Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers
For America, 2016 was the year of the fact-checkers.
Fact-checking has become one half of a dialectic. Its antithesis is the ever-encroaching phenomenon of fake news, a pestilence that pervades our Facebook news feeds on a daily basis. And despite the fact that they propagate hoax after hoax after hoax, they still get clicks. Some of these sites are openly satirical. Others have a much more sinister purpose: to saturate social media with highly polarizing misinformation.
What exactly is it that makes us so receptive to fake news? Perhaps it’s the internet’s baked-in forgiveness for undiscerning consumption of media. It might be that we’re victims of Poe’s law, which essentially states that, due to the internet’s inability to clearly convey sarcasm, satire presenting even the most ludicrously extreme views can still be mistaken by some readers as being sincere. It could be that many of us are from or have been informed by the Cronkite era of journalism, where honesty from the media wasn’t just expected, it was virtually a given, as articulated in that anchor’s departing catchphrase, “And that’s the way it is.” For many Americans, that was gospel.
Whatever the causes, it seems that we’re much more likely to fall prey to an instance of fake news if it aligns with our preexisting beliefs. This confirmation bias has always been a part of media-audience dynamics. It’s at the heart of today’s so-called post-truth politics, referring to a political discourse that relies less on verifiable facts and more on an appeal to the emotions and longstanding biases of the public at large — or as we say here on the internet, “feels over reals.” High-profile orators need only say things that cater to what their constituencies want to hear, even if it’s nowhere near the truth, with very few repercussions.
It really makes you wonder what, exactly, the point of it all is. In a post-truth age, it’s hard to say whether media even serves a purpose as anything but a sea of propaganda for us to slog through until we have no faith in anything anyone says to us. After all, what can we possibly believe in an era where we’re constantly reminded not to trust any institution designed to inform us?
To answer that, we have to talk about media bias and its history.
The journalism we know in America didn’t exist until the 19th century.
Before that, we had a brief stint with the Alien & Sedition Acts, signed into law by President John Adams (who didn’t exactly have the best relationship with the press after the infamous XYZ affair), which made any remark critical about the government or its laws illegal. While it’s clear to us today how that might blatantly violate First Amendment rights, it was still a point of contention in a fledgling nation.
Later in the century, Abraham Lincoln accused border state publications of being Confederate sympathizers, and ordered many of them closed, setting a somewhat antagonistic tone for the relationship between the government and media. At that point, and into the next century, small publications were specific to neighborhoods with homogeneous ethnic groups. They also very explicitly supported certain candidates or parties, and made no pretense otherwise.
By the Progressive Era, things began to change. It brought the advent of yellow journalism, the practice of using sensationalism and exaggeration to attract readers. William Randolph Hearst, a big-time publisher, ordered his publications to deliberately falsify stories, which may have contributed to the Spanish-American War by encouraging American resentment toward the Spanish.
In the years leading up to America’s involvement in World War II, American politicians in favor of joining the war on Germany’s side claimed that newspapers had a pro-Jewish slant.
During the Civil Rights Movement, some White Southerners complained television had a pro-miscegenation slant, while newspapers in favor of liberal social reforms were accused of a communist bias.
And Spiro Agnew accused the media of anti-war sentiment, calling them the “nattering nabobs of negativism,” which both changed his image as an inarticulate vice president and, according to some, invented the political strategy of directing public criticism away from the White House and towards the media. Of course, looking back at a long history of the media, it’s plainly evident that this wasn’t the beginning of media-government hostilities. The media’s relationship with the public followed suit.
Today, that relationship is worse than ever.
In 1972, 72% of Americans trusted the media to be truthful. About the same percentage said they trusted Walter Cronkite to be honest with them. According to Gallup:
Consistent with Republicans’ and independents’ dissatisfaction with the media, far more Americans say the media are too liberal than too conservative, 46% vs. 13%, as was the case in 2011, and every year since Gallup has been tracking this trend. Thirty-seven percent currently describe the media’s political leanings as “just about right.”
Perceptions of a liberal media bias are particularly strong among Republicans and conservatives, with 74% and 73%, respectively, saying the media are too liberal. However, half of independents also call it too liberal, while most Democrats call it “just about right.”
So conservatives tend to be more skeptical of mass media. Pundit Rush Limbaugh recently said, while speaking on the fake news phenomenon, that fake news is the everyday news — a bold claim, but one that much of his following seems to share.
Enter the fact-checkers.
Conservatives trust the media even less than they trust the government, but compare the media’s perceived dishonesty to their own political committee’s: The Republican National Committee’s PolitiFact rating as compared with the Democratic National Committee’s paints an unfavorable picture of the Grand Old Party. The DNC veers considerably more honest than the RNC, at least on the sort of bold statements PolitiFact analyzes.
While it’s perhaps too easy to finger-point in a time when political parties are more divided than ever, we still have numbers on hand that might be useful for understanding this culture of mistrust.
According to The Atlantic’s breakdown, as a whole, Republican politicians received three times as many “false” and “pants on fire” ratings as Democrats (32% vs 11%), while Democrats had twice as many claims rated “true” as Republicans did (22% vs 11%). Yet both constituencies tend to be equally forgiving of their own politicians’ fibs. On the other hand, if the two parties have data on the veracity of PolitiFact’s analyses over the years, they haven’t released it. I wouldn’t count on it happening any time soon, either.
When confronted with this data, I don’t think most Republicans’ immediate response would be to demand greater honesty from their politicians. More likely, they would question the source of the fact-checking and accuse the media of yet another deceptive ploy.
There’s a transference of distrust of mass media to distrust of fact-checkers— Snopes, FactCheck, PolitiFact have all been accused of partisan bias. And there’s a perfectly good chance they might be biased. Any media that asserts itself as an authority on absolute truth, however empirically sound, is subject to its own critique. After all, there isn’t a successful outlet out there that doesn’t claim to report honestly, so what makes these fact-checkers any different? To quote a friend of mine, “Who snopes the Snopesmen?”
As an answer to some of these criticisms, Snopes released a response that highlighted accusations from readers of many different political perspectives, which indicates that some readers might see any evidence that they’re wrong as evidence of bias against them. It’s difficult to say whether these sites are absolutely objective, but to confidently say that their bias clearly swings in one direction or another would take a lot more research than we have right now.
This is the recursive problem of having watchdog groups for watchdog groups.
Amusingly, fact-checkers checking one another isn’t unprecedented; FactCheck.com debunked a chain email about Snopes in what might be the first big fact-checking crossover in history. So why would we assume they’re any more trustworthy than even the fakest of fake news sites?
What affords fact-checkers legitimacy in many people’s eyes are the rigor and metrics they apply to their investigations of claims. These self-proclaimed vanguards of objectivity take a special approach to journalism in the sense that they’re not really traditionally journalistic. They’re not so much interested in telling stories as they are in examining the details of other people’s stories.
A good journalist selectively synthesizes disparate pieces of information to form a coherent story for their readers to process. They transform chaos into a narrative for a narrative-obsessed species, but this often comes at the cost of fully exploring every nuance and data point that a story entails. PolitiFact and its ilk often skip the storytelling process entirely, focusing instead on a single nuance and poking a million holes in it until it’s been stripped of all pretense. They deal in claims about claims, backed up with impressive amounts of data, and they come in the neat package of either “true” or “false” (well, okay, maybe “true,” “mostly true,” “half-true,” “mostly false,” “false,” or “pants on fire,” but you get the gist). They’re committed to coming as close to absolute truth as they can get without all the narrative embellishments.
And yet, they’re treated with almost as much skepticism as cable news, the same people who screwed up Operation Tailwind.
So whom will Americans trust?
It seems like there are two answers: their own politicians, and themselves (or at least people they see as being similar to themselves). People reflexively distrust objectivity because they simply cannot believe it exists. They would rather subscribe to flawed media that spreads falsehoods they like to hear than to media that makes any honest attempt to remove bias. They’ll go with their conditioned responses and the cheering on by their peers over a careful inspection of the facts any day.
Picture that zany uncle of yours who’s always sharing image macros on Facebook, making wild claims that are easily debunked. Despite a clear pattern of hoax and defamation, your zany uncle’s social media circles share and validate these notions, allowing false information to spread quickly. And we’re all susceptible to it. I’ve even been known to blast an article out into the maw of social media without first doing diligent research into the topic to make sure it’s at least been corroborated by multiple sources.
Here are some likely reasons why this happens.
First: in the digital age, spreading misinformation comes at very little cost. Just click “share” and all your friends can read the same thing you’re reading. Critically-minded friends might comment on your article to let you know whether it’s true, but since you’re more likely to befriend people who have similar political views to yours, they’ll be less inclined to fact-check you, as just one of many examples of bias in in-group dynamics. You never get told you’re wrong, they never get told you’re wrong, and someone else shares it. It takes no resources to disseminate information, and rare is the case where you embarrass yourself by sharing something that’s untrue. That’s why fact-checking perceived as inconvenient receives less credence than blatant fabrications.
Second, and more abstractly: information that doesn’t disconfirm preexisting beliefs appears to be neutral, and neutral claims don’t require fact-checking.
Here’s a claim: the richest 0.1% of America owns 40% of the nation’s wealth, while the bottom 90% owns 35%. To a liberal, that might sound about right. If I said that to a crowd of liberals, they might treat it as a pretty neutral, objective claim. We’ve all heard Bernie Sanders talk about wealth disparity in America, and he’s probably used those numbers a million times before without anyone complaining.
Except it’s not correct at all. Just ask Bernie Sanders. The richest .1% owns about 22% of the wealth, while the bottom 90% owns 22.8%. That’s a considerable discrepancy, but I’m willing to bet many liberals wouldn’t dispute it at first blush. And if they’ll accept that claim, they might accept a claim about an even greater wealth disparity later. Things that sound “about right” are very easily pushed to different extremes until very radical claims are seen as being relatively neutral and objective.
We expect neutral claims to be didactic in nature because we expect didactic claims to be neutral in nature. That feedback loop makes us very bad at identifying where bias might pop up, because we subconsciously prevent ourselves from seeing why bias might pop up.
But news media is no longer seen as a didactic institution.
It’s not there to teach, it’s there to control. Cynical skepticism about the American media has turned it into a political tool, and its claims are political claims, many of which we might disagree with. Imagine a calculus teacher going on a tangent about the pervasiveness of white privilege. Suddenly, the pedagogic nature of our relationship has been broken. We’re not talking about seemingly objective truths anymore, and so skepticism abounds.
The media’s current challenge, created (in large part) by politicians in the 1960s who sought to enshrine the media’s failure to reconcile its new ideal of objective journalism with the inherent subjectivity of human journalists, is to fundamentally change that relationship again, and return to the public’s good graces. It hasn’t been able to do so by striving for even greater objectivity, as the public still generally distrusts purportedly objective fact-checkers while succumbing to their own favored fake news.
Fake news, on the other hand, has found its success by using coded language to turn yellow journalism into a curated sanctuary of whichever truths you want to hear. To consumers, sensationalist media that confirms their biases is transformed into traditional, disinterested pedagogy, while sensationalist media from a different part of the political spectrum is conflated with media that demonstrates journalistic integrity. All media is biased unless it’s yours. Sites like Addicting Info (left-leaning), Breitbart (right-leaning), Natural News (left-leaning), or InfoWars (right-leaning) establish themselves as authorities on truth with exactly the kind of people who need their own personal beliefs validated. They’re the only places that can be trusted by the people who frequent them; ironically, they’re also the places most rife with bullshit. We’ve given them a lot of names over the years — fringe media, disinformation, fake news — but only one name really sticks with me: propaganda.
In Reasonably Sound’s excellent podcast on dog whistle politics, Mike Rugnetta says:
The first step is to create an environment where audiences rely on the news. It’s not only gonna keep them entertained, it’s also going to keep them safe. This involves overblown leads, pandering to fear, claims about exclusive insight, and even cynical details like underscoring mundane news updates with exciting cinematic music. But most importantly, it means agreeing with their audience, or at least appearing to agree with them. A surefire way to get someone to tune out is to say something that complicates their values.
Rugnetta talks about sending coded messages to audience members with extreme ideologies without alienating more moderate support—but fake news doesn’t even need to do that much. Plenty of it is overtly bigoted or incendiary, with gleeful contributions in kind by its readers (I can’t count the times I’ve seen friends of friends actually attribute things Obama [didn’t actually] say to his commitment to the Quran). Fake news has to be polemic to survive. The rule of fake news is “propaganda or perish,” and so far it’s not doing any perishing.
I wish I knew how more objective news could shed the skepticism surrounding it without resorting to the same dirty tactics as fake news. I’m an advocate of the measures sites like PolitiFact and Snopes take in separating truth from fiction. I have no illusions about the fallibility of these sites, but I do believe in their dedication to objectivity, even if individuals on their staffs have their own share of biases. In other words, I trust them to attempt to make good on their promises, even if their web hits suffer for it.
This is just one moment in a dynamic media culture.
As always, we’ll see fringe media continue to polarize and even radicalize as history takes its course. We’ll see technology streamline our consumption of information in some ways and complicate it in others. Social media will expedite the spread of facts, both true and untrue. We might even see politicians being fact-checked in real-time during speeches and debates become the norm, rather than their claims being allowed to hover in a vacuum and incubate in the public conscience until even the most absurd falsehoods are misremembered as confirmed facts. For media, the only constant is change, as they’re always working with advancements in technology to adopt new strategies for attracting readers and viewers.
More interesting to me is how we, the readers and viewers, can change our attitudes about which media we decide to consume, and the standards we hold it to. How can we foster our ability to discern? How can we develop an interest in real truth, not just in ourselves, but in others, even those we don’t agree with? How do we dissect historical narratives, deciding what parts of a story are necessary as a cognitive tool to understand people and events, and what’s actually there — in the form of data and facts — to be understood?
The onus isn’t on the media to meet our expectations first. It’s on us, to adjust our expectations so that shitty media isn’t even a blip on our radars. To understand that journalists are people too, not separate entities existing outside of and commenting on our culture, but living in it with us, experiencing most of the same things we experience and making (usually) an earnest attempt to consolidate those things for us to digest using the skills available to them. To demand integrity, to be able to identify it when it’s present, and to say something when it isn’t.
This year, PolitiFact published an insightful article deeming fake news itself its Lie of the Year.
This struck me a bit like Clark Kent writing a scathing exposé on Lex Luthor. Somewhere near the beginning is this gem:
In 2016, the prevalence of political fact abuse — promulgated by the words of two polarizing presidential candidates and their passionate supporters — gave rise to a spreading of fake news with unprecedented impunity.
I think the spirit of that quote is that Americans have recently succumbed to a desire not to know, but to believe. To illustrate that, we need to talk about something no one else is: the recent election.
PolitiFact maintains a rating for every person whose words they subject to their signature treatment (of course, PolitiFact doesn’t analyze every claim a politician makes, but they do manage to hit the bulk of the most publicized and polarizing ones). Here’s President-Elect Trump’s rating, and here’s his opponent’s, Hillary Clinton.
During the campaign, Donald Trump was painted as a candidate who “said what he meant,” a straight-shooter who wasn’t afraid to speak his mind even if the subject was controversial. If that was the case, then, extrapolating from this sample of his claims, about 15% of what he believes is true, while 69% is false, and the rest is hovering in ambiguity.
This time, the feels beat the reals.
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