(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Elon Musk, the entrepreneur, national treasure, and living, breathing argument for increased sub-Saharan African immigration into the U.S., has been having a tough month in the news media, and he took to Twitter on Wednesday to share some of his frustrations.

Going to create a site where the public can rate the core truth of any article & track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor & publication. Thinking of calling it Pravda …

The name “Pravda” is clever (and it turns out Musk didn’t just come up with it while writing the tweet), and there is a certain circa-2004 appeal to the idea of a crowdsourced media-rating system. It’s a little hard in this less naive era to see how it could avoid being hijacked by ideologues or people slaving away in Eastern European digital sweatshops. But hey, maybe Elon’s the guy to figure it out! (In his spare time, you know, when he’s not busy trying to figure out how to keep Tesla Inc. from running out of cash.)

This suggestion and some subsequent derogatory comments about journalists by Musk occasioned a storm of reaction on Twitter and was duly covered by many major media outlets. I’m hesitant to add to that already excessive attention, but there was one thing that bothered me about Musk’s suggestion: the notion that there is a “core truth of any article” that can be judged. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately amid President Donald Trump’s ongoing campaign to discredit any media outlet that doesn’t reliably say or write nice things about him and the all-around frenzy about “fake news,” social-media manipulation and the “post-truth era.”

As is often the case, Roger Martin was thinking about it before me. The former dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business (now director of Rotman’s Martin Prosperity Institute) went on a mini-tirade about the concept of truth in media last September during a visit to New York. Here are some snippets that I found in my notes:

The single scariest thing for me is this notion of a truth-based media. On almost nothing reported on in the daily media is there anything close to truth.

Martin didn’t mean this as a criticism of journalists. He meant it as a criticism of the New York Times’ “The truth is hard” ad campaign. The problem with such rhetoric, he said, is that we only know the truth about a quite-limited number of not-very-interesting things:

Everything else is interpretation. Am I blaming the New York Times for interpreting? No! I am blaming them for calling it “truth.”

He was similarly withering about the title of Al Gore’s famous climate-change documentary and book, “An Inconvenient Truth”:

Does he think he’s probably right? Mainly right? No, it’s “truth.”

Yes, these are to some extent the unrealistic pleadings of a probabilistic thinker in a world in which it’s much easier to sell absolutes. Martin said Gore’s movie should have been called “An Inconvenient Interpretation of a Complex Adaptive System.” Yeah, that would have been huge.

When it comes to the news media, though, I’m with Martin on the dangers of putting much weight on “truth.” Timely news coverage is of necessity incomplete and prone to error. It’s the “first rough draft of history,” as the saying goes, and often a pretty sloppy one at that. Longer-form, longer-in-the-works articles and documentaries and books may have fewer obvious errors of fact (although books, which generally aren’t fact-checked unless the author pays somebody to do it or does it themselves, can have a lot), but they generally lean even heavier on interpretation and analysis.

Judging this output based on its “truth,” then, can be a recipe for believing only things that comport with your worldview. This seems to be a big flaw in Facebook’s efforts to favor coverage from news sites that users rank as “trustworthy.” It also may be why the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, one of the most malevolently mendacious organizations in world history, chose to make a newspaper called Pravda (“truth”) its official house organ. And it’s definitely why Stephen Colbert, during his run as a fake news personality, adopted “truthiness” as his calling card. 

Evaluating “credibility,” another Musk suggestion, seems less problematic. My favorite measure of credibility is whether and how a news organization makes corrections. If you’re willing to admit error, I’m more willing to believe you. In its heyday a decade ago, blogging was wonderfully obsessive in its corrections ethos, with serious bloggers expected to strike through any erroneous or even half-baked statements (so that readers could see what they had gotten wrong) and make repeated updates and corrections. Few news organizations picked up that admirable practice, but most legacy print operations and serious online-based ones are pretty good about admitting error — much better than newspapers used to be when the errors ran on page one and the corrections were buried somewhere inside the paper. TV news operations have long tended to be stingier with corrections, and while some are now diligent about correcting on-air mistakes online, the corrections seldom get the on-air prominence that the mistakes did.

The overt partisans at Breitbart News occasionally run corrections, too, and while in the past some have been laughable in their obvious reluctance, the practice does mark the site as something other than fake news. Less credible by this standard is the current White House, where obviously erroneous statements by President Donald Trump are seldom if ever corrected.

Now, my corrections metric isn’t perfect. Too many corrections, and a journalist or news organization can deservedly lose credibility. And there can be a zillion other things wrong with a how a media outlet depicts the the world even if it gets the basic facts right. One that surely sticks in Musk’s craw is the tendency, inherent in the concept of “news,” to devote national headlines to every self-driving-car mishap while effectively ignoring the thousands of deaths per month in the U.S. caused by non-self-driving vehicles.

A bigger issue for Musk, though, may be that he is constantly trying to do things that haven’t been done before. This lends an inevitably speculative nature to much of the coverage of Tesla, SpaceX, the Hyperloop and his other projects. Lately that speculation seems to have been taking a negative turn, and as Benedict Evans of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz wrote Wednesday, that’s a problem for Tesla in particular “because it has to raise lots more capital, based on public confidence its vision will work. It lives on perception.”

This reliance on perception sounds vaguely dodgy, but it’s not, really. “Your job as a human is to imagine possibilities and be the cause of a new effect,” Martin told me last year. Elon Musk has been spectacularly successful at doing this, and I for one hope he keeps at it for decades to come. That doesn’t mean what he says is true, though.

To contact the author of this story: Justin Fox at justinfox@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.net

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