fake news – Sheila Kennedy

News Supply And Demand

The faster our country spins out of control–the weirder the behavior of the clowns who (usually thanks to gerrymandering) have been elected to Congress–the more convinced I become that a majority of our national dysfunctions are a result of our Wild West “information” environment.

No matter how crazy your preferred belief, you can find support for it online. I used to tell the students in my Media and Public Affairs classes that if they really believed that aliens had landed in Roswell, I could find them five Internet sites with pictures of the aliens’ bodies. (I never actually tested that thesis, but I firmly believe those sites are out there.)

The problem–as most of us have long realized–is that free speech on the web far too often means speech (and with AI, pictures) that are free of even the slightest contact with reality.

As Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank wrote awhile back, with the help of the Internet, the Republican Party has constructed a “walled fortress of alternative facts.”

Beginning in the hours after the elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Tex., right-wing social media churned out every manner of conspiracy theory: The shooter was an illegal immigrant! No, he was transgender! Or maybe the massacre was a false-flag operation perpetrated by the anti-gun left! And the grieving families are paid crisis actors!

The disinformation then followed the usual paths, finding its way to Alex Jones’s Infowars (the shooting had “very suspicious timing,” coming days before the National Rifle Association’s convention) and right into the claims of Republican members of Congress.

Rep. Paul Gosar (Ariz.), who has repeatedly tied himself to white nationalists, tweeted that the gunman was “a transsexual leftist illegal alien” — and let that multi-headed falsehood stand for two hours before deleting it.

It wasn’t just Gosar, who is such an embarrassing nutcase that six of his siblings took out television ads asking people not to vote for him. Milbank reported on equally idiotic statements issued by other “usual suspects”–Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and the ever-goofy Marjorie Taylor Green.

At the NRA convention, some of the most prominent Republican officials posited yet another conspiracy theory: that for political figures calling for sensible gun control, “their real goal is disarming America,” as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) put it in a speech stocked with falsehoods. Former president Donald Trump falsely told the group that the Biden administration reportedly “is considering putting U.N. bureaucrats in charge of your Second Amendment rights.”

As Milbank says, purposeful disinformation, aimed at those who desperately want to believe “alternative facts” is why we can’t have a rational discussion or a common-sense compromise about gun violence–or anything else.

Academic studies have found that Republicans share between “200 percent and 500 percent more fake news (fabrications published by sites masquerading as news outlets) than Democrats.” A research team led by scholars from MIT wanted to determine why. “Were they less able to distinguish fact from fiction? More psychologically predisposed to political bias?”

In part, yes. But the researchers found that “the issue primarily seems to be a supply issue,” Guay told me. “There’s just way more fake news on the right than the left.” In experiments giving Democrats and Republicans equal amounts of fake news that confirmed their world views, Republicans were more likely to share the falsehoods — but only 1.6 times more likely. This suggests that Republicans don’t have some “overreaching hunger” to traffic in untruths; they simply can’t avoid it because they’re so immersed in the stuff.

Guay’s is the latest of many studies identifying the disinformation “asymmetry” afflicting the right in the Trump era. In lay terms: Garbage in, garbage out. Republican voters hear lies by the thousand from Trump and imitators such as Johnson and Cruz….It’s hardly surprising that, thus exposed, they become more toxic in their language, more extreme in their ideology and more outraged.

If you saw “evidence” everywhere you turned, from people you trusted, that the country is being run by socialist pedophiles bent on disarming the populace, extinguishing your race and destroying the United States, you’d probably be outraged, too. At the very least, you might not be in the best frame of mind for a constructive conversation about ending gun violence.

I haven’t the slightest idea how rational folks combat this “supply problem.” Real news–actual journalism, even at its most slapdash–requires time and effort to produce. The creation of propaganda doesn’t.

It’s hard enough to tell the difference for those of us who want to separate the wheat from the chaff–but fake news is welcomed and distributed by those who desperately want to believe it.

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Calling BS

I think the University of Montana is onto something.

One of the biggest problems facing contemporary societies–not just in the U.S., but worldwide–is propaganda. Disinformation and conspiracy theories and just plain lying are ubiquitous (propaganda today, as Steve Bannon inelegantly put it, is achieved by “flooding the zone with shit”). It matters. As any medical professional will attest, a wrong diagnosis of what ails you will prevent the identification of a remedy to cure you.

The University of Montana has an intriguing approach to that flooded zone; it offers a course titled “Calling Bullshit,” the purpose of which is to examine why it’s so easy to spread misinformation and untruths and why it’s so hard to combat it. It’s an effort to explore “what citizens can do to become better consumers and producers of factual information.”

“The name is definitely provocative, but the class is not about the cussword,” said course instructor Professor Lee Banville, director of UM’s School of Journalism. “It’s about information literacy. People need to be both better sharers of information and better consumers of information.”

Because the subject is indeed serious, Banville chose a more appropriately earnest title when he launched the course in 2021. News Literacy, however, generated about as much excitement from students as one might expect.

“We had about 20 students in the class because, let’s face it, the title was boring,” Banville said. “Calling it B.S., we had 40 students this summer and 102 are enrolled this fall.”

The idea for the class – and its unconventional title – isn’t entirely original. The University of Washington also sponsors a course titled Calling Bullshit, and its instructors, Professor Carl Bergstrom and Associate Professor Jevin West, wrote a book on the subject with the same title. Their emphasis though is on the misuse of data, Banville said, whereas UM’s looks more at how to spot and debunk misinformation in journalism and social media.

Students have noted that, while the title was provocative, the course content was surprisingly rigorous, imparting skills that will help them navigate our increasingly fraught information environment. The ultimate goal is to educate students to become critical thinkers regardless of where the country leans politically from year to year.

“The title may be a little playful,” Leigh said, “but I can’t think of a better skill set to teach our students than to not take things at face value. It’s valuable really for all consumers of news and media.”

In the coming semesters, Banville and Leigh would like to expand the number of students who can take the course, but they want to keep class sizes small enough to foster two-way dialogue that respects other points of view.

Teaching such a course requires discussion of the difference between recognizing BS and “calling” it. The latter takes fortitude.

And that title?

Banville said he wanted a course name that “hit” students upside the head, but even he struggled at times with Calling Bullshit.

“When I was filling out the paperwork to start the course, I kept thinking I can’t believe I am submitting this form, and I even used an asterisk in place of the ‘i’ at first,” he recalled. “I was waiting for someone to push back, and no one did.

“Yeah, the name is provocative,” he said, “but information literacy is incredibly important to society and our democracy.”

Several years ago, I bought and thoroughly enjoyed a little book published by Princeton University Press and written by Harry Frankfort, a noted moral philosopher. It was titled “On Bullshit.” In it, Frankfurt explored bullshit and the related concepts of humbug and lying, and distinguished among them.

Courses like this one, that help students develop critical thinking skills, are increasingly important in a world where so much “information” should not be taken at face value. That said, there are people who–for a variety of reasons–are especially vulnerable to so-called “fake news.” One recent study found that some people have an especially difficult time rejecting misinformation.

Asked to rate a fictitious person on a range of character traits, people who scored low on a test of cognitive ability continued to be influenced by damaging information about the person even after they were explicitly told the information was false. The study is significant because it identifies what may be a major risk factor for vulnerability to fake news.

The study found older adults to be especially vulnerable to fake news. Lack of vulnerability correlated highly with education–presumably, because education helps people develop “meta-cognitive skills.”

Like the ability to call bullshit…..

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Pink Slime

I hadn’t heard the term “pink slime”applied to the media before reading the following report in Talking Points Memo.

This is the tale of a fake news story, widely shared by a lot of smart people who so badly wanted it to be true that they didn’t care that it wasn’t. It is also the tale of the decline of local news in America, the wave of pink slime that is replacing it, feeding destructive partisan narratives about public institutions.

The story–which was written to sound like one of those overzealous efforts to compensate for structural racism–was that administrators at two Chicago suburban high schools would be requiring teachers to “adjust”their classroom grading scales in the upcoming year. The adjustments were supposedly going to “account for the skin color or ethnicity of the students”. The story (from a rightwing outlet masquerading as a local news source) explained that the directive was an effort “to equalize test scores among racial groups.” Teachers would be told

to exclude from their grading assessments variables it says disproportionally hurt the grades of black students. They can no longer be docked for missing class, misbehaving in school or failing to turn in their assignments, according to the plan.

To suggest that people were outraged would be a considerable understatement. Had the story been true, the outrage would have been appropriate, but of course, it wasn’t. Not even close. No new policies had been adopted. A committee on grading and assessment had submitted an initial report, but it contained no mention of race-based grading or plans to grade students using different standards according to race.

This is where “pink slime” comes in. “Pink slime” is the product of a partisan propaganda platform well-disguised as a “local” news outlet. It’s named after a meat-processing byproduct used as filler—in other words, it looks like meat but isn’t.

When Talking Points Memo reporters looked for the source of the story–which you couldn’t even characterize as distorted, since it was pretty much invented out of whole cloth–they traced it to something called Local Government Information Services.

Local Government Information Services (LGIS) is the publisher of lots of local news media in Illinois, with titles like “Southern Illinois News” and “SW Illinois news.” LGIS is part of a much larger network of local news in multiple states. As local news media has disappeared “pink slime” outlets like LGIS have taken their place, relying on low-cost or automated content repeated across sites, and eschewing basic journalistic practices.

Just how big and how connected these local news outlets are is difficult to discern. In 2020, the New York Times counted about 1,200 connected local news outlets that had arisen in just 10 years.

Behind this empire of pink slime is Brian Timpone, a conservative businessman and former journalist with a record of plagiarism and fabrication. It is not just that his media has an ideological outlook, or that it frequently uses deceptive practices such as the story detailed here. They are also directly funded by conservative advocates, a fact that is rarely disclosed to readers. At least $1.7 million could be traced going from Republican campaigns to Timpone’s companies, but the actual number is unknown given the shadowy nature of the flow of political money and the obtuse structure of these networks.

The rise of LGIS and similar “news sources” has been facilitated by the near-death of local journalism and the closing of hundreds of newspapers that adhered to the norms of ethical news gathering. The fact that so much false “news” goes viral tells us that the supply of propaganda continues to grow, with phony “news” sources extruding a steady stream of propaganda masquerading as news–pink slime, pretending to be meat.

Local journalists with a sense of responsibility to journalistic ethics, their personal reputation, and the community they live in have been replaced by anonymous for-hire freelancers paid crumbs to feed the motivated reasoning beast.

As the report notes, people want to believe that these stories aren’t just true, but typical.

“But of course,” they type, and retweet. Even after they have been corrected, they might think to themselves, “Well, maybe this specific piece was exaggerated, but it is representative of a broader trend.”

The episode is indeed representative and telling, but of something that has gone wrong in our media landscape. When you give the benefit of the doubt to partisan fake news rather than professional educators, it is hard to take the whole “I’m here to defend education” bit too seriously. Our looming crisis in education is not runaway wokeness, which local school boards can police, but the willingness of those who should know better to reflexively denigrate the teaching profession.

America’s problems almost all come back to partisan, deeply dishonest media.

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The Right Problem

Sometimes, unrelated “factoids” converge to tell a story. Just in the past couple of weeks, I’ve come across stories that seemed initially to be unconnected, but come together to illustrate a troubling aspect of contemporary political life.

Factoid #1: Recent polls show that a third of Americans do not believe the Nazis killed six million Jews.Thirty-one percent of the Americans surveyed, and 41 percent of millennials within that group, do not believe that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust and think the real death toll is at least 2 million lower. (Eleven percent said it is acceptable to hold neo-Nazi views.)

Factoid #2: An October poll by Axios found barely a majority of Americans affirming faith in democracy. Just 51% of Americans said they have faith in the country’s democracy, and 37% say they have lost faith in democracy.

Factoid #3: The people most apt to share “fake news“–to be taken in by conspiracy theories, spin and propaganda– aren’t defined by political ideology, but by age (although age does correlate with political philosophy). Research published by the journal Science Advances, found that older Americans — especially those over 65 — were much more likely to share fake news than younger ones, and conservatives and Republicans were more likely to share fake news than were liberals and Democrats.

There are several disheartening conclusions to be drawn from these disparate items. The most obvious is that Americans are woefully ignorant of history. Another is that the pace of social change has been most upsetting to older Americans, who find themselves attracted to “alternative facts” when their settled views are challenged. Still another is that Americans are disappointed with the direction the nation is taking, and draw the conclusion that democracy hasn’t worked.

But beneath those fairly superficial conclusions, I think there is a state of bewilderment. As our media has fragmented, as the availability of widely-trusted news sources has diminished and the number of politicized, highly partisan outlets has increased, thoughtful Americans–those who don’t automatically accept the spin from one “true believer” cult or another– no longer know what to believe.

Did you read that six million Jews were murdered? Well, maybe. Where did you read that? Did you read that Trump lies constantly? Well, that was from the Washington Post; this article from Breitbart attributes the accusation to the Post’s “liberal bias.” I’m not sure who’s right.

An article for the Guardian profiled David Neiwert, who has written about the contribution of the alt-right to our current situation.

For several decades following the Great Depression, when capitalism and liberal democracy teetered on the brink, Republicans and Democrats “agreed to defend democracy, and defend the values of democracy because it benefited them all by following basically FDR’s program. Now, we’ve lost that because conservatives have decided they are no longer willing to submit to any kind of government run by liberals,” Neiwert says. “The current conservative movement has decided it no longer wishes to be part of a liberal democracy.”…

Neiwert has focused on the media environment.

In his 2009 book The Eliminationists, Neiwert explained how this post-9/11 authoritarianism was fuelled by increasingly lurid fantasies in conservative media of destroying liberals, Muslims and other perceived enemies. These bubbled away throughout the presidency of Barack Obama, himself the subject of endless conspiracy theorising. Trump, of course, became the principal pusher of the idea that Obama wasn’t born in the US. His subsequent presidential campaign was powered by authoritarian and conspiratorial fantasy. And so, Alt-America has its president.

But can the problems Neiwert points to actually be remedied? “I’m not optimistic,” he says. “I believe that we’ve dug ourselves a really deep hole and we have a really long way to dig up.” He believes that while Trump is likely to lose in 2020, the movement, and the party, that propelled him to power will continue to have a malign effect.

One important step to challenge this would be media reform. He says that the internet and corporate ownership of local media have “basically gutted the ability of local newspapers to cover local news, gutted the ability of larger newspapers to do consumer and investigative reporting”. Social media, a paradise for conspiracy theorists, is filling the gap.

Without trusted and trustworthy journalism, reasonable citizens don’t know what they can believe, and that uncertainty paralyzes them.

Unreasonable citizens believe what they want to believe, and alt-right propagandists are happy to oblige.

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Whose Fake News?

Psychiatrists define “projection” as a defense mechanism employed by people who are having trouble coping with difficult emotions. They project their feelings of inadequacy or remorse over shameful behaviors onto someone else–accusing other people of undesirable or reprehensible actions of which the accuser is actually guilty.

For example, Donald Trump and “fake news.”

I’m not referring to Trump’s constant misstatements and inaccuracies (latest favorite: Trump said Harley-Davidson had lost sales because Americans were reacting negatively to the company’s impending move overseas. The company announced that move two weeks ago. Trump’s cited “evidence” was from 2017.)

He gets his facts wrong so often he could open an “Inaccurate-R-Us” franchise, but frequently, that’s simply because he is jaw-droppingly ignorant. His constant whining about “fake news,” however, is different. When he accuses reporters of manufacturing stories, he’s projecting, but he’s also playing to his base.

A recent example is this July 3d tweet

Just out that the Obama Administration granted citizenship, during the terrible Iran Deal negotiation, to 2,500 Iranians – including to government officials. How big (and bad) is that?”

Trump is absolutely obsessed with Obama (presumably because he can’t bear the fact that a black guy is infinitely smarter and classier than he is) and invents “facts” about him constantly. In response to the tweet, the Washington Post’s fact checker gave the allegation Four Pinocchios.

As embarrassing as it is to have a President who lies whenever his lips are moving, Trump’s truly despicable use of fake news is in service of his bigotry, especially when it comes to immigration. These are “lies with purpose”–messages intended to keep his base terrified of those lawless and dangerous brown people coming over the southern border.

The view from that southern border is radically different from the stories Trump is peddling.

As a resident of that border recently wrote

The news over the past few weeks might make you think that places such as my hometown — McAllen, Tex., in the Rio Grande Valley — are under siege from waves of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers, a crisis of lawlessness so extreme that drastic measures are needed. Tearing children from their parents, or, when that proves too unpopular, corralling families in tent cities. Then there’s the $25 billion wall that’s needed to safeguard the United States from the threat of being overrun.

The view from down here is different. In a 2018 rating of the 100 most dangerous cities in the United States based on FBI data, no border cities — not San Diego, not Texas cities such as Brownsville, Laredo or El Paso — appeared even in the top 60. McAllen’s crime rate was lower than Houston’s or Dallas’s, according to Texas Monthly in 2015. The Cato Institute’s research consistently shows that immigrants, both legal and undocumented, are markedly less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.

And as Kevin Sullivan recently wrote, in a story in the Washington Post, the town of McAllen is profoundly uncomfortable with Trump’s policy, and irate about the rhetoric he uses to defend it.

The policy is seen as unwanted and unfair in this border city of 142,000 whose population is 90 percent Hispanic and so fully bilingual that roadside anti-littering signs say “No dumping basura” (trash).

Far from being the criminal hell-hole described by Trump, McAllen is a thriving community, with an economy that is heavily dependent upon trade with its Mexican neighbors. Businesses welcome the customers who come over the border, and the town raises more sales tax per capita than almost any other Texas city — about $60 million last year, greater than its property tax revenue. Crime in the city is at a 33-year low.

There is a “crisis” at the border, but it is a humanitarian crisis entirely of Trump’s making.

Facts, evidence, accuracy, fairness–none of those things matter to this profoundly unstable and insecure man, so he evidently assumes that they don’t mean anything to anyone else, either. He projects his own dishonesty on others; he may even believe that everyone is as pathetically self-aggrandizing as he is. He clearly doesn’t realize how obvious his lies and inadequacies are to everyone outside the small, devoted base that desperately wants to see itself as superior to black and brown people.

He would be an object of pity if he weren’t in a position to do so much damage.

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