If this story were true, what else would be true?
There’s a funny scene in the zombie apocalypse comedy Shaun of the Dead in which the protagonist (Shaun) rolls out of bed and heads to the convenience store, without yet realizing that the apocalypse is upon him. Part of the joke is that the denizens of his suburban English town were barely distinguishable from zombies in the first place, and so on top of his hangover, he doesn’t notice the change. But even in his state, he notices soon enough, and so begins the adventure.
Lesson: when an earth-shattering event happens, you’ll probably hear about it soon enough. Especially when it’s news that anyone could check for themselves, and few people have reason to lie about it, word gets around. If that’s true in a post-apocalyptic world without functioning news media, it’s definitely true in a world with them. Think about how quickly you probably found out about the events of 9/11, for instance — and from how many different sources.
In my previous post, I suggested that one way to do a sniff test on the news was to ask how initially plausible the story was. If, given our background knowledge, the story depicted is unlikely to happen in the first place, we should insist on much more evidence than the report of a single source. We need to go in search of further confirmation that it is true before we begin to take it seriously. To know how to find that confirmation, it’s good to ask the third question of the sniff test: if this story were true, what else would be true?
When an earth-shattering event happens, you’ll probably hear about it soon enough.
For most of the stories we hear from other people, we don’t have the time, the resources, or even the knowledge to confirm the story for ourselves. For most of us, the most important thing we can do to confirm a story is to look for stories from other news sources that independently report the same thing. We know that if a story has merit, if it is about a major public event, anyone with the resources and knowledge to check it out will try to do so. The members of a free press in a free market for news have an incentive to report the story. If all of the other news agencies scoop them, no one will want to buy or advertise in their news outlet.
It follows that if you hear what should be a big story, but you don’t find it confirmed in known sources of news, it’s also a good bet that the story has little merit. This is part of what journalists mean when they say a story “doesn’t have legs.”
What if you hear a story less earth-shattering, but also less implausible than a zombie apocalypse: Monica Lewinsky Says She Is Voting For Hillary Clinton. Sniff test question 1 should already raise red flags: if you’ve never heard of Empire News and can’t figure out whether or not it is even intended as satire, you won’t have much reason to trust the story. (You have to dig pretty deep into their site before you find any disclaimer about this. Try finding the fine-print link from the main page if you dare.) Using Sniff test question 2, your doubt should grow because the story is already so initially implausible. Monica Lewinsky obviously despises the Clintons for accusing her of lying about her affair with the President, and she would have to hate Trump even more to be able to stomach a vote for Hillary Clinton.
Checking the Internet for the source of a supposed direct quotation is a golden opportunity for checking a story’s authenticity.
But even if we thought Empire News was being serious, and even if Lewinsky had previously made known her hatred for Trump’s misogyny, the story is still not plausible enough to accept on face value. Before taking it seriously, you would need to do some checking. Here’s how I would have done this.
The story tells us that Monica Lewinsky justified her endorsement of Clinton with the following line: “I’ve spent years trying to stop bullying, in life and online, with children, teens, and adults, so what kind of message would it send if I voted for Donald Trump?” Checking the Internet for the source of a supposed direct quotation is a golden opportunity for checking a story’s authenticity.
If Monica Lewinsky had really said that, you’d expect that other reputable news sources would be reporting it as well. Either Lewinsky would have made a public statement that everyone could report about, or she would have done an exclusive interview with Empire News. But if by chance Empire News were anything other than a satire site, you’d expect to find other news sources reaching out to Lewinsky to confirm that she had really said this. You’d probably also expect to find word of it on Monica Lewinsky’s own web site.
But of course what you actually find when you search the exact phrase of the quotation (leaving aside various debunkings of the story) is the Empire News article itself, and a couple of other clickbait-y sites recycling the Empire News story, citing no one else but Empire News. Interestingly, none of them claim to be satire sites, but report the story with a straight face, and haven’t bothered correcting themselves since the story was debunked. This is not what you would expect to find if this story were true.
Nevertheless, this story had 75,000 people engaging with it on Facebook before the election, according to a recent survey by Buzzfeed. Type “Monica Lewinsky voting for Clinton” into your Facebook search box and see some of the incredulous people who shared this item publicly and still haven’t bothered to take it down. Many of these people were presumably left-liberal critics of Trump — a reminder that left-liberals should not feel too smug about how it’s their conservative counterparts who are always the gullible victims of online fabrication.
Take a look through Buzzfeed’s list of phony stories that received the most play on Facebook in the time leading up to the election. How many of these were big enough stories that you would expect that they would be picked up by major media outlets if true? See the list for yourself and note how much higher the Facebook engagement was for some of these than the Lewinsky story.
Iknow what you’re going to say: what about media bias? There is very real media bias that can disincentivize news outlets from reporting important stories. Stories that don’t fit an ideological agenda can be buried “below the fold,” otherwise subordinated to other news, or (especially when a story is of marginal interest) not reported at all.
There is every reason to think that the mainstream press will report even initially improbable stories that go against their agenda, when the evidence becomes obvious enough.
But a story big and important enough can’t stay buried for long. We have just witnessed a highly improbable event: the election of a reality TV host to the presidency of the United States. He had alleged that the dishonest media didn’t want to cover his rallies and that the election would be rigged against him. And the press did give him a hard time, especially after the primaries. But when election day came, they reported his victory, as much as it pained them to do. The system didn’t look so rigged after all. And even though his rival bested him in the popular vote, the media were relatively quick to call the election and to transition to investigating the implications of the decision. Do you think that if he had lost the electoral vote that night, the alternative media would have been so quick to acknowledge it?
Yes, the mainstream press will bury inconvenient stories for a while, sometimes because of bias, sometimes because of an abundance of caution. They may even spread false stories for a while until they are called out for it. But because their business model depends on their reputation, they are accountable for their mistakes in a way that alternative media are not. There is every reason to think that the mainstream press will report even initially improbable stories that go against their agenda, when the evidence becomes obvious enough.
And yes, the alternative media can play an important role here by helping to keep the mainstream media accountable, by checking their errors and by scooping them on stories that might not otherwise get reported. The Drudge Report famously broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal and reported that Newsweek had been sitting on it. A variety of bloggers were instrumental in showing that 60 Minutes had used inauthentic documents in a report about President Bush’s military service. There are a few other cases.
But just like any other industry in a free market, it is the big corporate entities that create economies of scale that enable their smaller competitors. For example, if it weren’t for Starbucks’ massive market power, independent coffee shops wouldn’t have easy access to the tools of the trade, the beans, or the demand for coffee that allow them to offer an alternative experience. By the same token, the alternative media needs the mainstream media far more than the other way around. Leave aside the fact that they need someone to critique. Look up your favorite alternative blog, and see how much raw news they get from mainstream sites. Major news agencies have reporters and resources that most alternative sources can’t hope to equal. For as much as he liked to lambaste the “dishonest” mainstream media, Donald Trump still tweeted from them extensively — when the stories they reported favored his agenda.
If the zombie apocalypse were to happen, it wouldn’t be long before you heard about it. A consequence of this is that if you’ve not heard about that earth-shattering event — especially if you’ve been paying attention to the usual channels of information (unlike Shaun) — it probably isn’t happening. In fact, if you’ve got zero credible evidence in favor of it, why even raise the question of whether it’s happening in the first place?
According to an old saying, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In other words, the mere fact that you aren’t aware of something doesn’t mean it’s not there. This is true and important within certain limits. It applies most clearly in cases where you know you wouldn’t easily know of something’s presence if it were there. If there is a needle in that haystack, you know you’re not going to find it right away. But the principle applies differently depending on our background knowledge about the ease of detecting a fact. If instead of the proverbial needle in the haystack, we instead go looking for the proverbial elephant in the room, we know in advance that we would easily know of its presence if it were there. So, absence of evidence of the elephant in the room is, for practical purposes, evidence that it is absent. It’s still technically true that the sheer absence of evidence for that elephant doesn’t mean he’s not there. But if you have positive evidence that you’ve looked in every part of a room where an elephant would be if he were there (which isn’t a hard thing to do), you are justified in thinking there’s no elephant there.
Shocking stories we read online, if true, would be much more like the elephant in the room than the needle in the haystack.
I suggest we apply similar wisdom to assessing the stories we read online. Shocking stories we read online, if true, would be much more like the elephant in the room than the needle in the haystack. Precisely because they’re shocking, we would expect these stories to be significant enough to be widely reported.
As philosopher Michael Scriven once put it,
If we take arguments for the existence of something to include all the evidence which supports the existence claim to any significant degree, i.e., makes it at all probable, then the absence of such evidence means there is no likelihood of the existence of the entity. And this of course is a complete justification for the claim that the entity does not exist, provided that the entity is not one which might leave no traces . . . and provided that we have comprehensively examined the area where such evidence would appear if there were any. (Primary Philosophy, 1966, pp. 102–103)
By the same token, when we comprehensively examine the places we would expect a news story to be reported if that story were true, and we come up dry, this is sufficient justification for claiming that the events described by the story probably did not happen.
Read about Question 4 of the Sniff Test.
