The Importance of Thoughtful Reporting in the Era of Post-Truth
New information has never been more easily accessible. With a small number of clicks, people can learn obscure facts about topics that they didn’t even realize they cared about. From eHow articles to Tasty videos on Facebook, the need to use reason and to problem solve is becoming obsolete for people of all ages. What does this mean regarding the actual intelligence of any given person, apart from their mobile devices and internet access? When addressing this question in 2016, there is no better place to start than Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year: Post-Truth. Oxford Dictionary defines this term as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
In the weeks leading up to the election, I had never seen more political articles shared on Facebook amongst my friends. It seemed like digital political activism was at an all time high. While this is impressive and noteworthy on a surface level, this shift in political energy has also devalued the importance of fact in the process of forming opinion. The ease with which social media platforms allow us to share our beliefs have made personal opinion far more prominent and tangible than objective truth in economic, political, and cultural issues.
Headlines, emojis, and exclamation points dictate and determine the political stance of many young people. With the decline in emphasis on fact, we see an upsurge in emphasis on data. During the election, data was collected in a number of popular ways, mainly in the form of sentiment analysis. For example, Twitter tracked tweets during the presidential debates to identify public sentiment from one minute to the next. As a result, election news looked a certain way. Rather than information in the form of objectively-proven truths, such as unemployment rates and potential success of specific economic polices, the public was bombarded with data based on sentiment and general emotion regarding the candidates at any given moment.
All of this is not to say that the existence of emotion and sentiment in politics is not intuitive, natural, and in accordance with instinctive human behavior. Jill Lepore, a writer for the New Yorker, addressed the current complexity and interwoven nature of emotion and truth, stating, “…nothing could be less well settled in the twenty-first century than whether people know what they know from faith or from facts, or whether anything, in the end, can really be said to be fully proved”. With passion on political issues comes the presence of emotion. Emotion can not be easily extracted from belief.
Taking human nature into account, media sources––particularly liberal and left-wing ones––might be wise to re-evaluate their priorities in reporting. Public sentiment led many people to believe that Hillary Clinton would win the election. College students on liberal campuses, surrounded by pro-Clinton sentiment, did not uniformly feel the urgency of voting. Polls showing positive public response to Clinton during debates and speeches predicted a Clinton win based on public sentiment, which had the effect of lulling many avid-news watchers and social media users into complacency.
Moving forward, acknowledging the era of Post-Truth that our generation has entered, it is crucial to identify the difference between data and fact. Only fact will teach liberal New Englanders about the root of the desires and priorities of the conservative members of the Rust Belt. Only fact will show us the success or failure of any given sect of government. Only fact can predict the state of our country in the coming years. The knowledge that comes with data is temporary and limited. Data can show us how current events make people feel, giving us a moment’s insight in an ever-flowing and evolving larger narrative. This is a fragmented understanding, and it must be completed if we are to truly understand our quality of life and relationships with one another.
