In short: You haven’t missed a formal apology or “we were wrong” article because the Times treats the story as an ongoing mystery where the “truth” has shifted back and forth depending on which source is talking.

That accurate description should constitute a helpful guideline on how to read any article in the NYT. We should take seriously the observation that the newspaper’s understanding of truth has always “shifted back and forth.” And we should keep in mind that the forces that guide that shift are the ones I’ve cited above: the interests of its owners, editors or its segment of the marketplace.

At this point, I decided to continue the discussion by evoking a theory that had occurred to me in the past but which I had never seen articulated in any media.

“Has anyone entertained the idea that it might be an effect of technology the CIA itself uses to monitor its own personnel, not necessarily to cause injury but as surveillance?”

The idea that Havana Syndrome (AHIs) could be an inadvertent side effect of U.S. surveillance or signals-intelligence technology is a theory that has circulated within the intelligence community and among independent analysts, though it is rarely the “front-page” explanation.

This theory generally takes two forms: Internal Surveillance and Mutual Interference.

1. The “Inadvertent Side Effect” Theory

In 2021, the Heritage Foundation and several security analysts raised the possibility that these incidents might not be “attacks” at all, but rather the result of extremely high-powered surveillance or jamming equipment being used in close proximity to personnel.

• The Logic: Modern intelligence work requires intense “electronic shielding” (SCIFs) and active jamming to prevent eavesdropping. If a piece of equipment—either a U.S. device or a local one—was malfunctioning or emitting specific radio frequencies at an unsafe level, it could theoretically cause biological effects without being intended as a weapon.
  
• Historical Precedent: This is often compared to the “Moscow Signal” during the Cold War. For decades, the Soviets beamed microwaves at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. It wasn’t a weapon meant to kill; it was a way to “power” eavesdropping bugs hidden in the walls or to jam U.S. signals. However, the personnel exposed to it suffered health issues for years.

2. Monitoring or “Blue-on-Blue” Interference

There is a more niche theory that the “surveillance” might be domestic.

• The Idea: Because the initial 2016 cases in Havana primarily hit undercover CIA officers (rather than standard State Department diplomats), some speculated that the CIA was deploying a new type of “biometric” or “proximity” sensor to keep track of its own officers’ locations and health in a high-threat environment.
  
• The Result: If this technology had a “biological resonance” or a glitch, it could have accidentally injured the very people it was meant to protect.

3. Why This Theory is Hard to Prove

• The CIA’s “Mystery” Stance: If the CIA discovered that its own equipment was the cause, they would be highly unlikely to admit it publicly. Doing so would reveal a massive “friendly fire” blunder, expose sensitive technical capabilities, and open the government up to enormous legal liability from injured officers.
  
• Location Inconsistency: While this theory explains incidents at embassies or in CIA housing, it struggles to explain why symptoms were reported by personnel in hotels or while traveling in places like Vietnam or India, unless they were carrying the equipment with them.

Current Official Status

The January 2025 Intelligence Community update (which you may have seen in recent news) actually hints at this “messiness.” While five agencies still blame foreign actors as “very unlikely,” two agencies now acknowledge a “roughly even chance” that some incidents involve technology. Crucially, they have stopped using the word “attack” in all cases, shifting instead to “events,” which leaves the door open for the cause being accidental exposure to technology—whether ours or theirs.

Note: There is a distinct “Catch-22” here. If the cause is a top-secret U.S. defensive system, the government can’t explain it to the victims without breaking national security laws.

Gemini’s answer gave me more than I expected. It provided numerous objective facts that have not been reported in The New York Times or any popular media outlet that considers its vocation to be to keep the general public informed. The key takeaway from Gemini’s response is this: “If the CIA discovered that its own equipment was the cause, they would be highly unlikely to admit it publicly.”

As I reflected on this I decided to take it one step further with the following prompt:

“You correctly observed: ‘If the CIA discovered that its own equipment was the cause, they would be highly unlikely to admit it publicly.’ Still, they presumably would have had to explain to the victims what they discovered. Or would they? Given what we know about the internal complaints of neglect on the part of the HR function, would CIA staff ever learn the truth even if it meant keeping it confidential, to save face for the agency?”

Rather than reproduce the entire response, here is the very interesting conclusion:

In this world, transparency is viewed as a vulnerability, and “saving face” is often synonymous with “protecting the mission.”

My conclusion

If even the staff of the CIA has no hope of accessing the truth in matters their employer understands and that affect their own health, should the wider public trust any of our institutions that claim to be pursuing the truth? A fortiori, would it make sense for us to trust anything asserted by a media that we know has a habit of uncritically repeating what those institutions say?

Critical thinking, the key not to knowing but to understanding, should become every citizen’s best developed skill.

Historically, we were conditioned to believe that the vocation of the Fourth Estate — the press — was to provide the corrective needed to keep our governments honest. Thanks to social media (which, alas, contains its own sources of distortion) and to AI (which we know can hallucinate), we have access to a diversity of sources. We have the means of comparing narratives and focusing on patterns of interpretation that appear more truthfully constructed.

Anyone can do it, but we need to develop and refine the habit. Ideally, our schools will help in the effort. Faced with the trauma of AI’s rivalry, positioned as a competitive source of truth, our wonderful educational institutions need to focus less on the delivery of inert content and more on developing every citizen’s critical thinking skills. We may need to retrain our trainers and educators to get there or replace them with a new generation that understands the new priority. If we allow a Cold War between traditional educators and AI to develop, not only will we fail to develop critical thinking, our institutions will crumble due to the misplaced energy dedicated to the war effort.

This in any case is a theme that a new generation of politicians in our democracies need urgently to think about.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At Fair Observer, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]