From the Facebook Page: Spirituality Lab, November 2, 2020
Day 3—Trusted News Sources?
The other day I asked people to message me with answers to two questions:
- Where do you turn to for news when something big happens?
- What are your top three regular sources for news?
Not surprisingly for this group, when things get crazy more turn to the Washington Post or New York Times than any other sources. Other mentions were CNN, BBC, Guardian, and CBC (from the one Canadian who responded).
Your sources for general news were more varied, however. Washington Post, NPR, and the NY Times were the most frequently cited. BBC and CNN were next most frequent. Also mentioned were 538, Google, Facebook (to see what friends were talking about), MSNBC, AP, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, ABC, NBC, CBS, and two mentioned Fox—one to check in periodically on how they covered things, and one noted their non-political coverage was often good.
One of the biggest problems I see in our polity is what I call the “fact gap”. The majority of folks on the liberal-left spectrum firmly believe that the right wing has stopped acknowledging facts. But if you listen to right wing news sources, which I try to do each week, you hear the exact same charge leveled against the liberal-left—that we are peddling “fake news”.
Facts and truths have become so malleable that there is precious little agreement on them. Clearly this is a danger to our democracy. It is one thing to disagree on policies, but if we cannot even agree on basic facts then we can never move forward together as a nation.
Often when we find ourselves faced with someone who has totally different “facts” about a situation our response is to harden our own position, to grab onto our own “facts” so hard that we cease to examine them ourselves and we cease to try to truly evaluate the other person’s “facts”.
The internet has put more information at our fingertips more quickly than ever before, but this has caused as much confusion as it has broadened our ability to search for information. We are hit with an overload of data, facts, and opinions and we do not have the time nor the ability to sift through them to evaluate or deeply understand what we are reading. The tendency is to narrow down your searches to a few trusted sources so as to try to handle the tidal wave of alternatives out there.
Many members of this Lab are political liberals, and I bet that while reading this you are thinking about all sorts of Trump-generated “facts” that are completely incorrect. Several of you told me in messages that you sometimes tune into Fox News to see the lies they are spreading. When we go looking for facts to help us understand what is happening, we head to similar sources—Washington Post, New York Times, NPR. And these are generally solid sources, but they also report from a similar perspective—and a familiarly comfortable one for liberals. Our conservative friends and families do the same with their trusted sources. And we wind up talking past each other, each convinced that we have a firmer grasp on the truth.
The Trump era has made clear to many what philosophers have been wrestling with since pre-Aristotelian times—Truth is relative, not absolute. It is time-bound, perspective-driven, and pliable. This can lead us to lose our “spiritual political serenity” as we get frustrated when even the clearest of facts for us—such as, wearing masks stops the spread of COVID19—is challenged by alternative facts—such as, no one that I know personally has died of COVID19, let alone been hospitalized, so masks are not needed. Then we tend to lock down our minds and dismiss the positions of others.
On a broader scale this can lead to political authoritarianism, forcing the viewpoints of some on the rest of society. It can cloud our ability to take in new information and pivot our policies to reflect deeper understandings.
The posted link below from On The Media, by Bob Garfield, is a good example of how the liberal media—and its consumers—can succumb to wishful thinking and ignore what is actually happening. For the last five years (starting during the 2016 campaign) major liberal sources have been reporting on how the GOP is abandoning Trump. Over and over we have been given evidence that this is happening—only to find that the GOP has stuck with him through thick and thin. I recall reading some of these articles and taking heart myself, rather than reading them critically.
Confirmation bias is strong. The best remedy I can suggest is to try to read as widely as you can in sources outside of the usual ones you turn to. Try to triangulate the “facts” you are reading and use your best judgment leavened with a strong dose of cynicism about everything you read. Keep an open mind that the “other side” might be correct, or at least have as much a piece of the truth as your side does.
Here are some sources of journalism that offer relatively well-supported reporting and which often strive to be as objective as they can:
· The Economist—moderate, factual, economic oriented
· The New Yorker—takes the time to dig into stories
· The Atlantic—like The New Yorker, deep dives
· National Review—a conservative take with good reporting
· Axios—shorter pieces but generally well-supported
· Politico—solid reporting from former Washington Post journalists
· Wall Street Journal—some very fine reporting , and the editorials will challenge your liberal biases
· Bloomberg News—moderate slant, well-researched
· Forbes—surprisingly objective views on current GOP policies
I find it is also a very good practice to read more conservative right-leaning journals, and to do so with an open mind. Their starting assumptions are different from mine, and so it is a healthy thing to challenge my own biases.
Some of the better ones are:
· Reason magazine—Libertarian, with some very good articles at times.
· American Conservative—trying to forge a conservative vision for our times that sometimes hearkens toward traditional conservative thought and not the radical right stuff
· National Review
· Washington Examiner
Finally, I try hard to fact-check stuff as best I can, be it left or right. It is amazing how often when I read something that feels off and I look it up, I find that my instinct is correct. As some of you know, I try to do this with liberal posts that I see as much as I do with right wing posts, and I think it is very important to let folks know by PM or adding a post when they are trafficking in a news story that may be factually incorrect or significantly skewed.
There are many websites dedicated to unbiased fact checking, among them: Snopes, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and Fact Check (Washington Post).
Yes, this is all time-consuming and potentially frustrating. But it is the only antidote I know for the factual confusion that surrounds us in this overly-saturated information environment. It is the new price of working for a more democratic society and for fighting off the ignorance that undergirds the authoritarian impulse, both right and left.
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