Cornell Alumni Magazine, September / October 2008 - And Nothing But the Truth By Farhad Manjoo '00

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September / October 2008...And Nothing But the Truth

Tuesday, 26 August 2008

In his first book, a former Daily Sun editor-in-chief and longtime Salon.com scribe contemplates the slippery slope of a 'post-fact society'

By Farhad Manjoo '00
Illustrations by Marty Blake

For more than forty years, ABC, CBS, NBC, the Associated Press, and a half-dozen large newspapers, working in loose concordance, have collectively set the American news agenda. You could picture the old-time network news anchors—men like Walter Cronkite, Dan Rather, Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw—as particularly attentive and imposing hosts of a national dinner party. For decades, they guided their guests, the American people, to whichever topics they considered worthy of our attention, and we hung on their every word. Their power was legendary. Early in 1968, CBS's Cronkite, a man Americans would have trusted with their checkbooks, ended a Tuesday evening telecast with his view that the United States was "mired in stalemate" in Vietnam. "If I've lost Cronkite," President Lyndon Johnson remarked to an aide, "I've lost Middle America." Johnson soon announced that he wouldn't stand for re-election.

But the mainstream media is now an institution in winter, with the largest outlets serving ever-narrower slices of the public. The mainstream is drying up. In some ways, we are returning to the freewheeling days before radio and television launched the very idea of mass media—the era of partisan newspapers and pamphleteers. But our niches, now, are more niche than ever before. We are entering what you might call the trillion-channel universe: over the last two decades, advances in technology—the digital recording and distribution of text, images, and sound over information networks, a.k.a., the modern world—have helped to turn each of us into producers, distributors, and editors of our own media diet. Now we collect the news firsthand through digital cameras, we send our accounts and opinions to the world over blogs, and we use Google, TiVo, the iPod, and a raft of other tools to carefully screen what we consume.

This trend toward niches, which began decades ago but has recently been accelerating at a blinding pace, has itself become a topic of national conversation, feted for its capacity to return power to the people. You need look no further than your favorite political blog to understand the thrill of these people-powered movements. Now, finally, ordinary folks can propel outré political candidates to the big time and turn forgotten events into the biggest news events of the day. A peculiarly utopian sensibility colors much of the discussion about how these new tools will affect politics and society; the tone is surprising, given the magnitude of the shift we're talking about. It's probably unrealistic to think that we'll undergo these changes without any pain or that, indeed, we're not undergoing any pain now.

To continue the analogy: We, the guests at Cronkite's dinner party, have all jumped up from the table and turned the event into a stand-up cocktail affair, open bar. Now we're free to talk amongst ourselves. We mingle, flitting from group to group, or we stay put in our own circle of friends. This party is democratic and egalitarian; information no longer flows from a furrowed-brow host at the top, and now we all get to talk and listen to whomever we want, about whatever we want. The shindig is undeniably messier than in the past. There's a guy in the corner yelling about how NASA didn't really land on the moon, and he's attracting a crowd. A woman in a lab coat claiming to be the surgeon general of the United States is dispensing medical advice. You're suspicious of her credentials, but all your friends seem to believe her. On a table somewhere, people find a stash of photos of Britney Spears mistreating her baby. They make a million copies. Within minutes, a fellow is comparing Spears to Adolf Hitler. Rumors spread, cliques form. The prettiest girl in the room attracts all the attention. The people dressed in blue hold a secret meeting on the left side of the room. Everyone is wary.

The analogy may sound simplistic, but I mean only to highlight, in brief, some of the dangers I'll examine in this essay. Studies of the media and of human psychology, some conducted recently but many long before the digital revolution, provide compelling insight into the consequences of a fragmented media. Although information now flows more freely than it did in the past—and this is certainly a salutary development—today's news landscape will also, inevitably, help us to indulge our biases and pre-existing beliefs.

While new technology eases connections among people, it also, paradoxically, facilitates a closeted view of the world, keeping us coiled tightly with those who share our ideas. In a world that lacks real gatekeepers and authority figures, and in which digital manipulation is so effortless, spin, conspiracy theories, myths, and outright lies may get the better of many of us. All these factors contributed to the success of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign that derailed Senator John Kerry's presidential bid. New media, patchworks of niches, were at the scene of that crime.

To understand what I mean when I talk about how niche media cultivate bias, consider a study by Shanto Iyengar, a professor of communications at Stanford, and Richard Morin, the Washington Post's director of polling. In 2006, the pair set out to discover how the source of a particular news story affects readers' attraction to that story. For instance, is a Republican reader more likely to read a piece of news because it comes from Fox News rather than from NPR?

To do this, the researchers obtained a list of news headlines spanning six broad categories—U.S. politics, the war in Iraq, race relations, crime, travel, and sports. Without disclosing which news outlet the headlines had come from, Iyengar and Morin asked some of the participants in the study to rate their interest in the headlines. This gave the researchers a baseline measure of the intrinsic attractiveness of each headline. Then, with another group of participants, Iyengar and Morin slightly tweaked how they presented the news stories. They added one of four randomly picked news logos alongside the headlines—from either Fox News, NPR, CNN, or the BBC. How would the logos affect people's interest in the headlines?

As they expected, people were biased toward certain news sources—Republicans preferred stories with the Fox News logo, and Democrats converged on CNN and NPR. But the nature and the intensity of the bias that Iyengar and Morin found are intriguing. For starters, they discovered that Republicans were far friendlier to Fox than were Democrats to either CNN or NPR; Republicans showed, in other words, a much greater propensity toward giving in to their bias. Adding the Fox label to a story about Iraq or national politics tripled its attractiveness to Republicans. No label prompted so great a shift in people on the left. The greater Republican bias is in keeping with numerous psychological studies that show conservatives to be much more willing to consume media that toe the ideological line. This phenomenon helps explain, in no small degree, the amazingly successful right-wing pundit factory.

The team's most surprising finding, though, didn't have to do with politics. Rather, it concerned "soft" news; people showed bias even when looking at news stories about travel and sports. "It's one thing when people prefer sources that they agree with when the news is talking about Iraq or President Bush—that's perfectly understandable," Iyengar says. "But what we show is that it even applies for issues on which the boundaries between Democrats and Republicans are not as clear-cut. If you're looking for a Caribbean getaway, why would it make any difference whether it's coming from Fox or NPR?" But it did make a difference—adding a Fox label to travel stories made them more attractive to Republicans and less attractive to Democrats. People "have generalized their preference for politically consonant news to nonpolitical domains," Iyengar says—in other words, they've become addicted to their own preferred spin. "They've gotten into the habit of saying, 'Whatever the news is talking about, I'm just going to go to Fox.'"

While technology eases connections among people, it also, paradoxically, facilitates a closeted view of the world, keeping us coiled tightly with those who share our ideas. Think back to the height of the 2004 presidential campaign. Try to recall how you felt every time an advertisement for the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth popped up on your television screen. If you are a Democrat, it's likely that the ads provoked in you the sort of anger whose intensity can only properly be rendered here in a string of typewriter expletive symbols (#%&@!). What the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were saying about John Kerry was plainly false. Everything you'd learned about Kerry, and everything you'd learned about the Swift Boat Veterans, corroborated this idea: websites, newspapers, and books teemed with evidence to support your view, and anyone who believed otherwise was willfully ignoring reality. If, on the other hand, you supported George W. Bush, you felt something like pure joy on seeing the same Swift Boat ads. To you, what the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were saying about John Kerry was plainly true. Everything you'd learned about Kerry, and everything you'd learned about the Swift Boat Veterans, corroborated this idea: websites, newspapers, and books teemed with evidence to support your view, and anyone who believed otherwise was willfully ignoring reality.

Continued...
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