As I said yesterday, “…I concluded reading Salena Zito’s latest tome. I intend to write extensively about the book tomorrow. I honestly think that taken with her prior book on the 2016 election, they comprise the best possible analysis of the politics of Donald Trump, and the political earthquake he represents.” But earthquake may be a bad analogy as they happen along a single fault. What is going on is a web, with many avenues of change, some big and some small. As Zito admits in her Afterword, what is going on is bigger than Trump – he has harnessed it, but he is not it. I wrote last Thursday, excepting Zito, about an unwillingness to listen, but I think it is deeper, it s a fundamental lack of curiosity.
I will start by excerpting Butler again:
Case in point: When Politico ran a story following Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, the news outlet was apparently convinced that because its reporters had read on WhatsApp that Puerto Rican voter in Allentown, Pennsylvania, were bolting from Trump and that could cost him the election, they didn’t need to send anyone to Allentown to interview people. Had they done so, they would have found that this was not the case.
Basically, they relied on social media to do their news gathering and their reporters became simply writers, retelling what social media had told them. As a business strategy, that actually makes sense. It’s a whole lot cheaper to keep a small staff in an office, reading and regurgitating, than it is to keep a staff of reporters out in the field. But why would anyone be so gullible, and more importantly incurious?
When news of the massive Russian earthquake came out last week, my wife first saw it on Facebook. Now given the numbers she was quoting, which were ghastly, and therefore unbelievably, huge, my reaction was, “Social media – let me check it out.” A visit to the USGS web site later, then I believed what I read on Facebook. I did not need to travel to the Kamchatka Peninsula to verify the story, but I did need to poke around the internet a bit. Why weren’t the Politico reporters at least curious enough to verify the social media report with other local sources?
Current reading, “An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions.” It is about the pandemic school closures. Now, I am only about 11% into the book, but what is obvious already is that there was also an abundance of evidence that closing schools might be a bad idea even early in the pandemic, and certainly after the much ballyhooed “two week to flatten the curve” – evidence that people never sought, let alone ignored. Evidence that also was easily found from the comfort of a desk with an internet connection.
Certainly confirmation bias is at play here. This, from the article just linked is fascinating:
One explanation for why people are susceptible to confirmation bias is that it is an efficient way to process information. Humans are incessantly bombarded with information and cannot possibly take the time to carefully process each piece of information to form an unbiased conclusion…. People need to process information quickly to protect themselves from harm. It is adaptive for humans to rely on instinctive, automatic behaviours that keep them out of harm’s way.
And so, we conclude that this age of abundant, even overwhelming, information is in fact increasing misunderstanding, not understanding. The fire hose of information has resulted in faulty information filters.
I rely on something called a “feed reader” to gather news. Once abundant, they have largely disappeared from the internet. Those that do exist lie behind multiple paywalls, first for the service proper, then for the sources subscribed. With a feed reader, you decide what sources of information you use. Most people these days rely on social media as their news aggregator, which comes with an algorithm that is deciding what you see; an algorithm designed specifically to show you what you want to see. An algorithm that in fact creates confirmation bias. That Joe in his living room does this has become a fact of life.
That an outlet like Politico does it is unforgivable. And of course, once Politico does so, everyone else in legacy media reports it because they think Politico verified it. And so journalism is reduced to gossip.
As we get smarter about our politics, we have to get smarter about our news.
