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560 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 8 (1998)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0560 and id is 1 raw text is: PREFACE These remarks are being written on the Fourth of July weekend, in the virtual space between Jerusalem and Philadelphia. From Philadelphia, it looks as though Jerusalem is full of facts, if not brotherly love, and that Philadelphia has hardly any. After all, facts from the Middle East are on the front page of every newspaper, while Philadelphia hardly makes the inside pages. To worsen matters, Michael Herzfeld tells us that Gary Wills has debunked the famous painting depicting the ceremonial occasion on which signatories of the Declaration of Independence gathered in Philadelphia for the event. From Jerusalem, however, Philadelphia seems as firmly anchored in fact as the Liberty Bell, while the Middle East is seething with myth and ambiguity. The Palestinian delegation to the United Nations has just been upgraded-but not to the status it was seeking-and both sides are claiming a diplomatic triumph. Not so long ago, an Israeli prime minister announced that there never was a Palestinian people, and the Arab world retorted that Jerusalem was not the capital of Israel. Victory in the Yom Kippur War was claimed by both Egypt and Israel, and Israel is having second thoughts about whether it really won the Six Day War, considering all of the unanticipated problems that have followed in its wake. Facts refuse to stand still, it seems, and that is what this volume is about. Facts are all around us, of course, but they are hard to recognize. THE CONFERENCE The conference in which these 14 articles first took form was organized by the Annenberg Scholars Program and took place in February 1997 as the culminating event of a two-year effort to grapple with the status of fact and the role of media in postmodernity. The conferees, and a distinguished audience, met with the two multidisciplinary cohorts of Annenberg Scholars who had spent a year at the University of Pennsylvania deliberating the dilemma of reporting-in journalism, law, history, and the sciences.' Both Scholars and conferees were asked to consider that the classical distinctions between facts, representation, and interpretation had apparently broken down. If facts cannot be told without narrators and narratives, and if these inevitably affix imprints of their own, it follows that facts are accessible only through representation, and that representation is tainted with interpreta- tion. As Jerome Bruner puts it, when the classical baseball umpire claims to call balls like they are, and the modern umpire purports to call them like I see them, their postmodern counterpart takes issue, insisting instead that they ain't nothing until I call them. 8

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