The midterm election results suggest that the U. The Alar pesticide scare of is one example. Alar was a pesticide sprayed on apples, and studies for the Environmental Protection Agency found that it caused tumors in laboratory animals that had been given high doses. But an environmental activist group thought that the EPA was too slow to ban it outright. The group did a statistical study called a risk assessment, based on dubious data, and concluded that Alar was dangerous to children, who eat more apples than adults do relative to their body weight.
Sales of apples collapsed. The outcry simply overwhelmed scientific evidence. Crossen, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal , focuses on how advocates of policy positions and companies promoting products misuse scientific research to further their objectives. Wary of making decisions based on opinion or belief, the U. People are increasingly reluctant to believe any assertion that is not supported by statistical research.
A growing industry has thus developed to create the research to legitimize policy positions or marketing objectives. Public policy debates now commonly revolve around competing estimates of cost, effectiveness, or risk, rather than around the intrinsic merits of a proposal. Much of the health care debate raged around differing estimates of the numbers of citizens without health coverage and the costs of the various proposals to cover them.
Companies routinely use research studies to promote products or positions. Its sponsor: the maker of Wonder Bread. And if the media jump, that is good enough for many Americans. Crossen is particularly critical of the overuse and misuse of polls.
How questions are worded and how samples are chosen can have a huge impact on the responses. The press loves polls and surveys.
A survey by the Southern Baptist Convention found that Concocted or inaccurate surveys and studies taint our perceptions of what is true, and they distort public policy debates.
They take information from self-interested parties and add to it another layer of self-interest—the desire to sell information.
Both Crossen and Weaver end their books with lengthy lists of proposals for reforms. Crossen suggests that high schools should teach students the basics of statistics and how to tell whether numbers are believable. News organizations should train journalists in statistical analysis and should devote more space to describing the research methodology. Every story about research should identify the sponsor and describe its interest in the outcome or impact of the research. And the media should stop producing information that serves only to feed their own interests.
He argues that the press should cover crises and disasters less and political, social, and economic events more: less politics, more substance; less on personalities, more on institutions.
That is quixotic and will never happen. It would be a return to pre-Pulitzer journalism. The rapid advance of information age technology—hundreds of cable television channels, the growth of specialized media, the spread of computer information resources—is certain to give citizens access to far more diverse sources of information and is likely to force the media to reinvent the ways in which they present news and other information.
A press driven by drama and crises creates a government driven by response to crises. Mendoza is right. People do make mistakes. But a mainstream media site would remove every trace of a false story like this.
These also appear online. Many more smaller corrections are made to web stories, each one carefully footnoted so the reader is in no doubt what changes have been made and when. If one story exemplifies how news and information move in the world of alternative news it is the tale of the Grenfell D notice. The blog repeated claims that unnamed firefighters had seen up to bodies in the ruins of Grenfell, far more than the official total so far of 30 dead police now estimate there were 80 deaths in the block.
The story had everything: government conspiracy, evasion and callousness plus a wall of silence from traditional media. It duly received uncountable shares and furious denunciation across multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts. If they were foolish enough to try, it would be about 20 seconds before the story got out. I speak on the phone to Steve Walker, the self-employed Merseyside businessman who runs Skwawkbox.
Walker launched Skwawkbox in to write about the NHS, the welfare system and the state of the left, then found new impetus with the advent of Corbyn. How could it have been right for Skwawkbox to spread unsubstantiated rumour at a time when riots were considered a genuine possibility? That story went viral because people said, why is nobody talking about what we are seeing on the ground?
People deserve the chance to make their own mind up. Which raises the question: how can you make up your mind when your information sources are so polluted by fiction that even the people who spread them believe them?
The response of self-defined insurgent media is: why observe the rules of the mainstream media when the mainstream media have failed us?
For professional journalists, this is a nightmare prospect: news and commentary devolving into a baseless cacophony where anyone can say anything and whatever is shared most will win. The truth will become what the most, or the loudest, people want it to be. Similarly, in the United States in the 60s, the cultural and political crisis of Vietnam brought on a slump in the credibility of a similarly stuffy and obeisant mass media.
The journalism of the s proved to have rather sharper teeth. Just ask Richard Nixon. The answer to bad journalism can only be good journalism, from the widest pool of professionals. Fund and deliver it in the most innovative ways you can, but let the material be its own advocate. Andrew Harrison is editor of the Remainiacs Brexit podcast; remainiacs.
Journalism has a responsibility to society and great journalists have a responsibility to inform people and make news. To blame any one outlet is dangerous and to lose trust is dangerous, too. If we forfeit the responsibility of the media to keep us from being abused by the structures of power, then we become victims instead of citizens.
Journalism empowers viewers, listeners and readers to make more informed decisions for themselves; it does not tell people what to believe or how to feel. All credible, mainstream news outlets subscribe to a code of ethics or statement of principles or statement of values. These ethics or values are core to their mission. Print news: The American Society of News Editors - provides the ethics codes for several major newspapers. We did a demonstration project last summer to prove we can automate the checking of claims like that.
The challenge is going to be writing tools that can check specific types of claims, but over time it will become more powerful. It is an approach being attempted by a number of different groups around the world.
Researchers at the University of Mississippi and Indiana University are both working on an automated fact-checking system. IBM has spent several years working on ways that its Watson AI could help internet users distinguish fact from fiction. A major issue most people face without knowing it is the bubble they live in. If they were shown views outside that bubble they would be much more open to talking about them. This idea of helping break through the isolated information bubbles that many of us now live in comes up again and again.
By presenting people with accurate facts it should be possible to at least get a debate going. But telling people what is true and what is not does not seem to work. For this reason, IBM shelved its plans for a fact-checker.
Any attempt to break through these bubbles is fraught with difficulty as you are being dismissed as being part of a conspiracy simply for trying to correct what people believe. It is why you have Republicans and Democrats disagreeing over something as fundamental as how many people appear in a photograph. Similarly, firms like Amazon could offer up films and books that provide an alternative viewpoint to the products a person normally buys.
I think we have to work on that. Google is already doing this to some degree. It operates a little known grant scheme that allows certain NGOs to place high-ranking adverts in response to certain searches.
It is used by groups like the Samaritans so their pages rank highly in a search by someone looking for information about suicide, for example. But Google says anti-radicalisation charities could also seek to promote their message on searches about so-called Islamic State, for example.
But there are understandable fears about powerful internet companies filtering what people see - even within these organisations themselves. For those leading the push to fact-check information, better tagging of accurate information online would be a better approach by allowing people to make up their own minds about the information. We need to tag and structure quality content in effective ways.
Mantzarlis believes part of the solution will be providing people with the resources to fact-check information for themselves. He is planning to develop a database of sources that professional fact-checkers use and intends to make it freely available. This is a problem that governments around the world are facing as the public views what they tell them with increasing scepticism. Nesta, a UK-based charity that supports innovation, has been looking at some of the challenges that face democracy in the digital era and how the internet can be harnessed to get people more engaged.
Eddie Copeland, director of government innovation at Nesta, points to an example in Taiwan where members of the public can propose ideas and help formulate them into legislation. But that means facing up to our own bad habits. She and her team have been working to identify fake news on the internet since Will Moy agrees.
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