Sharks, The News, and Facebook Groups, Oh My!
Week 5 in Social Journalism
For the last ten years, working as a filmmaker, I have been interested in what part stories and media play in our collective experience of the world. One of my favorite TED talks of all time, How Hollywood Can Tell Better Love Stories by Imran Siddiquee looks at representation in film and explores the notion that who we show as love interests in films directly correlates to who we perceive as being as being worthy of love in society. He details Hollywood’s defense that movies simply reflect culture, they don’t influence it. My favorite example he uses to combat this argument is JAWS. Before Steven Spielberg’s 1975 hit, sharks did not register on a national level as a major threat or fear. After the release of that film and its success, the fear and hunting of Great White Sharks became a national phenomenon and educational funding for the studies became readily available. And now 40 years later we have Shark Week and Sharknado 1–6. After a month in the Social J program, I realize that Journalism has its own shark trouble.
Thirty years ago, according Neiman Report’s The Transformation of Network News, networks to didn’t “expect to turn a profit from news programming. They presented news programming for the prestige it would bring to their network, to satisfy the public-service requirements of Congress and Federal Communications Commission, and more broadly so that they would be seen as good corporate citizens.” In the 90’s when, news networks were subsumed into larger corporate networks with stockholders, the news could no longer be a just a service- it had to be profitable. Networks had to compete with each other AND had to match ratings with popular cable shows. While filming the CNN documentary, The Nineties, my friend and producer Sandra Alvarez discovered that the evening news was up against cable shows like COPS in the ratings game. Thus a show about primarily African American men being arrested in the middle of the night became the competition for a news program.
Other than the obvious problems with this narrative for the news, it’s also affecting us on a more subtle level. “For most of our species’ history, available information tended to be really helpful for our survival. If you heard a lot of stories about wild dog attacks, you learned to be vigilant about wild dogs.” Explains Tobias Rose-Stockwell in This Is How Your Fear and Outrage Are Being Sold for Profit (not assigned reading for class but inspired by our discussions.) This is due to something in human nature called the availability heuristic. It is a shortcut for our brains which makes us believe: “If it comes to mind easily, it must be true.”
This shortcut is now exploited by our news coverage and our perception of threats far exceeds actual danger. It also important to understand on a very basic level, how the brain prioritizes experiences and memories. Elizabeth A Phelps of NYU’s Dept of Physiology explains in Human emotion and memory, “events that elicit emotional responses, which are likely to be more important for survival, are also more likely to be remembered later.” When something is scary enough to elicit our fight-or-flight survival instinct that, we are hardwired to pay close attention to threats, perceived or real.
The last piece of this delivery method is the social media algorithm that has now mastered the art of grabbing our exponentially valuable attention by whatever means necessary. Facebook’s News Feed wants you to engage and share so its algorithm gives you things it knows you already like, cat videos, things you’re afraid of, things that will make you cry. Our current news and News Feed is not designed to foster curiosity or promote accessibility to information that might be challenging.
In terms of the the media we consume, if crime, and therefore fear, sells because it accesses our strongest survival instincts and emotions and the more we see something the more we believe it, its not surprise that news and its delivery methods have helped in the polarization of our society. Years of therapy have taught me to recognize a fear response and it seems our country is gripped by fear on both sides of the political, racial, gender, economic divides. Humans have deep and biological fear of the other- which ranges from the fear for our survival to the fear of being uncomfortable. Fear is an incredible motivating tactic and I would argue an even better sales and organizing tactic than sex. And to top it off conspiracy theorists/media manipulators, according to Dana Boyd of Data and Society, have figured out the internet and human consumption of information faster than journalists are beating us at our own game.
“Journalism — the historical counter to propaganda — has become the biggest casualty in this algorithmic war for our attention. And without it, we are watching the dissolution of a measured common reality.” Tobias Rose-Stockwell.
So what are the new tools journalists can use to combat these the seemingly endless reasons to be divided? (It’s not lost on me that every week in Community Engagement, we are introduced to a new tool to possibly save journalism and humanity…) During orientation, Jeff Jarvis read us a quote from Columbia Journalism Professor James Carey that I was reminded of this week:
“Republics require conversation, often cacophonous conversation, for they should be noisy places. That conversation has to be informed, of course, and the press has a role in supplying that information. But the kind of information required can only be generated by public conversation; there is simply no substitute for it… A press that encourages conversation of its culture is the equivalent of an extended town meeting. However, if the press sees its role as limited to informing whoever happens to turn up at the end of the communication channel, it explicitly abandons its role as an agency of carrying on the conversation of the culture.”
In my humble and novice opinion, this is the way forward. What has been lost (or has never existed for marginalized voices) is a space for debate and conversation. But conversation is messy and inefficient and can’t be boiled down into a tweet or impactful meme.
We are in a sea of information- even a Sharknado of information, some fake and some real, but we are in a drought of conversation. The origin of the word is the Latin conversari “to keep company with” and old english converse “to live among, be familir with.” Our collective fear and distrust will not unfreeze in a shouting or shaming match (read: Republicans and Democrats in the Senate Judiciary Committee…) to see who can be beaten into a temporary submission. According to research done by Solutions Journalism Network in their piece Complicating the Narrative, “The brain behaves differently in charged interactions. It’s impossible to feel curious, for example, while also feeling threatened.” And furthermore,
“In this hyper-vigilant state, we feel an involuntary need to defend our side and attack the other. That anxiety renders us immune to new information. In other words: no amount of investigative reporting or leaked documents will change our mind, no matter what.”
So how and where do we have productive and informed conversations that don’t devolve into dumpster fights and insults in the comments sections?
Our guests in class this week, were two recent graduates of the Social J program who are working for an organization called Spaceship Media. Their mission and tactics will make you tingle with excitement. While this is an anecdotal fact, everyone I have told about Spaceship Media over the last week has said versions of “Oh my god. That’s incredible.”
SPACESHIP MEDIA: Journalism to Bridge Divides (swoon)
Spaceship Media practices Dialogue Journalism a method they created to:
- Help communities engage with tough issues
- Tackle polarization
- Rebuild trust in the media
(I’m pretty sure they should all be given superhero capes for their work.)
Their first project, Talking Politics, was launched in December 2016 after the bitter Presidential campaign. It was meant to be a month long project that brought together fifty women from Alabama and California in a facebook group dedicated to discuss everything from immigration reform to the Affordable Care Act to the details of their daily lives. Through a lengthy vetting process, Spaceship insured that all the women from across the political spectrum were interested and invested in having a civil dialogue. The participants also agreed that Spaceship and their media partners would help moderate the conversation and provide facts and statistics when called upon. This is key: these women agreed to treat each other with respect, engage civilly with differing views, AND to trust a group of known journalists. The project generated 10,000 comments and three feature stories before ending in January 2017. In an interview with Michael J Coren, Founder Eve Pearlman was quick to point out that, “changing people’s minds isn’t the point. It’s more important that people just hear one other, rather than demonize each other.”
Today they have launched several other projects, the largest being, The Many. The Many is a private facebook group for 400 women from all over the country to promote dialogue leading up to the 2018 midterms. While the conversations are off the record, reporters are members of the group and with participant’s permission, write stories about the conversation to amplify its impact.
“Most Americans do not trust journalism. But this isn’t because of your reporting. It’s because you’re an abstraction. It’s because of the loss of local journalism.” posits Dana Boyd. Spaceship Media has an intimate approach to journalism on a platform that historically has not fostered conversation. Because these stories are inspired by real questions and interactions, and are then shared by a core group of interested and engaged women to their larger communities, Spaceship’s brand of journalism is arguably very relevant to its readers.
After a particularly bleak couple of weeks, I like that, along with my ideas of journalism being challenged, my political beliefs and questions are shifting. What if the goal isn’t to change minds of the other side? What if it’s to defeat polarization and paralyzing fear? What if the shift that needs to happen is to get off the pendulum swing between conservative and liberals each election cycle- depending on whose base is more energized/freaked out. What if the answer isn’t “making the other side pay?”
This system is going to be hard to break down and it will be almost impossible for typical brand of journalism to shift its coverage tactic. But there are other ways forward that are proving to make journalism more relevant and necessary. They don’t have a lot of financial stability yet but they are making the case that “burning it to the ground” could look something like the daily threads of a Facebook group where women from across the political spectrum are having a challenging but civil conversation.
