Posts Tagged ‘investigative journalism’
“Truth does not do so much good in the world, as the appearance of it does evil”*…
Joshua Benton on the way that we handle misinformation as elections stakes rise…
… Giving someone a meaningful incentive on a mental problem can lead them to work harder and have a better chance of getting it right. That’s also true for a very specific kind of mental problem: figuring out whether to believe some random headline you see on social media….
[Benton cites several studies that conform this generalization…]
There’s a consistent thread here: If people don’t see a reason to bring their full mental capacity to bear on a question, they probably won’t. We’re lazy! But when the stakes are a little higher — when there’s a little more reason to bring our A-game — we can do better.
Let’s transfer that idea into politics. After all, there’s usually no direct reward for sussing out a fake headline in your News Feed, or for detecting when a claim about a politician edges from plausible to laughable. In day-to-day life, a single bit of political wrongness is unlikely to impact your life one whit. So why summon up the brain power?
But what if the stakes were suddenly higher — say, just hypothetically, if it was a presidential election season and the country is being presented with two wildly different potential futures? Would people then summon up more of their mental capacity to separate good information from bad? Pundits have long said most voters only “get serious” about an election a few weeks before the big day — maybe that new seriousness might mean a stricter adherence to the facts?
That’s one of the issues addressed by a new paper by Charles Angelucci, Michel Gutmann, and Andrea Prat — of MIT, Northwestern, and Columbia, respectively. Its title is “Beliefs About Political News in the Run-up to an Election“; here’s the abstract, emphasis mine:
This paper develops a model of news discernment to explore the influence of elections on the formation of partisan-driven parallel information universes. Using survey data from news quizzes administered during and outside the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the model shows that partisan congruence’s impact on news discernment is substantially amplified during election periods. Outside an election, when faced with a true and a fake news story and asked to select the most likely true story, an individual is 4% more likely to choose the true story if it favors their party; in the days prior to the election, this increases to 11%.
Did you catch that? People aren’t more likely to evaluate accuracy correctly during the fever pitch of an election season — they’re less likely, and by a meaningful margin…
[Benton explains the methodology of the study and explores some examples of it more specific findings…]
… In a sense, it all comes down to what you mean by “high stakes.” Yes, a presidential election is high stakes for the country at large. But believing something that supports your ideological priors is high stakes for your ego — especially at the height of an all-consuming campaign. Our brains want to believe the best about our side and the worst about the other. And it seems that overrides any extra incentive for accuracy at the moment our votes matter most…
“Are people more likely to accurately evaluate misinformation when the political stakes are high? Haha, no,” from @jbenton and @NiemanLab.
* François de la Rochefoucauld, Maximes
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As we think, we might spare a thought for Andrew Russell “Drew” Pearson; he died on this date in 1969. A journalist known for his long-running column, “Washington Merry-Go-Round.”
At the time of Pearson’s death (of a heart attack) in Washington, D.C., the column was syndicated to more than 650 newspapers, more than twice as many as any other, with an estimated 60 million readers, who devoured the investigative and “insider”-centered approach to political coverage that Pearson pioneered– and that has become the milieu for the misinformation discussed above. A Harris Poll commissioned by Time magazine at that time showed that Pearson was America’s best-known newspaper columnist. The column was continued by Jack Anderson and then by Douglas Cohn and Eleanor Clift, who combine commentary with historical perspectives. It is the longest-running syndicated column in America.
“Just remember, turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamn page”*…
The remarkable Robert Caro– the author of The Power Broker (a biography of Robert Moses) and the four (of five planned) volumes on the life and work of Lyndon Johnson– has won nearly every literary honor, among them the Pulitzer Prize for biography (twice); the National Book Critics Circle Award (three times); the Gold Medal in Biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and the National Humanities Medal, (given to him in 2010 by a big fan, President Barack Obama). He is even a “living landmark,” according to the New York Landmarks Conservancy. So his archives and papers are sure to be a treasure trove…
Early last year the New-York Historical Society arranged to acquire Mr. Caro’s substantial archives, including the files for his Johnson masterwork and for “The Power Broker,” which examined how one unelected official, Robert Moses, used his political wiles to reshape the New York metropolitan region.
But as Ms. Bach, a curator for the society, would learn, the Caro records extend much deeper into the past — back to when he was a young newspaper reporter — revealing hints of the compassionate rigor that would one day earn the writer international acclaim…
So much of Mr. Caro’s research never made the page. For example, he interviewed all the key aides to Fiorello La Guardia, who served as New York’s mayor from 1934 to 1945. Yet only a minuscule fraction of that research appeared in “The Power Broker.”
This is one reason he wanted the archives to be accessible to the public. The unpublished materials extend well beyond Moses and Johnson to encompass much of American life over the last century, from the streets of New York City to the rutted roads of the Texas Hill Country — to the marbled halls of the United States Senate.
“Years of observation,” he said, by which he meant more than a half-century…
Robert Caro’s notes and files move into an archive: “What We Found in Robert Caro’s Yellowed Files.”
* Robert Caro, quoting an early mentor, Alan Hathway (managing editor at Newsday, Caro’s first reporting gig)
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As we do the work, we might send thoroughly-researched birthday greetings to Samuel Hopkins Adams; he was born on this date in 1871. A investigative journalist, he began his career at the New York Sun, then McClure’s (where he was a colleague of fellow muckrackers Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. But it was at Collier‘s that he had his biggest impact– probably most notably his expose on patent medicines, a series of 11 articles that led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.
Adams also wrote fiction. His most popular work in his own time was Revelry (1926), based on the scandals of the Harding administration. (He followed it with Incredible Era [1939], a biography of Harding.) But perhaps his most enduring piece of fiction was the magazine story “Night Bus” (1933), which became the basis for the marvelous 1934 film It Happened One Night. A man of many enthusiasms, he also wrote other biographies, (largely historical) non-fiction, and even “risque” novels…
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