Fake News, Alternative Facts, and the Question of Truth

We you play.

Some of you have been looking at the

addition of the Morning Post. I should point out that this was a regular

issue. In other words, all 28 pages that was distributed in Washington,

somewhat to the surprise of a lot of people who actually wanted to believe in

what we will call fake news. So that’s one of the questions

that we will ask of David Edwards this afternoon to explain to

people at The Washington Post. I know from a friend they’re

rather cheered on they the pranksters and said that this was a great, great

feat. In other words, the post itself, with the exception of the

lawyers who had to deal with infringement of copyright. The rest of the people

at the post thought that this was a great stunt. And they added

that would this this were actually true. David Edwards is

well known to all of us. I will simply say that he has taught

at the University of Texas for 50 years, which is somewhat

of a an unprecedented record, I believe

surpassed. But in the government department, I think not.

So David Edwards is going to speak to us this afternoon about fake news and then Sam Baker

is going to respond. David?

Well, thank you all for coming. Normally, I speak relatively

extemporaneously with some notes, but this topic is important enough that I’ve actually

written a manuscript. So you’ll pardon me if

I. This seems a little less spontaneous than it might be, I hope, because it might

be a little more substantive than it would be if it were extemporaneous.

There’s always been fake news, although it’s nature and circulation and characterizations

of disliked news as fake have evolved with politics and technology

and are on an unprecedented scale today. Some trace fact news,

false new fake news back to ancient Egypt when in the 13th century

B.C., Ramses the Great portrayed the battle of Kaddish as an Egyptian

victory when the treaty between the Egyptians and the Hittites revealed that the battle was

actually a stalemate. It became much more widespread following

invention of the printing press in fourteen thirty nine. The first recognized

instance of fake news in what became the United States occurred when Benjamin Franklin, of all

people, wrote fake news about murderous scalping Indians in league with

King George in order to generate support for the American Revolution.

There’ve been many since. Alternative facts, on the other hand, are a

new phenomenon, at least by that name, Trump presidential counselor Kellyanne

Conway coined that term in explaining, quote unquote, how newly inaugurated

President Trump’s press secretary could declare that Trump’s inaugural crowd was larger than President

Obama’s. When crowd estimates, aerial photos and other evidence

clearly demonstrated the opposite. She later defended her choice of words,

defining the term as, quote, additional facts and alternative information.

It was later pointed out that the term bore a close relation to the term truthful,

high powered type hyper hyperbole. In Trump’s 1987

book, The Art of the Deal, where it was defined allegedly by Trump,

although he had a ghostwriter, as we know, defined as, quote,

an innocent form of exaggeration and a very effective form of promotion

in that book. Trump plain that quote, People want to believe that something is the biggest

and the greatest and the most spectacular. And quote, the derision

that Conway was widely subject to eventually subsided. And both Austrian and German

linguist declared the phrase alternative facts. The non-word of

the year twenty seventeen. But when the use of the term alternative

facts subsided, the use of the term fake news only increased. Led by the president

himself, the Washington Post has been keeping a running tally of, quote, false

or misleading, quaint claims, unquote, by the president since his inauguration

as a March 17th. Twenty nineteen. The latest time when they published their total, the

total was nine thousand one hundred seventy nine with false or misleading

claims. That includes 201 uses of the term fake news

to apply to statements that he disapproves of or disagrees with and to various news

organizations, especially CNN. The president perhaps inadvertently

revealed what he means by fake in a tweet May 9th, 2018. Quote,

The fake news is working overtime just reported that despite the tremendous

success we are having with the economy and all things else. Ninety one percent

of the network news about me is negative, parentheses fake.

Why do we work so hard and working with the media when it is corrupt? Take away

credentials and grow. Trump told CBS as Leslie Stall

before the cameras were turned on for an interview. Quote, You know why I do it?

I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories

about me, no one will believe you. And quote,

The Washington Post archive also offers thousands of examples of fake news generated by

the president himself. This is what is most unprecedented. The president not only

as the aplysia of the term fake news to other sources, but also as himself, the source

of fake news. In 2018, academic researchers studied consumption

of fake news during the 2016 campaign. One conclusion, according to Brendan

Nyhan, one of the authors interviewed by NBC News, was that, quote, People got

vastly more misinformation from Donald Trump than they did from fake news Web sites

and the quote. However, there has been a stunning proliferation of

fake news Web sites since the Internet became accessible for public use in the 1990s.

These Web sites specialize in creating attention grabbing, grabbing news, quote,

unquote. Sometimes this is simply for profit. For example, Justin Cohler created

a series of fake news Web sites, quote, for fun and, quote, earning some thousand

dollars a month from advertising on his sites. That advertising

has nothing to do with the value of the site. It’s just how many clicks you get and

you get rewarded with money for having

large numbers of clicks. The more troubling instances, however,

are those engineered by political operatives at home or abroad. And the most effective

may be those created by governments to employ bots, computer robots to

generate fake news and spread it to various social media to influence elections. As the Mueller

investigation found the Russians did during the 2016 presidential election.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Worldwide Web, asserted in 2017 that

the three most significant new disturbing Internet trends, trends that are preventing

the Internet from, quote, serving humanity. D and quote as he intended it to do,

those three trends are the surge in the use of the Internet by governments for both citizen

surveillance and cyber warfare and fake news.

One particularly concerning fun phenomenon today is what are called Internet trolls, people who

sow discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people by posting inflammatory

or otherwise provocative material in online communities such as newsgroups, forums,

chat rooms or blogs. Some trolls operate for their own amusement, but

others purposely abuse or mislead, often in political realms. In the 2016 election,

Russia had an army of more than a thousand paid trolls engaged in creating and circulating

fake news and disinformation about Hillary Clinton, and created social media

accounts that resembled actual voters in swing states which were used to disseminate

damaging assertions about Clinton and Russia continued such activities after

the election to further its own political goals. In 2018,

the Rand Corporation, perhaps the premier think tank established during the Cold War to conduct research

originally for the military, but increasingly also for other entities and audiences, published

a study it called Truth Decay. The study analyzed four trends that

detected one increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretations

of facts and data to a blurring of the line between opinion and fact.

experience over fact and for declining trust in formerly

respected sources of factual information. That study concluded that, quote,

such phenomena as fake news are only symptoms of a much more complex system

of challenges, one with roots in the ways that human beings process information.

The prevailing political and economic conditions and the nature of the changed media

environment, end quote. This study found the drivers of these trends to be

cognitive processing and cognitive biases. Changes in the information system.

Transformation of conventional media, internet and social media. Spread of disinformation.

Competing demands on the educational system. And polarization. Political

polarization. Socio demographic and economic polarization. It found

the agents of truth decay to be media, academia and research organizations.

Political actors and the government and foreign actors.

The challenge posed by fake news and related manipulations of the Internet and of communication

more generally is becoming a universal problem. Quote, Fake news is now

the poison in the bloodstream of our societies, destabilising democracy and

undermining trust in institutions and the rule of law and quote, wrote

Tony Hall, director general of the BBC in the Financial Times recently.

Continuing to quote, It has become a powerful tool for profit

or political gain at all levels, from villages to repressive regimes

in the West. We’ve witnessed its power to distort public debates, fueled divisions and influence

voters in emerging and developing economies that can generate violence in

these countries where digital literacy is lower and democratic institutions more fragile.

The rise of misinformation constitutes an urgent crisis and quote.

Nearly a billion people are registered to vote in India’s upcoming elections. And India

is one of the fastest growing markets for social media platforms and messaging apps.

Imagine the opportunities for misinformation and disinformation. The distinct discussion

there is misinformation is relatively inadvertent. Disinformation is purposefully

misleading people. Imagine

the opportunities for misinformation and disinformation in this country, where last year

by two men on a motorbike appeared on WhatsApp. Other

instances of slaughter resulting from it, or at least encouraged by misinformation and disinformation,

have occurred recently in Nigeria and Myanmar. And most recently, rumors

circulated on social media, especially Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter, that Roma,

better known as Gypsies, were kidnaping children, according to some allegations for organ

traffic trafficking in Parisian suburbs, and that led to violent attacks

on Roma encampments in the suburbs of France. That’s from today’s New York Times.

Media can, of course, be manipulated whatever form they take. And they have been historically as any

survey of, for example, American newspapers in the areas of Andrew Jackson or Abraham

Lincoln will readily demonstrate. But the possibilities for such manipulation

are multiplied when media take to the Internet, and the effects can be much more powerful

when items go viral. In addition, efforts to expose and correct such

effects always lag the damage and pale in impact once that damage has

been done. Manipulation is also more easily kept anonymous,

rendered pseudonymous or attributed falsely on the Internet. As the foreign interventions

in the 2016 presidential election uncovered and documented in the Mueller investigation

clearly showed. And with the development and continued improvement of deep fake

video manipulation technology, it becomes very easy to make anything look

believable. In addition, recent improvements in speech synthesis technology

are making it possible to generate seemingly authentic audio of anyone saying whatever

the manipulator wishes. The only requirement is that there be a one minute

of recorded speech by that person, and it doesn’t matter what that person was saying in that one minute.

These prospects would be ominous enough if they were limited to countries with long democratic tradition.

But they’re now being adopted with enthusiasm by many of the most autocratic regimes around

the world, ranging from the more advanced autocratic countries, especially Russia and China,

to less developed countries such as Egypt. And they will become much more ominous

as artificial intelligence capabilities advance and spread or are sold

to autocratic regimes. One imminent development will be what

can be called the industrialization of propaganda. As one recent analysis

argued, quote, a-I driven applications will soon allow

authoritarians to analyze patterns in a population’s online activity,

identify those most susceptible to a particular message, and target them more

precisely with propaganda in a weekly viewed in a widely viewed TED

talk. In twenty seventeen techno sociologist Zanab to

fetch, she described a world where, quote, people in power use these

algorithms to quietly watch us, to judge us and to nudge us

to predict and identify the troublemakers and the rebels and quote.

The result, she suggests, may be an authoritarianism that transforms our private screens

into persuasion architectures at scale to manipulate individuals

one by one, using their personal individual weaknesses and vulnerabilities,

end quote. This is likely to mean far more effective influence campaigns

aimed at either citizens of authoritarian countries or those of democracies

abroad.

To understand the nature and the comprehensiveness of the challenge of fake news, we must explore

the various stages through which it emerges. These are creation, propagation

or dissemination, reception, exception or acceptance or rejection,

evaluation and avoidance or overcoming. Creation

can be de novo. For example, the story developed and spread during the twenty sixteen

campaign that the Clintons were secretly running a sex trafficking pizza parlor in

Maryland or the Russian government’s various. That that sounds

preposterous. But one guy heard that and took an automatic

weapon and went to that pizza parlor and started shooting people.

So the Russian government’s various forms of meddling

in that election and others, including the Brexit referendum and the French presidential

election. Or it can involve interpretation or corruption by a conspiracy

assumption, for example, such as conspiracy theorist, media figure Alex Jones,

Austen Zohn, Alex Jones developed after the Sandy Hook massacre

of elementary school students and teachers at Sandy Hook, asserting that the entire event

was actually staged by gun control advocates. Or it can arise through

Labe. And he’s being sued in court now by some of the families of

murdered children. So we’ll see what happens there. Or

it can arise through labeling something President Trump has excelled at in terming the Mueller investigation

of possible collusion with Russia fake news and a witch hunt.

Next, propagation or dissemination? Propagation or dissemination

can occur when the president takes advantage of his bully pulpit to speak or when a media

outlet such as Fox News, quote unquote, decides what to purvey on

its platform, which it is established via its twin slogans. Fair

and balanced and we report, you decide. Or it can occur

through social media, which can take forms such as blogging, tweeting and retweeting

and commenting on content on an existing site. Or it can take the form

of what one critic terms pre news in which media figures and or institutions

develop, elaborate upon and speculate upon the development and significance

of something that hasn’t yet happened or hasn’t come to fruition. A phenomenon that was

very widespread during the two years of awaiting the outcome of the Mueller investigation.

Next reception involves accepting and believing or rejecting the content

propagated this stage, which I shall examine in more detail below, is shaped by what

some call the filters or predispositions that the audience employs

or unconsciously is influenced by. This cannot be avoided.

It necessarily occurs in any act of perception and cognition.

Next evaluation involves attempting to determine the accuracy or truth of the,

quote, news and report. This can involve various approaches. The most common

today, at least in the media, is generally called fact checking. It’s commonly done by various

media, newspapers, news services, foundations or other absurdly impartial

individuals or groups. Examine various such programs. Shortly.

Avoiding or overcoming fake news can be an individual product project or an

institutional project. Traditionally, the most common recommendations were

look for and explore both sides of the matter and look for objectivity.

Today, we know that neither of these admonitions is adequate. We know that there are almost always,

at least in political matters, more than two sides, as there are

usually more than two actors, each of which will have his or her or its side.

More sophisticated analysis and understandings today recognize that largely

because of the psychological influences cited above concerning evaluation. There’s

no clear single objective description or explanation of most social and political

matters. The traditional approach commonly recommended to information consumers

is to consult multiple sources, ideally sources with different values, interests

and or goals. When I was young, I used this approach subscribing to various

news and opinion periodicals understood to be liberal and conservative.

Such an approach can help but one achieve a more balanced and nuanced understanding of political

questions. But it will be of little help in dealing with possible fake news items for

obvious reasons.

More sophisticated analysis of conflicts now recognize and employ what might

be called the politics of problem definition, which recognizes that both presentation

of a dispute and formulation of descriptions as well as possible solutions

depend enormously on how the issue at hand is described or defined. This

is much more than a matter of definitions of key terms, although that in itself can be important.

Consider the case of what has long been called the welfare problem. Some think the problem

is that the existing programs costs too much, so they favor cutting benefits to cut costs.

Others think the problem is the benefits don’t go far enough to improve outcomes so they favor expanding

and improving benefits. Some think the problem is that recipients should have to earn their

benefits so they favor work requirements. Others think the problem is that benefits

foster dependents, so they favor making benefits less appealing and adding programs to encourage

or even require work. These are only four positions, but the practical discussion

of welfare. There are hundreds of positions with dozens of definitions of the problem

and therefore even more recommendations of program changes.

But underlying these practical challenges is the deeper fact that anyone’s

perspective will be influenced by his or her situation and education or socialization.

There’s a longstanding adage in politics that where you stand depends on where you sit.

Lyndon Johnson titled his presidential memoirs The Vantage Point in Cinema.

There’s what’s known as the Rashomon Effect. Each of these reminds us of something.

We all know that how we view things depends on our location, situation, experience,

etc. Furthermore, we know that our brain and our perceptual apparatus

function as filters which inescapably censor and distort.

If our brains actually had to deal with the entirety of circumstances in any decision

situation. We would be frozen in indecision. So our brains

edit what comes to them from our sense organs and present that edited pictured serve as if

it were what’s really there. Really true, really accurate. In fact, however,

we never get more than a highly edited or censored report. Our brains are always abstracting

from a plethora of sensory stimuli to limit our experience of quote, sensory

overload is sensory overload. Furthermore, they encounter such a

panoply of differentiating phenomena that any instant that they are necessarily

so that in any instant they are necessarily also abstracting from

difference to make it possible for us to believe we know what the situation actually

is. Given all this, is it any wonder that people experience what we

assume is the same reality differently and that disagreement inevitably

arises? This is the circumstance in which a democratic country requires

that its citizens be able to decide and act responsibly, and in which today they

are constantly subject to a barrage of conflicting media influences. Most

of them being of questionable reliability or accuracy.

Media are often at Mount Admi, admonished to emphasize objectivity in their

reporting, but careful analysis of challenges to accurate reporting reveal that such

a goal is problematic at best. The classic media critic indeed, perhaps the first media critic,

A.J. Liebling, famously asserted that freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns

one. That was half a century ago, long before the electronic media

that was supposed to democratize both production and consumption of news and

labeling say there were serious limitations on what could be learned from the media. In the words of

one analyst, quote, Beyond our limited daily experience, it is television, radio,

newspapers, magazines and books, the media that furnish our consciousness with the people,

places and events that we agree to call reality. But reality, in a literal

sense is what happens to three and a half billion people. That would now be six billion

all over the world, 24 hours a day out of that teeming experience.

The media can only give us in words and pictures a representation of tiny fragments

that are deemed significant or suggestive and quote.

Owners, editors and reporters did whatever curating to use a term in vogue today.

They’re whatever, whatever. And reporters did whatever curating there was

objectivity conceived of as anything more than verifying the accuracy of an account of something

was virtually impossible then. And that was before electronic media made

the need for such curation, both much more important and much more difficult, given

the instantaneous nature of electronic media in the era of 24 hour news cycle

and the skills necessary for consumers to do their own duration may well be atrophying

as the challenges continually magnified. Consider this suggestion quote

As the reliance on television as a teaching learning device in the largest sense increases,

many interpretive and interactive skills may fall into disuse and decay.

And since human interaction is the very heart and soul of the political process, a general decline

in the analytical and expressive skills which characterize that interaction in the society

as a whole cannot help but be reflected in the polity as well.

And quote, that penetrating and ominous critique was made in 1976,

long before the advent of computers and electronic media

efforts to analyze, critique and select among various allegedly correct or accurate

pieces of news. Ultimately reduce once the factors mentioned above have been considered

to the question of truth. But what do we mean by truth? And how are we determine what

qualifies as truth?

There are three fundamentally different criteria used and debated for determining the truth of an assertion

or a description. The first is the coherence or consistency criterion.

Does the item in question fit well with the other things that one believes? Is it logically consistent

with one’s other beliefs? The second is the correspondence criterion.

Do the observable features of the assertion correspond to what our senses tell us

about the relevant world? The third is the pragmatic criterion. Does

the account work in the real world, enabling one to be effective in acting? Which

of these three truth criteria is relevant and helpful in assessing the truth claims of the possible fake

news item? Whether it seems to be worthy of acceptance is basically a philosophical

question, and that’s something that philosophers have been debating for centuries and do not seem to have

reached agreement. Most people tend to prefer the correspondence

theory these days, at least in everyday life, but employing that criterion in matters

of political dispute can be particularly difficult because so much of politics involve secrecy,

governmental secrecy, commercial secrecy, personal secrecy. Thus,

practically speaking, in political disputes, most people seem to default to some version of the coherence

criterion. Does believing this particular assertion as a candidate for being true

news fit with other things one believes about politics? Or does it conflict with other

held beliefs? Most of the work being done today in public discourse

revolves around what is commonly called fact checking. Many newspapers carry

contributions from PolitiFact, a nonpartisan fact checking Web site created

to sort out the truth in American political discourse. It was created by the Tampa

Bay Times, a Florida newspaper, in 2007 and was acquired by the Poynter

Institute, a nonprofit school for journalists in 2018.

It’s financed by contributions, grants and ads placed on its Web site, PolitiFact.com.

It evaluates the accuracy of statements by and about politicians producing a Truth-O-Meter

rating for each. As of March 25th, 2019, PolitiFact

had evaluated six hundred fifty seven statements by President Trump. It found four percent

true 11 percent. Mostly true 14 percent.

Half true. Twenty one percent. Mostly false. 34 percent false.

And 15 percent. Pants on fire. The Washington

Post has its own fact checker rating system, awarding a varying number of Pinocchios

to statements that range from shading of the facts, but no outright falsehoods

to four Pinocchios for whoppers. The British Broadcasting

Corporation has introduced an international anti disinformation initiative,

which it calls beyond fake news and has incorporated something it calls reality check

as a part of its daily news output. In addition, it has invited media organizations

from around the world to join a special conference this coming summer to explore how to tackle

the global rise of misinformation, deliberate disinformation and bias with the goals

of developing a concrete action plan that can be implemented quickly.

Governments are also becoming involved. President Trump makes varied suggestions often.

You probably heard a bunch of those. We may be pardoned

if we are doubtful that his suggestions would conduce to more accurate reporting.

The Indian government has published draft proposals to deal with this problem that include requiring platforms

to break, end end encryption if asked to trace the source of objectionable

content, something that many observers see as a threat to privacy and freedom of speech.

These fears are magnified by the text of another Indian governmental proposal,

which would require companies to use automated filters to police content. That is,

quote, This is the words of the draft legislation

blasphemous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, pedophilic,

libelous, invasive of another’s privacy, hateful or racially

or ethnically objectionable, disparaging rel. or encouraging

money laundering or gambling or otherwise unlawful in any

manner whatsoever. And quote.

How many statements that anybody makes. Wouldn’t disqualified in one or

another of those criteria? Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which reported this proposal,

pointed out that, quote, The algorithm that could decide what content falls into

such categories hasn’t been invented yet and grow. But that’s little comfort when

we imagine politicians or bureaucrats in any country attempting to apply such regulations.

The Chinese government, for example, has long been at work suppressing political discourse it deems

inappropriate. The Poynter Institute created an international

fact checking network to promote excellence, in fact, checking in 2016.

Its governing principles to which member organizations are operations must subscribe are first

a commitment to nonpartisanship and fairness. Second, a commitment to transparency

of sources. Third, a commitment to transparency of funding and organization.

And fourth, a commitment to transparency of methodology. And fifth, a commitment

to open and honest corrections. But all the fact checking

and all the penetrating criticism of false and misleading statements will have little effect and

less than until citizens pay much more attention to these analysis and become

more careful in ascribing truth or accuracy to the rhetoric employed by these

political actors and pundits and by themselves and their conversations.

Who knows how to bring that about? That’s it.

Sam Baker Oh. But I’ve generated many

pages of notes listening to that brilliant talk.

And I really feel like, David, the thing I want to do most in my response is

to elaborate a little bit on a fascinating

point you made at lunch today about

the importance of thinking not just about. What’s true

and false in relation to fake news, but to also think about

the form of news itself. Think about what news is

about. In some ways like that. The arbitrariness and the strangeness

of news as a social practice. And I think did a fantastic

job of analyzing fake news in relation to both the form and the

content of the phenomenon. The second part of the talk you talked

about the different varieties of truth and the different kinds of verification

that we would want to engage in and talk about some of the public engines of fact checking in a

way that I think is really important. But in the first part of the talk, you talked really well about

the form of fake news, its etiology, its origins, its spread,

its techniques, its history, analyze it in terms of its propagation,

its dissemination. And you talked about the changes in the

mediation news recently in ways that I thought just were really

clear and well laid out. But I think that thinking about the form and the

content of fake news together, as as you discussed them, made me want to

challenge our audience today in this regard.

I think if you all looking around the room, I think of you as your warriors

for truth. Right? You all are people who you really care

to verify information, who are willing to change your minds. Right. Who,

you know, will like me, you know, bear grudges against news organizations

that you feel like lead you down the garden path. I was embarrassed recently when

a colleague said to me, well, you know, there’s been a special feature

on that area of interest. The New York Times, you know. Have you read it? No, I don’t read The New York Times.

No. I canceled my princess script, The New York Times in September 2016. And,

you know, of course, when there’s an article and someone sends to me, I open it, you know,

by going through a browser without cookies and getting the page open, you know, but I’m

never going to subscribe New York Times again until, you know, there’s a major, you know,

public reckoning with what happened in 2016.

This is seen as extremely eccentric, you know, by this. This colleague of mine, but I think

that I share this stance of mine because I think actually it will resonate in the room.

Maybe you wouldn’t go to that extreme, but you recognize the you know, that you two would be somebody

who would want to take a stand against, you know, a news organization

that had misled you. Right. And yet, even as you would be like warriors

for truth. Look around the room and I see avid consumers

of the news, people who consume the news all the time. You might even have sneak peek at their

phones during the talk to see what the latest news might be. Right

now, you might just be to think while the people will think that I’m checking for important

work emails. But in fact, I’m seeing with the latest, you know, news is about

the you know, the situation with the Mueller report on Twitter or I might

even be seeing the latest. Sporting News. If I can get

into, you know, real secret shame is around news consumption, right? We. We are the warriors for the truth, but

we’re also people who are, you know, in many cases and certainly my case

addicted to the news. That’s an aspect of the form of

fake news that I want to really highlight for us and like challenge us to reflect on it. The

food writer Michael Pollan. You know, the guy whose slogan is Eat food,

not too much, mostly plants. Right. He has a great term for talking about

the wrong kind of food, the bad kind of food. He says while, you know, it’s highly engineered food,

it’s engineered to be hyper palatable. So delicious

geniuses, right? Made that, you know, that

formula for Coke. Right. That formula for Cheerios. That’s why we eat too much of those things.

Well, you know, the fake news, right, is fake, but the news is hyper powerful

and it’s engineered for our consumption and it’s micro-targeted to us individually

with the very best the very latest artificial intelligence. All right. Keep us clicking to

keep us engaged. No matter how we might fight against

falsehood in the media arena, the news. Right. We should also reckon with

the extent to which we, too, are keeping the ball on the air just by being these avid news consumers,

even as we look for the truth. Because part of the problem might be. With

the biggest lie of all, which is that we need to know the latest information.

Do we really do we always need to? I try to challenge myself

to keep my phone in my pocket. And I hope, well, I’ll think about

doing the same in the face of fakeness.

I’d like to make one point specific point to put this in the British context, and that is

you will remember the bus before the referendum in which it was written

that three hundred and fifty million pounds a week instead of

being paid. The European Union would go into the National Health Service. So this

has a very practical application to the problems

of Brexit. The what is called now in Britain, the never random.

So Philip questions David Doyle. Well, just

to represent the kind of statistical political science unit I’ve already talked to you about before.

I think that most political scientists who’ve been studying the media since the 1920s on to the present have basically come

to the conclusion of what they call the minimal effects thesis, which is that most people don’t pay attention to politics.

Most people don’t pay attention to the media when they do. They tend to be very good at filtering

out views that are contrary to their own and very, very important views that are similar to their own,

that elections are affected by campaigns, let alone

by news media coverage, and that there are a lot of sort of fundamental political, economic, social factors

that seem to go into elections that don’t really have much to do with media coverage. And so

there are sort of stories and anecdotes and TEDTalks and whatever. But I still think that the sort of fundamental

message of political science research, even today research on Facebook and networks which suggest that people

are have more diverse political messages than we might sort of think about the story of everybody sort

of just being in one kind of funnel suggests that this really isn’t really either new or

really much of a change or a big deal or consequential to politics. So what’s your thought of take

on this political science perspective? I think it’s wrong

for my target. I I think

well, we know that it is difficult to establish causation in any

human realm. And so to

some extent, any of our analysis are interpretive

using a bunch of presuppositions. And perhaps this is one of them

that. I had one set in your typical political scientist, as

in others, that perhaps but I do think that certain

aspects of what has been happening in politics have had

significant impact. I think one example of that would be what happened

late in the last presidential campaign when comi

flip flopped on Hillary’s emails. First of all, the media treated

Hillary’s emails as a really enormous issue errors

including well, including The New York Times, although it was not as big a

consumption of consumer of that or purveyor of that view as others. But

but but many people do think that that changed some people’s views in

the last week or two of the campaign. And there’s some survey evidence of

that. I think and it didn’t take many views to be changed in three key states

to to produce the Electoral College victory of Donald Trump.

So that I think that kind of thing may be more common than we

than we expect. And a much of it depends on how you survey people and whether

your survey is really accurate in terms of both

sample size, etc. and truth telling by the people

who are doing the responding, which there’s some evidence is often a problem, too.

I mean, for example, when they after each election they survey people to find out

whether you voted or not in the presidential election and if so, how you voted. And it always turns out that

a much bigger percentage of the population voted than actually voted, because

it’s embarrassing to say you didn’t vote. So I don’t know. I mean,

I’m more skeptical when you want to make a quick response. I’ll the last thing I’ll say, which is that.

Yeah, I I I find that research persuasive. But then

I think also political campaigns do as well, which is why they do focus their messaging

now, not on persuasion, but on turnout. Right. And turn turn out to try to get

people who are already in their camp out to the polls, like through the messaging

and through their manipulation of messages of messages in the media. But then

to that extent that the obverse of that, if that’s true, is that those of us who are persuaded,

you know, might realize that we we really don’t need to be contending in the public

arena the way that we feel like we might. We don’t need to be like, you know, mounting in our Steed’s into our

Facebook, you know, flamewar. Right. It’s not going to change anybody’s minds. Right.

That that that’s not the way to do it, which we’re just letting ourselves feel better about ourselves while

giving Facebook endless clicks. And that’s the better thing to do. You know, as people have realized,

if you want to affect elections is to, you know, work to affect turnout

directly, not indirectly. Of course, most a fair amount of the

Russian intervention in the last election was designed to depress turnout. Exactly.

And again, it’s a little hard to know quite how

to measure that effectively. But a lot of people think that that was

an effect, an effective effect of Russian meddling. Jamie Galbraith

Wolfer trying to wrap my mind around framing here. It seems

to me that if we’re going to accept the concept of fake news

that is in opposition to something else, which is the true news,

there has to be a kind of duality here. And in that connection, if

you’ll forgive me for reaching deep into the mists of the past,

but maybe three or four days ago, it was widely

believed in our circles that there

was an investigation in progress that would establish

because of the high integrity of the investigator, that the president had engaged

in conspiracy and coordination with the Russians with respect

to the 2006. Campaign ad A whole

series of stories about a meeting in the Trump Tower in New York about a project for

a Trump tower in Moscow, about a number of other things were lined

up to support this proposition and everything that moved

against it was characterized as statements. And then suddenly it appears that the report

is delivered and a summary sentence says that it did not establish

that the president was engaged in conspiracy or coordination with the Russians.

And as part of that, the letter that the attorney general released

said that clearly a report had distinguished

between two forms of alleged Russian involvement

in the 2016 election. One form which was alleged and covered by the indictment

was a Russian government operation, allegedly hacking the d-s.c for whatever

purposes. The other form, which was what you describe as Russian interference and a couple of times

as Russian government interference was the Internet research agency of St. Petersburg,

which the Mueller report, apparently, according to Bach, clearly state separates

from the Russian government and considers to be a private enterprise operation, which doing what

it did would not be illegal if it had been in the United States and probably is not illegal anyway, since anybody

can put anything up on Facebook without legal consequences, far as I’m aware. So I’m wondering

in that light. First of all, how much of the burden you’ve placed

on President Trump and a lot of great things, but how much of a burden

you placed on him would be lifted if things which had he had called fake news

now turned out to have, let’s say, a preponderance of the evidence

on their side and whether this concept of

faith versus truth has to yield to something else, which perhaps suggests that

this is this this is kind of an accusation that is being used for political effect.

But where are they? Claire, it’s not entirely clear at any given time. What is place?

Well, I think, first of all, we don’t know what Mueller found. Yes, we know

we do. We do. The country we have. We have a summary statement

that I quoted and we have the proposition that if that were grossly

misleading, Mueller and his team would be perfectly at liberty to let us

know as, for example, when Arch Cox was fired. They did show up in court

with their materials the next day saying, you know, let’s get some rest. But there’s been

no sign of any such disagreement between Barr and Mueller’s abad

characterization and Mueller’s report. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is an important word there.

And also, the question the underlying question

that you haven’t mentioned is what criterion was Mueller

using in deciding that there was not evidence of

collaboration or conspiracy to open up? But I made clear that the proposition

on the critical side of the spectrum was that Mueller, given his high reputation

for integrity, was going to give us a true statement. Now we can question whether

we can now go and question his integrity, but that’s a lot to be proud of that I don’t

think that’s at issue. And I just said there wasn’t any evidence of conspiracy.

So what I didn’t say there was no evidence or transcripts. Special counsel did not establish

yet, but did not establish. And the assumption of many people is that that means that

he could not establish an prosecutorial terms that would be defensible in a court of law

rather than something that is that is wrong by the state,

which we also associate editor. But it’s quite distinct because there from what he

says about obstruction of justice, where he says that Mueller did not draw a conclusion, did not exonerate

the president. That is very different from the language he uses with respect to Russia.

Well, look, very different. We’ll see. But if we if we ever do get enough

of the report to examine, we’ll see what it says. I mean,

I think these are legitimate terms for discussion or items

for discussion. I agree with you. It raises the question about whether fake news is a

is a. A really useful category.

That’s like us voter. And then, Steve, the thing that concerns me in this whole discussion

is how fake news ultimately leads to fake history.

And we’re largely historians here. And should it take 50 years

to figure out what really happened in this situation?

I’m thinking of weapons of mass destruction. You were having a lot of fun poking at Trump to

our general amusement. But this goes back way,

way, way back. This has been going on for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

Fake news, false flag events have been used to.

Create history the way the rulers wanted to be

understood. And so this is with the new technology,

the ability to create this. It’s so much more and more

refined. How do we discern what’s

really going on? Probably good humor. I just recently heard

a statement by some reporters that they don’t investigate the news. They

just report it. Well, I think they’re admitting they’re simply stenographers.

I mean, to me, a journalist is supposed to investigate before they

report, but they’re saying, no, that’s not our job. Well, who are they in that sentence?

I don’t remember exactly what stenographer was. Yeah, the term of opprobrium used for Judith Miller of

The New York Times during the lead up. Nocera. Oh, sure, sure.

That’s like that. So, you know, we we’ve we’ve got these things happening

and. We know that Kennedy wasn’t shot by Oswald. But

at the moment? How do we get to the real truth? What? Separate from the fake to the reality?

Well, I mean, that is a very legitimate question, but there may be degrees

of fakeness to fake news and some of the things that in fact

many of the things that President Trump has uttered that have been classed as fake news

fall and the extreme end of that continuum. However, we

may characterize it, that just. I mean, he’s he states things that

there I mean, take they take the first thing he did upon his election, which was the two things

he declared that his crowd was bigger than any other crowd in history, which

is patently, obviously false. And everybody else recognized

that, except for Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer and maybe Fox News.

I don’t know. I wasn’t watching it at the time, but. And then the other thing was that three million

illegal aliens voted in California. And that’s why Hillary beat him in California.

Now, that is utterly preposterous by anybody’s

evaluation, isn’t it? There’s that Trump.

What about Bush? The younger, certainly. Do you think of his own?

Well, I’m not trying to defend Bush the younger, if that’s what you’re getting at. I mean, there’s no

doubt that there has been misrepresentation and governments have

often specialized in misrepresentation. As you were suggesting, people die

because Trump’s. Exaggeration,

say, of the situation. Whereas Bush, the younger

has killed, it’s been responsible for the death of millions of people.

That’s not a question that I would be interested in contesting. But that’s not

really what’s at issue here because they can use Stigall

and Bergan, and that’s how quickly my vow of silence again to sign it. I don’t think I don’t.

You said the word journalism in the room. Yes. But I think it’s really important to reflect.

You know, I you know, the importance of that

passion for mediating the news to us. For all my criticism of our

or practice of news consumption. Right. I do think also that recognizing

the ideals and ethics of that profession and holding that profession

to its ideals of ethics is a big part of any possible solution to

this situation. Steve? Well, I had a brief remark which

is very obvious and probably unnecessary, just that the fact

that it is often difficult to tell fake news from true

and sometimes we get it wrong doesn’t in the least imply

that there’s no difference and that the difference doesn’t matter. Right.

I. Say, that’s partly because I sense. The greatest

danger here is not that there’s a lot of fake news around, but they were beginning to tolerate

it and not care about whether it’s fake

or true that we. We see it as. A flag rather

than a quotation to the flag, you know, see that flag? True.

It’s a symbol of your group. And I’m afraid a lot

of what passes as news is. Playing that role, I

say this partly because a lot of this seems familiar to me from

commentary on the history of science. You know, when you study the history of science, you

learn how much it’s involved with human motivations and prejudices

and how often people have gotten things wrong. And some commentators,

mostly not scientists, but sociologists and a few historians,

have been led to feel that science itself is a social construct

and that a set of equation is governed.

Motion of the planets is an expression of the culture of its

times. And well, fortunately, that view is less popular

now than it was in the 90s. But in the toleration

for fake news, I see the same kind of.

Lack of. Vigilance about truth.

I saw it in the history of science. Yup, yup. Very good point. pro-Mitt underly.

Much of what you’ve talked about.

Our value systems and I have not heard you specifically talked of that point.

How do value systems figure in to. What is true and what is false?

Well, I thought I did refer to the impact value systems

and the way we encounter or.

And then describe whatever we’re talking about. But in any case,

there’s no doubt that. But there are many different types of values after all, some

of which are explicitly ethical and others of which are

are, you might say, perceptual and cognitive. And

obviously, those things have very significant impacts.

You know, I live in a retirement and I rub shoulders with lots of different kinds

of people that I never rub shoulders with before. I find values, value

systems held by these people, odd ones, not on much vakil

the fact that they don’t even know their value systems. Well, that may be

a matter of the sort of amnesia or dementia,

rather something about in political discourse. Well, it’s just

unbelievable. That’s Vera. Yeah. I guess my question is, does

the media I guess in some ways it seems about journalism and the speech

questions about anti scientism, this doesn’t journalism or actually the organized media

deserve a large share of the credit

or blame, if you will, in the following sense. Is that OK? President

Trump and Trump is talking about fake news, but it’s really to look at the

history of the media. You looked at the abolition of the fair

bet. You know, there was some fair news that the red line case, the fair news doctrine has

made candidates can look at the prohibition or the deregulation

that companies can own the same media markets and those same newspapers.

And in a town, they can own cross-media platforms. Radio is the break down of this.

You have also the sale of is almost now. No

newspapers that are owned by families anymore. It seems to me at times that, of course, a falling

share of the voting, but not in terms of the actual shares in terms of

distribution of profit. So just. Governing for governing purposes, namely

across the country, a on all of the all this has been absorbed by these newspaper

groups or newspaper chains. And so you look at that and you look at some towns and I’m familiar with Annapolis, Maryland,

Burlington, Vermont and freaken all think of examples of where the newspapers and statesmen. Here’s a great

example of this. All the other newspapers, we’ve got it. And you say this is really due to the selling

out of the news to the bottom line and above all else and

to reduce costs and to see the shutting down of farm bureaus across very grave. You have

bureaus in Washington. So what does this mean? It means we have these simple ideas about the world,

but there’s no contesting news or challenges out there locally for people alone counter.

And so you have and you looked at the news prior to Trump and it really depleted quality

of the news. And you had previous to Trump, you had all that click did the incentives

for quick news and so forth. And so it it seems that it’s kind of this commercialization

of the way by which we perceive and know the world that has been so

capitalized, if you will, that has really done a great deal to make it vulnerable

to what is happening now with artificial intelligence and Instagram and so forth, because

it’s still cold. If the efforts of the journalism school at Columbia was here a couple

of days ago and he made the extra point that the major news outlets

are increasingly moving to a subscriber model, which then gives them a very strong incentive

to cater to what they believe to be the beliefs of their subscription. Right. And so you’ve got these columns

of really distinct belief and fact structures

in the media that it’s close to the issues that is coming here.

So the past has to. Fifteen years we’ve inadvertently heard calls for the abolition of the Electoral

College, etc. Most recently, for example, by a couple of. Democratic

presidential 20:20 hopefuls. So a couple of questions. My

first is. Rarely, I’d like to hear your thoughts help us. Rarely do people really

kind of examine how this would work, given

the prevalence of what Steve Benen refers to as psyops or disinformation campaigns.

One person, one vote. Var. a very

vulnerable system. Yet people. Put

it forth as if it’s. Various issues

in our republic and my second question. And feel free to answer one or the other on

how much time you have. You mentioned that the RAND report on

tooth decay identified. I think if I understood and heard you correctly, you mentioned

media and academia as the source of. Just information. And so

I’m wondering if you can elaborate on that. And do you mean that there’s been.

There’s great skepticism, though, in terms of skeptics, skepticism of expertise

or experts. Accusation of surface track accusations,

sophistry and so on, so forth. And you would know what you’re if you would elaborate

based on. Well, I don’t

think so. Yeah. The Rand Corporation listed the academia

and in a long list of a fairly long list of other

actors and it was not a major focus of their study.

But there are now I mean, there is tremendous pressure in some quarters to diversify

academic faculties. For example, the National Association of Scholars is an example

of an interest group trying to bring that about.

Well, yeah. Free speech.

Yeah. And the free speech is a very. Has become a very controversial

much differentially defined as a result on

the Electoral College. The. I don’t think I don’t know anybody

who thinks that abolishing the Electoral College will solve all our problems. But the

big problem it will solve is the problem of most a lot of big

majority of people voting for one candidate and the other one winning, which. And

the shifting of or the placement of greater

weight on the votes of people in Wyoming, say,

than in California. And the we have lots of data about that. Now, there

there are particular instances where the Electoral College may favor,

depending on the exact situation at any given moment, way may favor some big

states over little states. And scholars have done a lot of work

on that. There was an interesting piece in The Wall Street Journal last week about. About that

as well. But but basically, the big problem with the Electoral

College from that point of view is just that it de-legitimatize the the

victory in terms of the principle of one person, one vote,

which

this source

information from, which is.

Certain percentage, 75 percent of revenues from Facebook or what have you. I mean, there are real

risks as well. Oh, that’s definitely true. But that isn’t obviated

by the Electoral College. In fact, it might well be worse than terms.

As a consequence of those things, given the election, I think

we’ve reached the point where we need to call for a concluding comments.

I’d like to reflect on the Walters comparison of fake news with fake

history. I was made aware of that two nights ago. I don’t know if any of you saw it on

PBS, a show on King Arthur. It’s on Netflix, too.

And it was a real eye opener, I guess. Well, in part, I guess,

because what they’ve determined is that the Anglo-Saxons

invasion of Britain was not really violent. You know that.

Well, we know from DNA evidence for the past 10 years that

a small minority of Britons are actually German. And they said that they’re

mostly Wrentham or Celts sensibly. So

now we have the archaeologists kicking in and they’re agreeing with the DNA

as well. And and the whole legend of King Arthur defending

against the Anglo-Saxons and the barbarians that I’ve been teaching this stuff,

you know. Oh, sorry.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry for yelling at you to have but you care and

you will repent. You know that. No. You are

ready to time to be home. The conference is 20 years now since, so archeology

determined that there was no evidence from conflict. Well, let me ask

you something. Yeah. It’s taken so long to sink in.

Well, the real fake history is jefferey of ground with respect.

That’s right. So far, we have not mentioned that. Yes. The bottom line is skewed since a chronicle

of dimensioned George. I feel with classic rock we haven’t had a problem throwing

nonexistence at the Trojan War for centuries. But I do want to point out this one

name has not turned up in Scotland at all. Harry Frankfurt. Some of you will

note the property. An article in Britain in 86 executed as a best selling book

in 0 5. I won’t use the 8 letter word in this gathering, but it was on B S

and much of the concern of someone like Glenn Kessler enumerating Trump’s lies

is really misplaced because everything he says from probably Babytalk forward

is simply B.S. situational without regard for the truth or falsehood

of what he’s saying. It’s very important, I think, to realize that this underlies an awful

lot of what goes on in the Jonathan Haidt brightest minds thinking and mindsets

of people who aren’t interested in truth or falsehood about how it makes them

feel about themselves, about the group’s properties in a massacre. It’s that whatever

else you say about it, it’s all the. Yes. And I was

surprised that didn’t turn up at all. It’s nice to talk about the true nature news and real news,

but B.S. is the order of the day. I think that makes

a good.