Truth and lies, trust and doubt: how should we be navigating the misinformation crisis?
- Written by The Conversation
“Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear.”
This statement might have been written last year – or last week – as a comment on the current state of political reporting. It is actually from Lying in Politics, an article by Hannah Arendt published in The New York Review of Books in November 1971. Her reflections were prompted by the release of the Pentagon Papers, which provided devastating evidence of the discrepancy between US government narrative about its role in the Vietnam War and the actual policies of engagement.
Review: Age of Doubt: Building Trust in a World of Misinformation – edited by Tracey Kirkland and Gavin Fang (Monash University Publishing)
Somehow, the sense that we can no longer trust public institutions and the information they feed us always seems immediate: a pathology of recent development. Age of Doubt: Building Trust in a World of Misinformation, a collection of essays edited by ABC journalists Tracey Kirkland and Gavin Fang, addresses the misinformation crisis as “one of the central issues of our time”.
Arendt wrote in response to a particular moment of crisis in public trust. There is no question that we are currently facing another. But if the problem isn’t new, what is “new” about the present crisis? What gives the issue an escalated priority now?
Anglican archbishop Michael Stead diagnoses the empathy deficit as an inevitable consequence of loss of faith. A society that is no longer Christian continues to operate on Christian foundations, leaving us “like cut flowers”, without the common ground we need for survival.
Many of the contributors regard the COVID pandemic as a turning point. Conspiracy theories spread as a secondary and ultimately more enduring virus. Kaz Ross, a specialist in extremism and conspiracy theories, explains how they arise in the gap between an unexpected event and our capacity to account for it. Once the false accounts are up and running, it is hard for genuine explanation to get traction.
Former Victorian Police Commissioner Graham Ashton had to front up to situations in which the community was judging police actions without knowing the circumstances. Instantaneous online reactions exacerbated the tensions. The experience reinforced his conviction that police must be part of community, not other to it.
That’s easily said, and it puts another vote in the empathy box. But the word “empathy” itself is being enlisted to carry too much weight in the quest for solutions. What does it mean in these contexts?
The only person here with a convincing answer to that is Yolŋu elder Yalmay Yunupingu. Yunupingu is coming from a place where community is continuously lived rather than constantly referred to, where practices of truth-telling go back through generations. The kinship system, Gurrutu, is the foundational truth from which trust is grown.
There are none of Archbishop Stead’s cut flowers here. Instead of well-intentioned talk of something called empathy, there are rules, responsibilities and protocols. Children are educated in these through storytelling. Language is a precious heritage to be honoured and cultivated – a salient reminder that the betrayal of truth begins with speaking falsely.
Where does agency lie?
Telling a lie to a circle of people whose faces you can see carries a very different moral force from wielding the firehose of falsehoods in a global media environment. When Kirkland says “something in this current age is different, sometimes dangerously so”, we are steered towards the central questions of where agency lies, and to what extent the problem is inherent in new forms of media.
Social media platforms are an easy target, and one journalists are especially inclined to pick, for obvious reasons. As Nic Newman and Amy Ross Arguedas from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism point out, journalists are often targets of vindictive posts from bloggers who have no accountability for what they say.
Polarisation is being supercharged in the pandemonium of social media. Plummeting levels of trust in professional news media tend to correlate with escalating levels of aggravation on TikTok or X. But that is only part of the story, which requires more sustained focus than it gets from this rather disparate collection of writings. Social media are as various as any other form of public communication. It is easy to overlook the role of public commentary in responding to real problems and critiquing the roles high-profile reporters and presenters play in the political arena.
There is as wide a difference between an abusive spray on X and a serious discursive exchange on Threads as there is between political feuding on Sky and the kind of news reporting we expect from the ABC. News journalists who are feeling the pressure might do well to attend to some of the more cogent criticism on public platforms, rather than sweeping it all into the basket of deplorables.
None of the contributors who are engaged in news journalism are proposing this kind of rapprochement as one of the solutions to the yawning gulf of mistrust, even though there are many distinguished reporters who have a significant social media presence and use it to promote ethical awareness on issues of critical importance. Australians Van Badham and Debbie Spillane, Guardian writer George Monbiot, Anne Applebaum of The Atlantic, and MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissman are among those who do this effectively.
In Age of Doubt, editors Tracey Kirkland and Gavin Fang address the misinformation crisis.
Monash University Publishing
Radical impartiality
ABC presenter Patricia Karvelas takes on the “radical impartiality” challenge that dogs all political journalists at the national broadcaster. In a measured and well-documented overview, she cites data on falling levels of satisfaction with government, loss of faith in democracy, and the rise of influence campaigns funded by “bad actors sowing dissent”.
Then comes the question of what radical impartiality looks like in this volatile environment, where high profile figures like herself can only measure their performance by being attacked with equal virulence from the left and the right. The solution, says Karvelas, lies in raising democratic literacy levels and equipping the public with tools to be better adjudicators.
That is a rather condescending view, which goes along with being satisfied that the public have been given a voice when their text messages are read out or when they get to ask a question of a panel of celebrity speakers. But this only widens the gulf and increases the frustration. Perhaps people make comments on social media because they have a point to make that is being missed by the voices issuing from television and radio?
News professionals, even in the most distinguished circles, can be remarkably obtuse on matters that are their core business. “Every tribe has its myths, and journalists are no exception,” writes Fergus McIntosh of the New Yorker. Fact-checking he says, has become “a pursuit bordering on mania”. But as the go-to solution in a disinformation fire-storm, the practice is just not cutting through.
Are those who manage staff budgets catering for some 30 dedicated fact-checkers at the New Yorker unaware that deception and manipulation do not reside in individual “facts” (however defined), but in the connections between them, the way they are strung into pseudo-logical assertions, thrown out in colourful non-sequiturs, or woven into narratives heavily loaded with implication?
Those are exactly the kinds of things that get picked up in social media communities, where participants correlate their understanding from a range of sources and share them with others who do likewise.
It is Danish news director Ulrik Haagerup, CEO of the Constructive Institute, who offers the most agile and insightful perspective on these matters. His contribution is all about the challenge of self-appraisal. He reports on workshops for editors – held at News Corp, of all places – in which the agenda was identifying how to do and see things differently.
This exercise begins with a resolve “to rethink continuously the business of storytelling”. At the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, Haagerup led experiments with stories that asked different kinds of questions and shifted some hardwired premises about how news communication should be framed. One strategy involved accompanying politicians to regional locations, where they were asked to talk to “real people”.
In picking “trust” rather than “truth” as the central theme of the anthology, the editors have wisely sidestepped the risks of inviting didactic or polemical views. “Truth carries within itself an element of coercion,” Arendt warns. Trust may involve an acceptance of the Plato’s cave dilemma. No one lays claim to the truth more vehemently than the propagandist who appeals to reason with lies.
