A Harvard University survey of 150 of the country’s top experts on “misinformation” provides a wonderful illustration of why American journalism should have avoided the quagmire of “fact-checking,” should get out of that mudhole now and should stay out of it.
Nothing has done more to damage mainstream media credibility in this century than the business’s decision to anoint itself as America’s high-holy arbiter of “truth.”
And this from a business inherently prone to mistakes. There are good reasons why Alan Barth’s long-ago observed that journalism is the “first rough draft of history.”
This is because, like all first drafts, it is full of mistakes. Read almost any story produced by almost any news organization covering almost any area of information in which you are well-versed or an expert and you are almost certain to find something which might easily be called “misinformation.”
One can only wonder what reporter Ella Nilsen considers “wide.”
This leaves three species that can or might be found in ANWR – the polar bear, the spectacled eider and the Steller’s eider, although most of the latter, according to the Service, “nest in Arctic Russia, as well as a small breeding population on the Arctic Coastal Plain of Alaska and historically on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta where nesting is now rare.”
Not to mention that Steller’s eider is rarely found as far east as ANWR on Alaska’s North Slope. All of which leaves basically two species – the polar bear and the spectacled eider – to define a “wide range.”
Journalism would be in a far better place today if news organizations devoted more attention to fact-checking themselves to catch misstatements like this instead of trying to find the truth or lack thereof of every muttering of an out-of-favor politician.
But then again, the CNN story also illustrates another problem.
Were one to fact-check CNN, it would be easy to declare this claim of “wide range” false, but then again, two threatened species is two more than zero. So the claim does have some truth to it, and we can now all argue about where “wide” begins.
Maybe when Nilsen was writing about that wide range of species she was referring to the wide difference between the polar bear and the eider, two widely different species. And this is illustrative of the never-never land fact-checking can wander into.
Into the gray
This is to be expected because between black and white, there are infinite shades of gray. And this is what has left the experts themselves struggling to settle on what qualifies as misinformation.
When polled, they showed a wide degree of disagreement on how to classify lies, deepfakes, conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, propaganda, rumors, clickbait headlines, hyperpartisan news, and satirical/parodical news. They didn’t even get into exaggerations like the one that led some people to believe that Democrat vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz “coached his high school’s football team to its first-ever state championship.”
That honor actually belonged to coach Rick Sutton, but Walz was one of his assistants. Depending on who is spinning the reporting, Walz has been variously described as the coach, the “defensive coordinator” or the “linebackers coach.” But whatever he was, describing him as the guy who “coached his high school’s football team” to a championship would be like describing Matt Patricia as the guy who led the New England Patriots to two Super Bowl victories.
Patricia was the defensive coordinator of the Patriots for two victories, but when later given the opportunity to lead a team himself, he proved a miserable failure. During the less than three years he led the Detroit Lions, his team won 13 games, lost 20, finished last in their division twice, and were in last place when he was fired late in the 2020 season.
That was both disingenuous and inaccurate. Not to mention that “local news reporting” isn’t exactly the best source. “School records” would have been better.
One can only guess what the experts on misinformation would call this, however.
At one extreme, about 10 percent of them believe satirizing the news qualifies as spreading misinformation, which might lead one to conclude the misinformation experts are a bunch of humorless sods.
At the other extreme, slightly more than 10 percent refuse to classify lies as misinformation, possibly because some lies contain truths.
Fiction is by definition all a lie, and what was it the late Ernest Hemingway said about all good fiction being “truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.”
How much this view depends on whether the experts agree or disagree with the propaganda in question is an unknown. But consider that some of the biggest propaganda of this decade was strongly embraced by expects with no proof it was true.
We’re talking about wearing cloth face masks for protection against or to prevent the spread of the Covid-19-causing SARS-CoV-2 virus. Scientists are still debating whether cloth masks provide any benefit at the population level, and among the latest views is a study that came out in July concluding that “epidemic modeling suggests that in specific circumstances masks may become more effective when fewer contacts wear them.”
How that conclusion was arrived at is too complicated to spend time on here, but if you’re interested, go read the study. For the purposes of this analysis, the study is being used solely to illustrate the many shades of gray in masking, which evolve around not only how well masks work to filter the air you breathe but depend on how long you are exposed to airborne pathogens.
Masks might be considered a little like holding your breath underwater; that works to keep you alive for as long as you can hold your breath. With masks, whatever protection they provide, lasts until it doesn’t.
N95 filtering facepiece respirators have been shown to have some protective value, but the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) still warns those in the medical profession, who may be exposed to high levels of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, that “you should discard used respirators after each patient encounter.”
Restaurant and bar employee working in what were known to be poorly ventilated spaces, (this is the reason smoking was banned in bars and restaurants), unfortunately received no such warning during the pandemic.
Almost the opposite, in fact. Government messaging in this country led many to believe that if they stayed six feet away from others, a distance now also debated, and wore a mask, they could go to work for eight hours in a poorly ventilated space and be safe from Covid-19.
This likely led to the deaths of thousands of people if not tens of thousands, but then again, most of them appear to have been already suffering from chronic illnesses for failing to listen to other government messaging advocating healthy lifestyles.
Maybe the latter messaging is too gray. Maybe Americans should have long ago been told that “you must get off your fat ass and move for at least 60 minutes every day or you will die an early death.”
But there are facts people don’t like to see presented in black and white so they’re soft-pedaled. This is because we are sometimes happier to have things offered in grays, especially ideas with which we disagree, so we can redefine them to fit our own categories of black and white as we try to sort out our gray, gray world.
Desire to simplify
Scientists who set out to see how many shades of gray the human eye could detect concluded that we can perceive “around 900 shades of gray,” and the eye is but one portal into the human mind. Sounds and smells come in their own shades of gray, and the human imagination allows for almost limitless shading.
Now, consider some of the “truths” of the moment that hinge on a belief in God – some professional football players think God helps them score touchdowns – or the moving target of “scientific consensus” zeroing out the grays.
A consensus is a “general agreement.” A general agreement is considerable different from a fact.
In legal terms, it’s closer to the civil court standard of “a preponderance of the evidence” than to the criminal court standard of facts established “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and even with the latter standard in play in the American court system, innocent people still sometimes are sentenced to prison.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are now trying to figure out exactly how to define the terms consensus and misinformation as they apply to the world of science, and it isn’t proving easy.
“You want to be very thoughtful and careful of labeling something as misinformation,” he said.
The media is not known for being thoughtful and careful. Often reporters know little about the subjects about which they are reporting. Often they are working on deadlines and lack the time to carefully research anything.
Reference the above claim to the “wide range of threatened species” in ANWR.
On top of all of this, there is an inherent media desire for the simple and dramatic over the complex which encourages shading the grays.
Selling the news
Good versus evil doesn’t play well in colors other than black and white.
Paint too many of the grays as black and white, however, in an effort to arrive at definitive conclusions as to the truth, and the fact checker can start to look like the one spreading misinformation, especially in those cases when the misinformation is partially or greatly in the eye of the beholder.
We’d all be better off if journalists today recognized this fundamental reality and accepted that journalism’s societal role has never been about finding the truth; it has been about gathering and reporting information in a clear and concise way to make people think about what is in the news and find their own truth, whatever that truth might be.
This role is especially important in the post-truth world of today where even the experts on misinformation find misinformation difficult to define and can’t seem to fully decide on what parts of it are wrong, OK or sort of OK.
This makes accurately defining the “facts” almost impossible in some situations, and as Kuferschmidt went on to observe, the “squishy definition of misinformation puts the researchers themselves in the challenging position of having to decide whether a claim is misleading, which can add to accusations of political bias.”
Accusations of political bias can be a problem for researchers ensconced in the comfortable confines of the country’s predominately liberal universities where the group-think provides some bulwark against protesting elements of the unwashed masses.
Accusations of political bias are, on the other hand, a nightmare for mainstream media in the business of selling information to the unwashed masses, especially a media that long tried to paint itself as “objective” only to struggle with its objectivity when Donald Trump first entered the race for the presidency in 2015.
You want the truth
Trump recognized early on that truth can be an impediment in politics and staged a campaign based largely on saying whatever he thought would win him votes whether the words were true, largely true, half true, minimally true, totally false or somewhere in between these dividing lines.
This was not without precedent in American politics, but Trump took it to new heights for modern times by leveraging the power of celebrity in ways never before witnessed in this country.
“Prized also because, in our politics, success is self-validating. A candidacy that started out as a joke, as a self-aggrandizing exercise in xenophobia, struck a chord in a certain constituency and took off….Winning – in ratings, polls and primaries – validated him, which brought further validation….”
This approach to politics laid the groundwork for the comparisons made between Trump and Adolph Hitler.
“Hitler did not try to persuade people factually, he played to the Germans’ fears, hopes, and ideals,” as historian Luke Ziegler has written. “Hitler preyed upon the skepticism of the
splintered Weimar party system. He conveyed that all parties would be dissolved into Volksgemeinschaft,” the people’s community.
“….What most middle, and some working, class people wanted was a nationalist, progressive, and united party. In a word, the Nazis.”
Most Americans, no doubt, would like more unity in this country today, but the United States lacks the long, German history of “Volksgemeinschaft,” and Trump is, unlike Hitler, not the man to deliver unity.
Thus there is little reason to fall for the left-fueled accusations that Trump is or could become the American Hitler. The evidence actually leans against this conclusion.
Hitler was a Macchevalian character whose greatest success came in co-opting the German bureaucracy and appealing to the German public’s desire for a return to importance in Europe. The Nazis, once voted into office, used the history of Volksgemeinschart and German authoritarian rule to leverage their way into power.
As Ziegler observes, “Hitler’s ascension to the chancellery was not a complete failure of democracy; it did not happen in ballot boxes. The decision to appoint Hitler was made entirely in closed meetings between men who did not respect democracy. By forgoing democracy, they renounced the safeguards it provided. The ruling elites saw parliament as a necessary evil that had to be endured so that one day, they could return Germany to its pre-World War I power.”
Trump might well have used Hitleresque techniques on the campaign trail, but he has shown no ability to co-opt the vast American bureaucracy – his promise to “drain the (bureaucratic) swamp” only led to a bigger swamp – and despite the variety of progressives in Congress who believe themselves way smarter than the American public and would likely welcome authoritarian rule if it aligned with their agenda, Trump has shown even less ability to manipulate the American equivalent of the German parliament.
Fortunately, too, the U.S. has no history of authoritarian rule and has displayed pretty much the opposite of Volksgemeinschaft since its founding as 13 not-so-united states given considerable power to rule themselves in line with the theme that when it came to the national interest they would get along when needed for survival.
No one but Trump can know exactly what Trump wants to be, but the idea of his becoming the American Hitler, as a ranting Rachel Maddow, the voice of MSNBC has suggested, borders on the absurd given that Trump’s past Presidency lacked the big step necessary to start a movement down that road – a war large enough to unite the country against a foreign enemy.
The time to worry will come if Trump sends U.S. troops to Ukraine to join the battle against Russia, and there are and have been no signs he has any inclination to do so. In 2022, Trump was in fact accused by Politico of praising Vladimir Putin’s invasion of that country although if one read Trump’s comments carefully at the time what the then-former President appeared to be praising was the public-relations spin Putin put on the invasion.
The latest take on the Ukraine war is that Trump wants the U.S. to become less involved rather than more involved. CNN is reporting that in the wake of Trump’s reelection, “Ukraine may soon have to adjust to a dramatic reduction in U.S.support that could have a decisive impact on the war with Russia.
“Throughout his campaign, the Republican president-elect and his running mate, JD Vance, have cast strong doubts on continued U.S. commitment to Kyiv as the war drags on more than two and half years after Russian forces invaded. Moreover, Trump has made comments that suggest the US could pressure Ukraine into an uneasy truce with Russia.”
This is not how you go about things if you want to seize control of a nation as Hitler did. Going to war is the ultimate, national unifier, with a devastating economic crisis coming in second. The closest this country ever came to authoritarian rule was in the 1930s and 1940s when first the Great Depression and then World War II led to a massive growth in the power of the executive branch of government.
Triumph of the Will
Still, there is no denying Trump’s efforts to mimic Hitler’s propaganda techniques on the campaign trail, and this approach clearly resonated with a large segment of American voters. All of which has a Washington Post columnist suggesting that the problem in this country is not Trump’s re-election but the indication that something like one in four Americans is a Nazi.
This has been a mainstream media view of Trump since the mainstream went to war with him after he was first elected in 2016. It tracks back to Hilary Clinton’s 2016 campaign trail claim that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it.”
Clinton lost in her campaign for president and not long after declared she was becoming “part of the resistance,’‘ which in keeping with the claims of Nazism some took to be a reference to the French Resistance after the Germans occupied that country in 1940.
Who knows how many journalists similarly joined the resistance while denying it as the French had been forced to do. The result was a long-running, guerilla war between Trump and the media didn’t make for a better President or a better media.
There are some who, no doubt, would like to see that war resume even if it is bad for the country and for the mainstream news business. Calling one in four of your potential readers Nazis might be good business if you’re a partisan news organization, but it’s not if you’re trying to be mainstream.
So, too, the banding together, as was reported to be the case for “outraged” staffers at the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, after the owner of your news organization decides against editorializing in favor of the election of either candidate for the presidency instead of embracing Democrat Kamala Harris.
As if those editorials would have made a difference. Newspaper endorsements of Presidents have regularly proved pointless in terms of influencing elections.
That journalists would protest over something so meaningless in the belief that it is so important pretty well summarizes how out of touch much of the mainstream media, and thus why so clueless as to how their fact-checking plays among the masses.
The mainstream parsing of every word Trump said during his first term as President and declaring every third word a lie in the belief that the “truth” would save America did nothing but burnish Trump’s image as the ultimate political bad boy.
How many Americans voted for Trump for this reason alone this year is hard to say, but there are plenty of Americans unhappy with the size and reach of government in this country today and happy to vote for anyone who shows any inclination to monkeywrench the system or, as Trump pitched it, “drain the swamp.”
“This bucket has a lot of very smart people in it who aren’t actually MAGA,” he writes. “They see Trump as an incompetent, narcissistic, populist, midwit fuckwad and they can think of nothing more pleasing than to have such a complete bozo in charge of The Regime for four years gumming up the Regime’s activities because The Regime’s activities are completely awful.”
The mainstream was never going to change the minds of those people by pointing out every Trump lie, near lie or distortion. All it was going to do was soil itself by trying to twist everything Trump said into a lie (he actually sometimes says something that is true) while ignoring the lies, the near lies and distortions of other politicians.
And they all distort things. Let’s all accept that.
Selling nonsense
Unsuccessful Democrat Presidential candidate Harris was on the campaign trail this year promising to “lower the costs of groceries,” and the media hardly batted an eye about that claim. Politico did do a story reporting that presidents “have few options to significantly or quickly lower food costs – though voters believe otherwise,” but never called out Harris.
Who knows if Harris’s claim as to lowering the costs of groceries won her any votes. It might well have done the opposite. Most people don’t like to be pandered to, and if you are going to pander, why not at least go all in:
“If I am elected, I will lower the price of your groceries, deliver them to your door, and shovel your driveway while there!”
What would the fact-checkers do with that? You can’t really call it a “lie” before she’s elected. Technically, there is the possibility should could do this for someone if elected.
And this why the the fact-checking business such a minefield for journalism.
For every person the fact-checkers make happy by agreeing with that person’s view, there is likely to be another or more who decide the fact-checker is the one spreading misinformation.
Wouldn’t it be better to just do the old-fashioned job of journalism and report the story as completely as possible as to what has been said along with whatever evidence there is that what has been said is bullshit and let readers sort out the “truth.”
I am reminded here of the “show, don’t tell” advice an editor named Mike Campbell used to hand out at a long ago Anchorage Daily News. The agenda-loaded mainstream media now seems to have abandoned that idea.
The telling has grown to the point where reading mainstream news can leave you feeling like a teenager being lectured by an all-knowing parent. And no matter how right that parent might be, the overbearing presentation can undermine the message.
Hell, mainstream media might actually have played the biggest role in getting Trump elected this time around thanks to its ranting like an obnoxious neighborhood know-it-all. That’s a turnoff for a lot of folks, and you’d think the people in selling the news as a mainstream product would recognize that turning off readers is not a great sales tactic.
Then again, maybe the mainstream is now all dead, and all that is left to sell is partisan news. And if that is that case, couldn’t we all just be honest about it?
Categories: Commentary
Google Erases History: When Asked ‘What Happened on July 13?’ AI Fails to Include Trump Assassination Attempt.
I typed in “search” and everything else came up but not the assassination attempt. No wonder MSM is looked at with cynicism.
When 52 intelligence agents can sign an oath that a factual laptop is Russian disinformation with no consequences, our information is no different than Russia’s, China’s or North Korea’s propaganda. At the time the officers perjured themselves to mislead voters, European news sources were providing actual footage from the laptop.
None of the officers were prosecuted, reprimanded, fired, or lost their pensions.
Easiest thing to do to them would be to pull their clearances. Requires no signoff. newly ensconced DNI Tulsi Gabbard would be just the DNI to do so. There are another several hundred former military and spooks who also signed a letter in Oct in support of Kamala. Their clearances also need to go.
Gonna be really difficult to get a job in the military industrial complex without a clearance. Cheers –