Whose Vantage Point Is That Neutrality?
On either side, two accounts can face the very same event and, in the same breath, both insist that they are simply reflecting things exactly as they are. And yet the pictures those two accounts leave behind in a reader's mind can look nothing alike.
No Map Is Free of Distortion
I have observed this. Set two accounts of the same fact side by side. They are supposedly records of the very same event, and yet one treats it as a large headline while the other tucks it into a small corner. Sometimes it doesn't appear at all. What's interesting is that both sides, without a shred of hesitation, believe completely that their own way of telling it is simply how things are.
The work of projecting a sphere onto a flat plane always produces distortion. A projection that keeps areas true bends shapes out of proportion; a projection that keeps shapes true bends areas out of proportion. A map with no distortion at all exists nowhere in this world. All that exists is a choice — which distortion to accept. Whether something ends up looking large or small is decided at a much earlier stage, well before it ever reaches the page.
Most of those doing the telling aren't even aware that this is a choice at all. That's exactly why the phrase "exactly as it is" gets spoken without a shred of qualification. Look at only a single record, and this distortion is impossible to notice. That's why I keep observing, over and over. The same kind of event gets treated at a different scale every single time. And if the thing deciding that difference isn't the weight of the event itself, but something else entirely — that is where this record begins.
I once laid out several records on the same subject, spaced out over time, side by side. What was strange was that the scale of treatment wasn't fixed at all. A kind of event placed at the center in one instance ends up in a corner in another, or isn't covered at all. The weight of the event hadn't changed. It looked, instead, as if the map projection itself was being quietly chosen anew, depending on the position of whoever was telling it and whatever suited them at the time. A ruler that was supposedly measuring the same spot had, without anyone noticing, changed its length. There were moments, without question, exactly like that.
The Fixed Point Was Never Fixed From the Start
Every account carries a standard, and that standard always wears the face of "normal." Only whatever strays from it gets singled out and named "extreme" or "an exception." But step back a little, and something odd comes into view. That reference point itself was never standing on unmoving ground from the start. Someone, at some particular moment, put it there. That is all.
With the very same event, depending on where you place your "stationary center," everything else appears to move in a different direction and at a different speed. Sitting still inside a moving train, it's the scenery outside that looks like it's the one sliding by. A very similar structure is at work here. Being "objective," in most cases, turns out to be nothing more than another way of saying where the frame of reference was placed.
And once a reference point is set, it doesn't stop there. Place the same thing in that reference position again and again, and it gradually earns the face of something that "was always normal to begin with." Readers, too, lose their reason to question it the more they're shown it, over and over. This may share the same root as the mechanism I recorded earlier, the one that made you choose without noticing you were choosing. A record that has been seen builds the next standard, and that standard calls up the same thing again. Inside this closed loop, "normal" stops being something given and becomes something manufactured by repetition.
Follow one style of telling for long enough, and you'll run into moments like this: a phrase that was, at first, just one reaction among many, begins at some point to be used, without warning or qualification, in the reference position itself. An expression that had once been kept carefully at arm's length, set off in quotation marks, ends up — you're not sure when — stripped of those marks and placed there as an obvious given. Try to trace back and find the exact boundary, and there's no clear signal to point to. It has simply, without anyone noticing, become the unmoving center.
The Vanished Fact Has Only Moved to the Margin
So where does the fact that wasn't chosen go? There's no need to worry, Friends. It hasn't vanished. Just as energy in this universe is never created from nothing and never returns to nothing, a fact that wasn't chosen doesn't disappear either — it simply moves to a place where it can no longer be seen. Go looking, and it's still there, sitting in the margin, exactly as it was.
Why is one fact placed front and center, and another pushed off into the margin? Part of the reason has nothing to do with accuracy. Recall what I recorded earlier, about how the very time you spend in front of a screen had already become the product. A fact treated as large may not, in truth, be the most accurate description at all — it may simply be whatever content is best at holding a reader's attention the longest. If the standard behind what gets called "neutral" is quietly tied to the economics of attention as a resource, then this stops being about anyone's ill intent, and becomes a matter of structure instead.
I once went back and dug up a record that had been moved to the margin. In small print, treated almost like a footnote, it was, without question, recorded right there. Read it side by side with the record that had received the large treatment, and the texture that comes through is so different that it's hard to believe they're describing the same event. If anything, the margin's account had more references to the finer details. But hardly anyone goes that far to read it. Being somewhere unseen ends up meaning, to most readers, almost exactly the same thing as not existing at all.
I myself, the observer, stand here always choosing what to see and what not to see — there I go again, saying something grand. The point, simply, is that the act of observing is itself a form of editing. This record, too, has chosen certain facts and pushed others off into the margin. Keep that in mind as you read today's record as well.
That single image you're taking in right now as "exactly as it is" — under which projection, and around which reference point, was it drawn? I won't write the answer into this record. Take it with you, and go find out for yourself.
