Navigating news in the Era of Misinformation
Written in January 2020
Distrust of the media is at an all-time high. We’re constantly bombarded by claims of “fake news” directed both to and from the White House. President Trump claims that the liberal media have launched an unfounded witch-hunt against him since he announced his presidential bid in 2015. He alleges that there’s an intentional effort to defame and discredit him through mischaracterizations and outright lies. On the other side, the majority of mainstream media outlets assert that in actuality Trump and the networks that support him are the ones spreading misinformation about his administration, business ventures and political opponents. This leaves the public in a difficult position. Based on these contradictory reports, someone must be lying. But who?
In a 2016 feature article for FactCheck.org, authors Robertson and Kiely discuss how many individuals make decisions on what and who to believe based on their own preconceived notions. This tendency is termed “confirmation bias,” and “leads people to put more stock in information that confirms their beliefs and discount information that doesn’t.” I immediately thought of the Fox News flock who ardently pushed the birther movement that plagued Obama’s presidency even after he publicly released his birth certificate. But the example offered by Robertson and Kiely actually addressed a falsity purported on the other side of the aisle — a claim that I actually believed to be true.
During Trump’s first election cycle, Twitter and Facebook were abuzz with a quote from an old People Magazine interview in which Donald was said to have criticized the Republican party saying, “If I were to run [for president], I’d run as Republican, They’re the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe anything on Fox News. I could lie and they’d still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific.” As I read it today, the quote does look suspiciously in-line with the exact criticisms that are lobbed at the right in today’s political conversations. Maybe I should have suspected that the quote was fake, a carefully crafted attempt to distance Trump from his base and galvanize the left’s feelings of superiority. And if the quote had been attributed to any other candidate in the history of our democracy, my natural skepticism may have kicked in. But Donald Trump is a new kind of beast. He is so wild, unfiltered and irreverent that it is uniquely difficult to discern what is true and what is false when it comes to his media coverage.
Farhad Manjoo also tackled the issue of confirmation bias in a 2016 piece written for The New York Times. He claims that “the internet is distorting our collective grasp on the truth. Polls show that many of us have burrowed into our echo chambers of information. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 81 percent of respondent said that partisans not only differed about policies, but also about “basic facts.” The last portion is particularly alarming. It is one thing to choose to focus on issues that are only pertinent to your life and ignore issues that pertain to other communities. That is a level of ignorance that is problematic, but at least understandable. But we now find ourselves in an era where we debate fundamental scientific fact.
The climate change debate has led the news cycle lately with the recent World Economic Forum in Davos, the rise of the young radical activist Greta Thunberg and the disastrous weather phenomenon taking place in Australia. As the daughter of an environmental lawyer, climate change and sustainable development have always been in my purview. So, I lauded the 2016 signing of the Paris Agreement, a consensus among the world leaders to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and seriously pursue renewable energy sources. Just one year later, Trump withdrew from the Agreement citing economic concerns and implying climate change is an inevitability that is not influenced by man-made emissions. He has doubled down on these claims in the past few years, promoting known climate deniers on Twitter. In March of last year, he tweeted a quote from a Patrick Moore interview on Fox and Friends saying. “The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, its Fake Science. There is no climate crisis, there’s weather and climate all around the world, and in fact carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.”
These erroneous claims are dangerous in and of themselves, but they are particularly insidious when coupled with misleading data plots and statistical climate reports. Manjoo notes that “documentary proof seems to have lost its power. Now because any digital image can be doctored, people can freely dismiss any bit of inconvenient documentary evidence as having been somehow altered.” In the era of photoshop, fake proof can easily be produced, and real proof can easily be discredited. This is why resources like FactCheck.org, Snopes.com and PolitiFact.com are now more important than ever. They are the only things standing between us and the chasm of a post-truth media landscape.
