Tag Archives: truth claims

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Adrift

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The Fourth Estate is in serious trouble. 

[The nation is in the midst of a continuing crisis of distraction that is weakening the habit of consuming reliable journalism].
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If we want to understand how far our civil life has drifted of course we can look to what has happened to the “Fourth Estate.” That phrase was coined by a British parliamentarian Edmund Burke and adapted by American writers to describe one of the essential parts of any democracy.  A free press is what Americans now understand as the fourth addition to the three formal branches of government (Congress, the presidency and the courts). Together they work as checks on each other: a fact that is well illustrated in the First Amendment, guaranteeing a free press. Interestingly, the practice of journalism is the only profession singled out for protection in the Constitution.

We have drifted into uncharted territory when the press is no longer able to function as our eyes and ears tuned to the other three branches. I’m repeating an obvious but vital warning: the nation is adrift because we are losing the compass of the Fourth Estate. The problem is not primarily the fault of news organizations, but with those of us who no longer feel motivated to make room for the news media. The nation cannot function without a vital press and motivated news readers. Video news helps, but it tends to shun ideas in favor of action. We need the longer view that a text-rich medium more naturally provides.

                                                  Pew Research Center

The decline of the American newspaper now has its own history. Independent owners have nearly disappeared as big city papers have closed or been bought up by chains. It can be hard to find a newspaper to buy in a big city. And the papers that remain have dramatically reduced their reporting staffs. It’s also an obvious fact of modern life that younger Americans mostly consume news in fragments, having been given the endless distractions of social media. There is great reporting that remains, but the outlets producing need-to-know stories are on a shrinking list of outlets unknown to a growing portion of the population.

We can count ourselves fortunate to still have organizations like The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal. Ditto for opinion outlets like The Atlantic and The Economist. And The Associated Press still provides on site coverage of major political developments that remaining news organizations still use. But it seems that fewer media managers want straight reporting, opting for the creation of reality-based fantasies like those favored by Fox News and Newsmax.  The differences between reporting and opinion-giving haven’t changed. Real reporters depend on facts and accounts of the observable to shape their journalism. News polemicists are freer to let their imaginations shape their conclusions. Calvin Trillin recalls that old-line reporters would call these self-satisfied pieces “thumb suckers.”  And, of course, facts alone can be selectively chosen or ignored. But we better start teaching young news consumers the critical tools needed to weigh claims and evidence. (What that unit of education might look like is taken up in the next blog.) The current pattern of catching passing glimpses of national events on platforms like TicTok and Facebook will doom us low levels of understanding that will cripple our capacity for self-government.

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“Your audience has halved in recent                                  years. People are not reading your stuff.”

This grim view of the future of quality journalism was brought home in the last few weeks by the resignation of Editor Sally Buzbee at the Washington Post. Prior to her decision she refused to pull an article that mentioned the Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, as among those allegedly involved in a scheme years ago to hack into the private communications of Prince Harry and other royals. At the same time, Lewis reminded observers of his roots in the sometimes shabby standards of British journalism by trying to kill that bit of news as it was being prepared by NPR’s media reporter. The quid-pro-quo for not running the story would be an exclusive interview with the radio network. Lewis was brought on by owner Jeff Bezos to turn around falling circulation figures: a fact brought home to staffers in an early meeting. “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years,” the new arrival declared. “People are not reading your stuff.”

The Post remains one of the great American news outlets. It is disheartening it should be in so public a feud, and doubly so if the root cause is declining circulation numbers. Less scrupulous news-creation techniques of some popular forms of the press are no cure for the underlying problem of declining public interest. Will we be able to sustain a vigorous fourth branch of government when the other three legs of our civil life are so wobbly? 

Before he passed away this month, political reporter Howard Fineman worked at many “legacy” news organizations like Newsweek. But he also added a sober observation about their tenuous status. “We are in what I view as a new global world war for control of the search for the truth,” he noted. “We have to mobilize our truth-seeking strength . . . for America and democracy to survive.”

 

 

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Making Sense of Truth-Denial

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Fantasy theme analysis helps us understand the contagion that happens when “information” combines with our hard-wired impulse to see the world in self-perpetuated stories.

There are many aspects of the ongoing pandemic that defy easy understanding. It’s not always clear why it has spread in some areas of  the world and remained more contained in other parts. But we do know proven ways to reduce the spread of COVID and its variants.  A simple list of public health precautions is available to anyone who cares to look: mask up especially indoors around other people; get tested if you have symptoms, and be sure to be vaccinated with one of the amazingly effective shots that will greatly increase immunity and lower the chances of death.  The science is clear: these precautions work. A person is more likely to get sick and die without a vaccine. As of this summer, 97 percent of the individuals in hospital ICUs for COVID were unvaccinated.  No wishful thinking can change these facts.

Even so, the denial of this most elemental of realities persists, and gives the virus a chance to change and infect new victims.  Meanwhile, alternate narratives circulate and gain credence mostly because they affirm what the deniers want to believe.  Hence COVID becomes a tool of control cleverly engineered by big-pharma, big government, or a host of other phantoms.

The Mechanism of Evidence Denial

Years ago, social scientist Robert Bales noted that groups of people put together in a room to solve a problem often reach a moment when there is a convergence of views around a preferred narrative. In many cases folks in the group didn’t have the facts or knowledge to make a judgement picked up bogus ideas from other like-minded people around them. Think of a jury reaching a judgment on a case based on a shared prejudice.

Later on theorist Ernest Boorman at the University of Minnesota refined Bales’ ideas into a convincing and solid theory called Fantasy Theme Analysis. Boorman acknowledged what  we all sense: that even in the presence of good information, we tend to rely on the views of our reference group and our natural compulsion to spin narratives that allow us to move from uncertainty to conviction.  This is more likely to happen with people who were never adequately trained in even the rudiments of fact-checking or assessing a source’s likely credibility. One result is the protective responses of fantasy themes that “chain out” to others with similar views and the same inabilities to process truth claims.

Such flawed thinking may well cost us our republic.

Fantasy theme analysis helps us understand the contagion that happens when incomplete information combines with our hard-wired impulses to see the world in sets of comfortable stories. Each one is filled in with actors, motivations, villains, and final outcomes. We hate incomplete narratives, as when there is an airplane accident caused by bad weather.  So we are happy to construct our own story, regardless of what solid evidence might oblige us to believe. We especially want to put human agents in the picture to be at least partly responsible.

Here’s another example I have used that suggests that none of us are immune from fantasy thinking. I was sitting in my office one day in the 80s with a copy of the New York Times opened up on my desk. A colleague dropped by and, at the same time, we both noticed the paper’s front-page picture of the new Soviet version of a space shuttle. The Buran space craft looked exactly like the American version. Same wing shape. Same color. Same size. And without missing a beat we both blurted out the view that “they must have stolen the American design.” End of story. We “knew” it and we were ready to fill in the blanks. The similarity of the shape was enough to accept the fantasy of a theft of our plans.  All the while, we pretty much ignored the physics of space flight, which mandates similar design parameters for any earth-to-space vehicle.

With group fantasies, the world is explained from existing beliefs. Without them, we would have to live with the continuous uncertainties mandated by the real world of incomplete information and awkward truths.

In my field the phrase homo narrans is sometimes used to describe the essence of our species. We tell stories to live. That is our priority, with Truth far down the list of imperatives. Truth is often too inconvenient. It feels better and it is much easier to bolster each other’s views with agreeable tales that put a disliked faction or renegade political group behind a particular phenomenon.  Such flawed thinking may well cost us our republic.

If we are looking for reasons for the current peril of the American experiment, we need to deal with the paradox of a society awash in “information” that makes it possible for frail minds to cherry-pick beliefs that fit with what they already “know.”