Speaker – David Edwards (GOVERNMENT)<\/p>\n
David Edwards has been a dedicated reader of American and British newspapers and opinion magazines since the 1950s. In fact, he still subscribes to more than one hundred print editions of newspapers, magazines, and journals. He will talk about how fake news has evolved into the versions of it that increasingly pervade politics today. And he will answer the question, what are some possible ways of understanding and coping with the challenge to democracy posed by fake news?<\/p>\n
Having taught government courses at UT for fifty years, David Edwards three years ago became Professor Emeritus. He has written books on international relations (Creating a New World Politics and Arms Control in International Politics) as well as American politics (The American Political Experience). He has served as a consultant to the Institute for Defense Analyses, the Industrial Management Center, and the Danforth Foundation. He has written for the Washington Post, the Nation, and La Quinzaine Litt\u00e9raire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Speaker – David Edwards (GOVERNMENT) David Edwards has been a dedicated reader of American and British newspapers and opinion magazines since the 1950s. In fact, he still subscribes to more than one hundred print editions of newspapers, magazines, and journals. He will talk about how fake news has evolved into the versions of it that […]","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","episode_type":"audio","audio_file":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/05\/Fake-News.mp3","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"82.28M","filesize_raw":"86282048","date_recorded":"29-03-2019","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":""},"tags":[204,21,7,40,202,208,203,194,210,206,209,207,205,120],"categories":[],"series":[2],"class_list":{"0":"post-201","1":"podcast","2":"type-podcast","3":"status-publish","5":"tag-alternative-facts","6":"tag-america","7":"tag-british","8":"tag-british-studies-lecture-series","9":"tag-david-edwards","10":"tag-democracy","11":"tag-fake-news","12":"tag-government","13":"tag-international-relations","14":"tag-media","15":"tag-new-world-politics","16":"tag-newspapers","17":"tag-politics","18":"tag-university-of-texas","19":"series-bsls","20":"entry"},"acf":{"related_episodes":"","hosts":[{"ID":949,"post_author":"10","post_date":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_date_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content":"\n
Wm. Roger Louis is head of the British Studies Lecture Series. He is an American historian and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin<\/a>. Louis is the editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire<\/a><\/em>, a former president of the American Historical Association<\/a> (AHA), a former chairman of the U.S. Department of State's Historical Advisory Committee, and a founding director of the AHA's National History Center in Washington, D. C.<\/p>\n","post_title":"Wm. Roger Louis","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"wm-roger-louis","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_modified_gmt":"2021-01-20 19:50:06","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=949","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"guests":[{"ID":829,"post_author":"45","post_date":"2020-06-23 19:47:10","post_date_gmt":"2020-06-23 19:47:10","post_content":"\n Professor Edwards teaches political and social theory, American politics, public policy, and international relations. His research interests include the philosophy of social science, noetic sciences, theories of administration, the theory and practice of public policy, international relations theory, American foreign policy, and U.S.- Russian relations. He has been a research associate at the Washington Center of Foreign Policy Research, a visiting professor at New York University, holder of Rockefeller and NATO research fellowships, and a consultant to the Danforth Foundation, the Industrial Management Center, and the Institute for Defense Analyses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His books include\u00a0Creating a New World Politics, International Political Analysis, Arms Control in International Politics, The American Political Experience<\/em>, and\u00a0Practicing American Politics<\/em>. He has written for\u00a0The Nation, The Washington Post, La Quinzaine Litteraire<\/em>, and other periodicals.<\/p>\n","post_title":"David Edwards","post_excerpt":"","post_status":"publish","comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","post_password":"","post_name":"david-edwards","to_ping":"","pinged":"","post_modified":"2020-06-23 19:47:10","post_modified_gmt":"2020-06-23 19:47:10","post_content_filtered":"","post_parent":0,"guid":"http:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/?post_type=speaker&p=829","menu_order":0,"post_type":"speaker","post_mime_type":"","comment_count":"0","filter":"raw"}],"transcript":" We you play.<\/p>\n Some of you have been looking at the<\/p>\n addition of the Morning Post. I should point out that this was a regular<\/p>\n issue. In other words, all 28 pages that was distributed in Washington,<\/p>\n somewhat to the surprise of a lot of people who actually wanted to believe in<\/p>\n what we will call fake news. So that’s one of the questions<\/p>\n that we will ask of David Edwards this afternoon to explain to<\/p>\n people at The Washington Post. I know from a friend they’re<\/p>\n rather cheered on they the pranksters and said that this was a great, great<\/p>\n feat. In other words, the post itself, with the exception of the<\/p>\n lawyers who had to deal with infringement of copyright. The rest of the people<\/p>\n at the post thought that this was a great stunt. And they added<\/p>\n that would this this were actually true. David Edwards is<\/p>\n well known to all of us. I will simply say that he has taught<\/p>\n at the University of Texas for 50 years, which is somewhat<\/p>\n of a an unprecedented record, I believe<\/p>\n surpassed. But in the government department, I think not.<\/p>\n So David Edwards is going to speak to us this afternoon about fake news and then Sam Baker<\/p>\n is going to respond. David?<\/p>\n Well, thank you all for coming. Normally, I speak relatively<\/p>\n extemporaneously with some notes, but this topic is important enough that I’ve actually<\/p>\n written a manuscript. So you’ll pardon me if<\/p>\n I. This seems a little less spontaneous than it might be, I hope, because it might<\/p>\n be a little more substantive than it would be if it were extemporaneous.<\/p>\n There’s always been fake news, although it’s nature and circulation and characterizations<\/p>\n of disliked news as fake have evolved with politics and technology<\/p>\n and are on an unprecedented scale today. Some trace fact news,<\/p>\n false new fake news back to ancient Egypt when in the 13th century<\/p>\n B.C., Ramses the Great portrayed the battle of Kaddish as an Egyptian<\/p>\n victory when the treaty between the Egyptians and the Hittites revealed that the battle was<\/p>\n actually a stalemate. It became much more widespread following<\/p>\n invention of the printing press in fourteen thirty nine. The first recognized<\/p>\n instance of fake news in what became the United States occurred when Benjamin Franklin, of all<\/p>\n people, wrote fake news about murderous scalping Indians in league with<\/p>\n King George in order to generate support for the American Revolution.<\/p>\n There’ve been many since. Alternative facts, on the other hand, are a<\/p>\n new phenomenon, at least by that name, Trump presidential counselor Kellyanne<\/p>\n Conway coined that term in explaining, quote unquote, how newly inaugurated<\/p>\n President Trump’s press secretary could declare that Trump’s inaugural crowd was larger than President<\/p>\n Obama’s. When crowd estimates, aerial photos and other evidence<\/p>\n clearly demonstrated the opposite. She later defended her choice of words,<\/p>\n defining the term as, quote, additional facts and alternative information.<\/p>\n It was later pointed out that the term bore a close relation to the term truthful,<\/p>\n high powered type hyper hyperbole. In Trump’s 1987<\/p>\n book, The Art of the Deal, where it was defined allegedly by Trump,<\/p>\n although he had a ghostwriter, as we know, defined as, quote,<\/p>\n an innocent form of exaggeration and a very effective form of promotion<\/p>\n in that book. Trump plain that quote, People want to believe that something is the biggest<\/p>\n and the greatest and the most spectacular. And quote, the derision<\/p>\n that Conway was widely subject to eventually subsided. And both Austrian and German<\/p>\n linguist declared the phrase alternative facts. The non-word of<\/p>\n the year twenty seventeen. But when the use of the term alternative<\/p>\n facts subsided, the use of the term fake news only increased. Led by the president<\/p>\n himself, the Washington Post has been keeping a running tally of, quote, false<\/p>\n or misleading, quaint claims, unquote, by the president since his inauguration<\/p>\n as a March 17th. Twenty nineteen. The latest time when they published their total, the<\/p>\n total was nine thousand one hundred seventy nine with false or misleading<\/p>\n claims. That includes 201 uses of the term fake news<\/p>\n to apply to statements that he disapproves of or disagrees with and to various news<\/p>\n organizations, especially CNN. The president perhaps inadvertently<\/p>\n revealed what he means by fake in a tweet May 9th, 2018. Quote,<\/p>\n The fake news is working overtime just reported that despite the tremendous<\/p>\n success we are having with the economy and all things else. Ninety one percent<\/p>\n of the network news about me is negative, parentheses fake.<\/p>\n Why do we work so hard and working with the media when it is corrupt? Take away<\/p>\n credentials and grow. Trump told CBS as Leslie Stall<\/p>\n before the cameras were turned on for an interview. Quote, You know why I do it?<\/p>\n I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories<\/p>\n about me, no one will believe you. And quote,<\/p>\n The Washington Post archive also offers thousands of examples of fake news generated by<\/p>\n the president himself. This is what is most unprecedented. The president not only<\/p>\n as the aplysia of the term fake news to other sources, but also as himself, the source<\/p>\n of fake news. In 2018, academic researchers studied consumption<\/p>\n of fake news during the 2016 campaign. One conclusion, according to Brendan<\/p>\n Nyhan, one of the authors interviewed by NBC News, was that, quote, People got<\/p>\n vastly more misinformation from Donald Trump than they did from fake news Web sites<\/p>\n and the quote. However, there has been a stunning proliferation of<\/p>\n fake news Web sites since the Internet became accessible for public use in the 1990s.<\/p>\n These Web sites specialize in creating attention grabbing, grabbing news, quote,<\/p>\n unquote. Sometimes this is simply for profit. For example, Justin Cohler created<\/p>\n a series of fake news Web sites, quote, for fun and, quote, earning some thousand<\/p>\n dollars a month from advertising on his sites. That advertising<\/p>\n has nothing to do with the value of the site. It’s just how many clicks you get and<\/p>\n you get rewarded with money for having<\/p>\n large numbers of clicks. The more troubling instances, however,<\/p>\n are those engineered by political operatives at home or abroad. And the most effective<\/p>\n may be those created by governments to employ bots, computer robots to<\/p>\n generate fake news and spread it to various social media to influence elections. As the Mueller<\/p>\n investigation found the Russians did during the 2016 presidential election.<\/p>\n Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Worldwide Web, asserted in 2017 that<\/p>\n the three most significant new disturbing Internet trends, trends that are preventing<\/p>\n the Internet from, quote, serving humanity. D and quote as he intended it to do,<\/p>\n those three trends are the surge in the use of the Internet by governments for both citizen<\/p>\n surveillance and cyber warfare and fake news.<\/p>\n One particularly concerning fun phenomenon today is what are called Internet trolls, people who<\/p>\n sow discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people by posting inflammatory<\/p>\n or otherwise provocative material in online communities such as newsgroups, forums,<\/p>\n chat rooms or blogs. Some trolls operate for their own amusement, but<\/p>\n others purposely abuse or mislead, often in political realms. In the 2016 election,<\/p>\n Russia had an army of more than a thousand paid trolls engaged in creating and circulating<\/p>\n fake news and disinformation about Hillary Clinton, and created social media<\/p>\n accounts that resembled actual voters in swing states which were used to disseminate<\/p>\n damaging assertions about Clinton and Russia continued such activities after<\/p>\n the election to further its own political goals. In 2018,<\/p>\n the Rand Corporation, perhaps the premier think tank established during the Cold War to conduct research<\/p>\n originally for the military, but increasingly also for other entities and audiences, published<\/p>\n a study it called Truth Decay. The study analyzed four trends that<\/p>\n detected one increasing disagreement about facts and analytical interpretations<\/p>\n of facts and data to a blurring of the line between opinion and fact.<\/p>\n experience over fact and for declining trust in formerly<\/p>\n respected sources of factual information. That study concluded that, quote,<\/p>\n such phenomena as fake news are only symptoms of a much more complex system<\/p>\n of challenges, one with roots in the ways that human beings process information.<\/p>\n The prevailing political and economic conditions and the nature of the changed media<\/p>\n environment, end quote. This study found the drivers of these trends to be<\/p>\n cognitive processing and cognitive biases. Changes in the information system.<\/p>\n Transformation of conventional media, internet and social media. Spread of disinformation.<\/p>\n Competing demands on the educational system. And polarization. Political<\/p>\n polarization. Socio demographic and economic polarization. It found<\/p>\n the agents of truth decay to be media, academia and research organizations.<\/p>\n Political actors and the government and foreign actors.<\/p>\n The challenge posed by fake news and related manipulations of the Internet and of communication<\/p>\n more generally is becoming a universal problem. Quote, Fake news is now<\/p>\n the poison in the bloodstream of our societies, destabilising democracy and<\/p>\n undermining trust in institutions and the rule of law and quote, wrote<\/p>\n Tony Hall, director general of the BBC in the Financial Times recently.<\/p>\n Continuing to quote, It has become a powerful tool for profit<\/p>\n or political gain at all levels, from villages to repressive regimes<\/p>\n in the West. We’ve witnessed its power to distort public debates, fueled divisions and influence<\/p>\n voters in emerging and developing economies that can generate violence in<\/p>\n these countries where digital literacy is lower and democratic institutions more fragile.<\/p>\n The rise of misinformation constitutes an urgent crisis and quote.<\/p>\n Nearly a billion people are registered to vote in India’s upcoming elections. And India<\/p>\n is one of the fastest growing markets for social media platforms and messaging apps.<\/p>\n Imagine the opportunities for misinformation and disinformation. The distinct discussion<\/p>\n there is misinformation is relatively inadvertent. Disinformation is purposefully<\/p>\n misleading people. Imagine<\/p>\n the opportunities for misinformation and disinformation in this country, where last year<\/p>\n by two men on a motorbike appeared on WhatsApp. Other<\/p>\n instances of slaughter resulting from it, or at least encouraged by misinformation and disinformation,<\/p>\n have occurred recently in Nigeria and Myanmar. And most recently, rumors<\/p>\n circulated on social media, especially Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter, that Roma,<\/p>\n better known as Gypsies, were kidnaping children, according to some allegations for organ<\/p>\n traffic trafficking in Parisian suburbs, and that led to violent attacks<\/p>\n on Roma encampments in the suburbs of France. That’s from today’s New York Times.<\/p>\n Media can, of course, be manipulated whatever form they take. And they have been historically as any<\/p>\n survey of, for example, American newspapers in the areas of Andrew Jackson or Abraham<\/p>\n Lincoln will readily demonstrate. But the possibilities for such manipulation<\/p>\n are multiplied when media take to the Internet, and the effects can be much more powerful<\/p>\n when items go viral. In addition, efforts to expose and correct such<\/p>\n effects always lag the damage and pale in impact once that damage has<\/p>\n been done. Manipulation is also more easily kept anonymous,<\/p>\n rendered pseudonymous or attributed falsely on the Internet. As the foreign interventions<\/p>\n in the 2016 presidential election uncovered and documented in the Mueller investigation<\/p>\n clearly showed. And with the development and continued improvement of deep fake<\/p>\n video manipulation technology, it becomes very easy to make anything look<\/p>\n believable. In addition, recent improvements in speech synthesis technology<\/p>\n are making it possible to generate seemingly authentic audio of anyone saying whatever<\/p>\n the manipulator wishes. The only requirement is that there be a one minute<\/p>\n of recorded speech by that person, and it doesn’t matter what that person was saying in that one minute.<\/p>\n These prospects would be ominous enough if they were limited to countries with long democratic tradition.<\/p>\n But they’re now being adopted with enthusiasm by many of the most autocratic regimes around<\/p>\n the world, ranging from the more advanced autocratic countries, especially Russia and China,<\/p>\n to less developed countries such as Egypt. And they will become much more ominous<\/p>\n as artificial intelligence capabilities advance and spread or are sold<\/p>\n to autocratic regimes. One imminent development will be what<\/p>\n can be called the industrialization of propaganda. As one recent analysis<\/p>\n argued, quote, a-I driven applications will soon allow<\/p>\n authoritarians to analyze patterns in a population’s online activity,<\/p>\n identify those most susceptible to a particular message, and target them more<\/p>\n precisely with propaganda in a weekly viewed in a widely viewed TED<\/p>\n talk. In twenty seventeen techno sociologist Zanab to<\/p>\n fetch, she described a world where, quote, people in power use these<\/p>\n algorithms to quietly watch us, to judge us and to nudge us<\/p>\n to predict and identify the troublemakers and the rebels and quote.<\/p>\n The result, she suggests, may be an authoritarianism that transforms our private screens<\/p>\n into persuasion architectures at scale to manipulate individuals<\/p>\n one by one, using their personal individual weaknesses and vulnerabilities,<\/p>\n end quote. This is likely to mean far more effective influence campaigns<\/p>\n aimed at either citizens of authoritarian countries or those of democracies<\/p>\n abroad.<\/p>\n To understand the nature and the comprehensiveness of the challenge of fake news, we must explore<\/p>\n the various stages through which it emerges. These are creation, propagation<\/p>\n or dissemination, reception, exception or acceptance or rejection,<\/p>\n evaluation and avoidance or overcoming. Creation<\/p>\n can be de novo. For example, the story developed and spread during the twenty sixteen<\/p>\n campaign that the Clintons were secretly running a sex trafficking pizza parlor in<\/p>\n Maryland or the Russian government’s various. That that sounds<\/p>\n preposterous. But one guy heard that and took an automatic<\/p>\n weapon and went to that pizza parlor and started shooting people.<\/p>\n So the Russian government’s various forms of meddling<\/p>\n in that election and others, including the Brexit referendum and the French presidential<\/p>\n election. Or it can involve interpretation or corruption by a conspiracy<\/p>\n assumption, for example, such as conspiracy theorist, media figure Alex Jones,<\/p>\n Austen Zohn, Alex Jones developed after the Sandy Hook massacre<\/p>\n of elementary school students and teachers at Sandy Hook, asserting that the entire event<\/p>\n was actually staged by gun control advocates. Or it can arise through<\/p>\n Labe. And he’s being sued in court now by some of the families of<\/p>\n murdered children. So we’ll see what happens there. Or<\/p>\n it can arise through labeling something President Trump has excelled at in terming the Mueller investigation<\/p>\n of possible collusion with Russia fake news and a witch hunt.<\/p>\n Next, propagation or dissemination? Propagation or dissemination<\/p>\n can occur when the president takes advantage of his bully pulpit to speak or when a media<\/p>\n outlet such as Fox News, quote unquote, decides what to purvey on<\/p>\n its platform, which it is established via its twin slogans. Fair<\/p>\n and balanced and we report, you decide. Or it can occur<\/p>\n through social media, which can take forms such as blogging, tweeting and retweeting<\/p>\n and commenting on content on an existing site. Or it can take the form<\/p>\n of what one critic terms pre news in which media figures and or institutions<\/p>\n develop, elaborate upon and speculate upon the development and significance<\/p>\n of something that hasn’t yet happened or hasn’t come to fruition. A phenomenon that was<\/p>\n very widespread during the two years of awaiting the outcome of the Mueller investigation.<\/p>\n Next reception involves accepting and believing or rejecting the content<\/p>\n propagated this stage, which I shall examine in more detail below, is shaped by what<\/p>\n some call the filters or predispositions that the audience employs<\/p>\n or unconsciously is influenced by. This cannot be avoided.<\/p>\n It necessarily occurs in any act of perception and cognition.<\/p>\n Next evaluation involves attempting to determine the accuracy or truth of the,<\/p>\n quote, news and report. This can involve various approaches. The most common<\/p>\n today, at least in the media, is generally called fact checking. It’s commonly done by various<\/p>\n media, newspapers, news services, foundations or other absurdly impartial<\/p>\n individuals or groups. Examine various such programs. Shortly.<\/p>\n Avoiding or overcoming fake news can be an individual product project or an<\/p>\n institutional project. Traditionally, the most common recommendations were<\/p>\n look for and explore both sides of the matter and look for objectivity.<\/p>\n Today, we know that neither of these admonitions is adequate. We know that there are almost always,<\/p>\n at least in political matters, more than two sides, as there are<\/p>\n usually more than two actors, each of which will have his or her or its side.<\/p>\n More sophisticated analysis and understandings today recognize that largely<\/p>\n because of the psychological influences cited above concerning evaluation. There’s<\/p>\n no clear single objective description or explanation of most social and political<\/p>\n matters. The traditional approach commonly recommended to information consumers<\/p>\n is to consult multiple sources, ideally sources with different values, interests<\/p>\n and or goals. When I was young, I used this approach subscribing to various<\/p>\n news and opinion periodicals understood to be liberal and conservative.<\/p>\n Such an approach can help but one achieve a more balanced and nuanced understanding of political<\/p>\n questions. But it will be of little help in dealing with possible fake news items for<\/p>\n obvious reasons.<\/p>\n More sophisticated analysis of conflicts now recognize and employ what might<\/p>\n be called the politics of problem definition, which recognizes that both presentation<\/p>\n of a dispute and formulation of descriptions as well as possible solutions<\/p>\n depend enormously on how the issue at hand is described or defined. This<\/p>\n is much more than a matter of definitions of key terms, although that in itself can be important.<\/p>\n Consider the case of what has long been called the welfare problem. Some think the problem<\/p>\n is that the existing programs costs too much, so they favor cutting benefits to cut costs.<\/p>\n Others think the problem is the benefits don’t go far enough to improve outcomes so they favor expanding<\/p>\n and improving benefits. Some think the problem is that recipients should have to earn their<\/p>\n benefits so they favor work requirements. Others think the problem is that benefits<\/p>\n foster dependents, so they favor making benefits less appealing and adding programs to encourage<\/p>\n or even require work. These are only four positions, but the practical discussion<\/p>\n of welfare. There are hundreds of positions with dozens of definitions of the problem<\/p>\n and therefore even more recommendations of program changes.<\/p>\n But underlying these practical challenges is the deeper fact that anyone’s<\/p>\n perspective will be influenced by his or her situation and education or socialization.<\/p>\n There’s a longstanding adage in politics that where you stand depends on where you sit.<\/p>\n Lyndon Johnson titled his presidential memoirs The Vantage Point in Cinema.<\/p>\n There’s what’s known as the Rashomon Effect. Each of these reminds us of something.<\/p>\n We all know that how we view things depends on our location, situation, experience,<\/p>\n etc. Furthermore, we know that our brain and our perceptual apparatus<\/p>\n function as filters which inescapably censor and distort.<\/p>\n If our brains actually had to deal with the entirety of circumstances in any decision<\/p>\n situation. We would be frozen in indecision. So our brains<\/p>\n edit what comes to them from our sense organs and present that edited pictured serve as if<\/p>\n it were what’s really there. Really true, really accurate. In fact, however,<\/p>\n we never get more than a highly edited or censored report. Our brains are always abstracting<\/p>\n from a plethora of sensory stimuli to limit our experience of quote, sensory<\/p>\n overload is sensory overload. Furthermore, they encounter such a<\/p>\n panoply of differentiating phenomena that any instant that they are necessarily<\/p>\n so that in any instant they are necessarily also abstracting from<\/p>\n difference to make it possible for us to believe we know what the situation actually<\/p>\n is. Given all this, is it any wonder that people experience what we<\/p>\n assume is the same reality differently and that disagreement inevitably<\/p>\n arises? This is the circumstance in which a democratic country requires<\/p>\n that its citizens be able to decide and act responsibly, and in which today they<\/p>\n are constantly subject to a barrage of conflicting media influences. Most<\/p>\n of them being of questionable reliability or accuracy.<\/p>\n Media are often at Mount Admi, admonished to emphasize objectivity in their<\/p>\n reporting, but careful analysis of challenges to accurate reporting reveal that such<\/p>\n a goal is problematic at best. The classic media critic indeed, perhaps the first media critic,<\/p>\n A.J. Liebling, famously asserted that freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns<\/p>\n one. That was half a century ago, long before the electronic media<\/p>\n that was supposed to democratize both production and consumption of news and<\/p>\n labeling say there were serious limitations on what could be learned from the media. In the words of<\/p>\n one analyst, quote, Beyond our limited daily experience, it is television, radio,<\/p>\n newspapers, magazines and books, the media that furnish our consciousness with the people,<\/p>\n places and events that we agree to call reality. But reality, in a literal<\/p>\n sense is what happens to three and a half billion people. That would now be six billion<\/p>\n all over the world, 24 hours a day out of that teeming experience.<\/p>\n The media can only give us in words and pictures a representation of tiny fragments<\/p>\n that are deemed significant or suggestive and quote.<\/p>\n Owners, editors and reporters did whatever curating to use a term in vogue today.<\/p>\n They’re whatever, whatever. And reporters did whatever curating there was<\/p>\n objectivity conceived of as anything more than verifying the accuracy of an account of something<\/p>\n was virtually impossible then. And that was before electronic media made<\/p>\n the need for such curation, both much more important and much more difficult, given<\/p>\n the instantaneous nature of electronic media in the era of 24 hour news cycle<\/p>\n and the skills necessary for consumers to do their own duration may well be atrophying<\/p>\n as the challenges continually magnified. Consider this suggestion quote<\/p>\n As the reliance on television as a teaching learning device in the largest sense increases,<\/p>\n many interpretive and interactive skills may fall into disuse and decay.<\/p>\n And since human interaction is the very heart and soul of the political process, a general decline<\/p>\n in the analytical and expressive skills which characterize that interaction in the society<\/p>\n as a whole cannot help but be reflected in the polity as well.<\/p>\n And quote, that penetrating and ominous critique was made in 1976,<\/p>\n long before the advent of computers and electronic media<\/p>\n efforts to analyze, critique and select among various allegedly correct or accurate<\/p>\n pieces of news. Ultimately reduce once the factors mentioned above have been considered<\/p>\n to the question of truth. But what do we mean by truth? And how are we determine what<\/p>\n qualifies as truth?<\/p>\n There are three fundamentally different criteria used and debated for determining the truth of an assertion<\/p>\n or a description. The first is the coherence or consistency criterion.<\/p>\n Does the item in question fit well with the other things that one believes? Is it logically consistent<\/p>\n with one’s other beliefs? The second is the correspondence criterion.<\/p>\n Do the observable features of the assertion correspond to what our senses tell us<\/p>\n about the relevant world? The third is the pragmatic criterion. Does<\/p>\n the account work in the real world, enabling one to be effective in acting? Which<\/p>\n of these three truth criteria is relevant and helpful in assessing the truth claims of the possible fake<\/p>\n news item? Whether it seems to be worthy of acceptance is basically a philosophical<\/p>\n question, and that’s something that philosophers have been debating for centuries and do not seem to have<\/p>\n reached agreement. Most people tend to prefer the correspondence<\/p>\n theory these days, at least in everyday life, but employing that criterion in matters<\/p>\n of political dispute can be particularly difficult because so much of politics involve secrecy,<\/p>\n governmental secrecy, commercial secrecy, personal secrecy. Thus,<\/p>\n practically speaking, in political disputes, most people seem to default to some version of the coherence<\/p>\n criterion. Does believing this particular assertion as a candidate for being true<\/p>\n news fit with other things one believes about politics? Or does it conflict with other<\/p>\n held beliefs? Most of the work being done today in public discourse<\/p>\n revolves around what is commonly called fact checking. Many newspapers carry<\/p>\n contributions from PolitiFact, a nonpartisan fact checking Web site created<\/p>\n to sort out the truth in American political discourse. It was created by the Tampa<\/p>\n Bay Times, a Florida newspaper, in 2007 and was acquired by the Poynter<\/p>\n Institute, a nonprofit school for journalists in 2018.<\/p>\n It’s financed by contributions, grants and ads placed on its Web site, PolitiFact.com.<\/p>\n It evaluates the accuracy of statements by and about politicians producing a Truth-O-Meter<\/p>\n rating for each. As of March 25th, 2019, PolitiFact<\/p>\n had evaluated six hundred fifty seven statements by President Trump. It found four percent<\/p>\n true 11 percent. Mostly true 14 percent.<\/p>\n Half true. Twenty one percent. Mostly false. 34 percent false.<\/p>\n And 15 percent. Pants on fire. The Washington<\/p>\n Post has its own fact checker rating system, awarding a varying number of Pinocchios<\/p>\n to statements that range from shading of the facts, but no outright falsehoods<\/p>\n to four Pinocchios for whoppers. The British Broadcasting<\/p>\n Corporation has introduced an international anti disinformation initiative,<\/p>\n which it calls beyond fake news and has incorporated something it calls reality check<\/p>\n as a part of its daily news output. In addition, it has invited media organizations<\/p>\n from around the world to join a special conference this coming summer to explore how to tackle<\/p>\n the global rise of misinformation, deliberate disinformation and bias with the goals<\/p>\n of developing a concrete action plan that can be implemented quickly.<\/p>\n Governments are also becoming involved. President Trump makes varied suggestions often.<\/p>\n You probably heard a bunch of those. We may be pardoned<\/p>\n if we are doubtful that his suggestions would conduce to more accurate reporting.<\/p>\n The Indian government has published draft proposals to deal with this problem that include requiring platforms<\/p>\n to break, end end encryption if asked to trace the source of objectionable<\/p>\n content, something that many observers see as a threat to privacy and freedom of speech.<\/p>\n These fears are magnified by the text of another Indian governmental proposal,<\/p>\n which would require companies to use automated filters to police content. That is,<\/p>\n quote, This is the words of the draft legislation<\/p>\n blasphemous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, pedophilic,<\/p>\n libelous, invasive of another’s privacy, hateful or racially<\/p>\n or ethnically objectionable, disparaging rel. or encouraging<\/p>\n money laundering or gambling or otherwise unlawful in any<\/p>\n manner whatsoever. And quote.<\/p>\n How many statements that anybody makes. Wouldn’t disqualified in one or<\/p>\n another of those criteria? Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which reported this proposal,<\/p>\n pointed out that, quote, The algorithm that could decide what content falls into<\/p>\n such categories hasn’t been invented yet and grow. But that’s little comfort when<\/p>\n we imagine politicians or bureaucrats in any country attempting to apply such regulations.<\/p>\n The Chinese government, for example, has long been at work suppressing political discourse it deems<\/p>\n inappropriate. The Poynter Institute created an international<\/p>\n fact checking network to promote excellence, in fact, checking in 2016.<\/p>\n Its governing principles to which member organizations are operations must subscribe are first<\/p>\n a commitment to nonpartisanship and fairness. Second, a commitment to transparency<\/p>\n of sources. Third, a commitment to transparency of funding and organization.<\/p>\n And fourth, a commitment to transparency of methodology. And fifth, a commitment<\/p>\n to open and honest corrections. But all the fact checking<\/p>\n and all the penetrating criticism of false and misleading statements will have little effect and<\/p>\n less than until citizens pay much more attention to these analysis and become<\/p>\n more careful in ascribing truth or accuracy to the rhetoric employed by these<\/p>\n political actors and pundits and by themselves and their conversations.<\/p>\n Who knows how to bring that about? That’s it.<\/p>\n Sam Baker Oh. But I’ve generated many<\/p>\n pages of notes listening to that brilliant talk.<\/p>\n And I really feel like, David, the thing I want to do most in my response is<\/p>\n to elaborate a little bit on a fascinating<\/p>\n point you made at lunch today about<\/p>\n the importance of thinking not just about. What’s true<\/p>\n and false in relation to fake news, but to also think about<\/p>\n the form of news itself. Think about what news is<\/p>\n about. In some ways like that. The arbitrariness and the strangeness<\/p>\n of news as a social practice. And I think did a fantastic<\/p>\n job of analyzing fake news in relation to both the form and the<\/p>\n content of the phenomenon. The second part of the talk you talked<\/p>\n about the different varieties of truth and the different kinds of verification<\/p>\n that we would want to engage in and talk about some of the public engines of fact checking in a<\/p>\n way that I think is really important. But in the first part of the talk, you talked really well about<\/p>\n the form of fake news, its etiology, its origins, its spread,<\/p>\n its techniques, its history, analyze it in terms of its propagation,<\/p>\n its dissemination. And you talked about the changes in the<\/p>\n mediation news recently in ways that I thought just were really<\/p>\n clear and well laid out. But I think that thinking about the form and the<\/p>\n content of fake news together, as as you discussed them, made me want to<\/p>\n challenge our audience today in this regard.<\/p>\n I think if you all looking around the room, I think of you as your warriors<\/p>\n for truth. Right? You all are people who you really care<\/p>\n to verify information, who are willing to change your minds. Right. Who,<\/p>\n you know, will like me, you know, bear grudges against news organizations<\/p>\n that you feel like lead you down the garden path. I was embarrassed recently when<\/p>\n a colleague said to me, well, you know, there’s been a special feature<\/p>\n on that area of interest. The New York Times, you know. Have you read it? No, I don’t read The New York Times.<\/p>\n No. I canceled my princess script, The New York Times in September 2016. And,<\/p>\n you know, of course, when there’s an article and someone sends to me, I open it, you know,<\/p>\n by going through a browser without cookies and getting the page open, you know, but I’m<\/p>\n never going to subscribe New York Times again until, you know, there’s a major, you know,<\/p>\n public reckoning with what happened in 2016.<\/p>\n This is seen as extremely eccentric, you know, by this. This colleague of mine, but I think<\/p>\n that I share this stance of mine because I think actually it will resonate in the room.<\/p>\n Maybe you wouldn’t go to that extreme, but you recognize the you know, that you two would be somebody<\/p>\n who would want to take a stand against, you know, a news organization<\/p>\n that had misled you. Right. And yet, even as you would be like warriors<\/p>\n for truth. Look around the room and I see avid consumers<\/p>\n of the news, people who consume the news all the time. You might even have sneak peek at their<\/p>\n phones during the talk to see what the latest news might be. Right<\/p>\n now, you might just be to think while the people will think that I’m checking for important<\/p>\n work emails. But in fact, I’m seeing with the latest, you know, news is about<\/p>\n the you know, the situation with the Mueller report on Twitter or I might<\/p>\n even be seeing the latest. Sporting News. If I can get<\/p>\n into, you know, real secret shame is around news consumption, right? We. We are the warriors for the truth, but<\/p>\n we’re also people who are, you know, in many cases and certainly my case<\/p>\n addicted to the news. That’s an aspect of the form of<\/p>\n fake news that I want to really highlight for us and like challenge us to reflect on it. The<\/p>\n food writer Michael Pollan. You know, the guy whose slogan is Eat food,<\/p>\n not too much, mostly plants. Right. He has a great term for talking about<\/p>\n the wrong kind of food, the bad kind of food. He says while, you know, it’s highly engineered food,<\/p>\n it’s engineered to be hyper palatable. So delicious<\/p>\n geniuses, right? Made that, you know, that<\/p>\n formula for Coke. Right. That formula for Cheerios. That’s why we eat too much of those things.<\/p>\n Well, you know, the fake news, right, is fake, but the news is hyper powerful<\/p>\n and it’s engineered for our consumption and it’s micro-targeted to us individually<\/p>\n with the very best the very latest artificial intelligence. All right. Keep us clicking to<\/p>\n keep us engaged. No matter how we might fight against<\/p>\n falsehood in the media arena, the news. Right. We should also reckon with<\/p>\n the extent to which we, too, are keeping the ball on the air just by being these avid news consumers,<\/p>\n even as we look for the truth. Because part of the problem might be. With<\/p>\n the biggest lie of all, which is that we need to know the latest information.<\/p>\n Do we really do we always need to? I try to challenge myself<\/p>\n to keep my phone in my pocket. And I hope, well, I’ll think about<\/p>\n doing the same in the face of fakeness.<\/p>\n I’d like to make one point specific point to put this in the British context, and that is<\/p>\n you will remember the bus before the referendum in which it was written<\/p>\n that three hundred and fifty million pounds a week instead of<\/p>\n being paid. The European Union would go into the National Health Service. So this<\/p>\n has a very practical application to the problems<\/p>\n of Brexit. The what is called now in Britain, the never random.<\/p>\n So Philip questions David Doyle. Well, just<\/p>\n to represent the kind of statistical political science unit I’ve already talked to you about before.<\/p>\n I think that most political scientists who’ve been studying the media since the 1920s on to the present have basically come<\/p>\n to the conclusion of what they call the minimal effects thesis, which is that most people don’t pay attention to politics.<\/p>\n Most people don’t pay attention to the media when they do. They tend to be very good at filtering<\/p>\n out views that are contrary to their own and very, very important views that are similar to their own,<\/p>\n that elections are affected by campaigns, let alone<\/p>\n by news media coverage, and that there are a lot of sort of fundamental political, economic, social factors<\/p>\n that seem to go into elections that don’t really have much to do with media coverage. And so<\/p>\n there are sort of stories and anecdotes and TEDTalks and whatever. But I still think that the sort of fundamental<\/p>\n message of political science research, even today research on Facebook and networks which suggest that people<\/p>\n are have more diverse political messages than we might sort of think about the story of everybody sort<\/p>\n of just being in one kind of funnel suggests that this really isn’t really either new or<\/p>\n really much of a change or a big deal or consequential to politics. So what’s your thought of take<\/p>\n on this political science perspective? I think it’s wrong<\/p>\n for my target. I I think<\/p>\n well, we know that it is difficult to establish causation in any<\/p>\n human realm. And so to<\/p>\n some extent, any of our analysis are interpretive<\/p>\n using a bunch of presuppositions. And perhaps this is one of them<\/p>\n that. I had one set in your typical political scientist, as<\/p>\n in others, that perhaps but I do think that certain<\/p>\n aspects of what has been happening in politics have had<\/p>\n significant impact. I think one example of that would be what happened<\/p>\n late in the last presidential campaign when comi<\/p>\n flip flopped on Hillary’s emails. First of all, the media treated<\/p>\n Hillary’s emails as a really enormous issue errors<\/p>\n including well, including The New York Times, although it was not as big a<\/p>\n consumption of consumer of that or purveyor of that view as others. But<\/p>\n but but many people do think that that changed some people’s views in<\/p>\n the last week or two of the campaign. And there’s some survey evidence of<\/p>\n that. I think and it didn’t take many views to be changed in three key states<\/p>\n to to produce the Electoral College victory of Donald Trump.<\/p>\n So that I think that kind of thing may be more common than we<\/p>\n than we expect. And a much of it depends on how you survey people and whether<\/p>\n your survey is really accurate in terms of both<\/p>\n sample size, etc. and truth telling by the people<\/p>\n who are doing the responding, which there’s some evidence is often a problem, too.<\/p>\n I mean, for example, when they after each election they survey people to find out<\/p>\n whether you voted or not in the presidential election and if so, how you voted. And it always turns out that<\/p>\n a much bigger percentage of the population voted than actually voted, because<\/p>\n it’s embarrassing to say you didn’t vote. So I don’t know. I mean,<\/p>\n I’m more skeptical when you want to make a quick response. I’ll the last thing I’ll say, which is that.<\/p>\n Yeah, I I I find that research persuasive. But then<\/p>\n I think also political campaigns do as well, which is why they do focus their messaging<\/p>\n now, not on persuasion, but on turnout. Right. And turn turn out to try to get<\/p>\n people who are already in their camp out to the polls, like through the messaging<\/p>\n and through their manipulation of messages of messages in the media. But then<\/p>\n to that extent that the obverse of that, if that’s true, is that those of us who are persuaded,<\/p>\n you know, might realize that we we really don’t need to be contending in the public<\/p>\n 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<\/p>\n Facebook, you know, flamewar. Right. It’s not going to change anybody’s minds. Right.<\/p>\n That that that’s not the way to do it, which we’re just letting ourselves feel better about ourselves while<\/p>\n giving Facebook endless clicks. And that’s the better thing to do. You know, as people have realized,<\/p>\n if you want to affect elections is to, you know, work to affect turnout<\/p>\n directly, not indirectly. Of course, most a fair amount of the<\/p>\n Russian intervention in the last election was designed to depress turnout. Exactly.<\/p>\n And again, it’s a little hard to know quite how<\/p>\n to measure that effectively. But a lot of people think that that was<\/p>\n an effect, an effective effect of Russian meddling. Jamie Galbraith<\/p>\n Wolfer trying to wrap my mind around framing here. It seems<\/p>\n to me that if we’re going to accept the concept of fake news<\/p>\n that is in opposition to something else, which is the true news,<\/p>\n there has to be a kind of duality here. And in that connection, if<\/p>\n you’ll forgive me for reaching deep into the mists of the past,<\/p>\n but maybe three or four days ago, it was widely<\/p>\n believed in our circles that there<\/p>\n was an investigation in progress that would establish<\/p>\n because of the high integrity of the investigator, that the president had engaged<\/p>\n in conspiracy and coordination with the Russians with respect<\/p>\n to the 2006. Campaign ad A whole<\/p>\n series of stories about a meeting in the Trump Tower in New York about a project for<\/p>\n a Trump tower in Moscow, about a number of other things were lined<\/p>\n up to support this proposition and everything that moved<\/p>\n against it was characterized as statements. And then suddenly it appears that the report<\/p>\n is delivered and a summary sentence says that it did not establish<\/p>\n that the president was engaged in conspiracy or coordination with the Russians.<\/p>\n And as part of that, the letter that the attorney general released<\/p>\n said that clearly a report had distinguished<\/p>\n between two forms of alleged Russian involvement<\/p>\n in the 2016 election. One form which was alleged and covered by the indictment<\/p>\n was a Russian government operation, allegedly hacking the d-s.c for whatever<\/p>\n purposes. The other form, which was what you describe as Russian interference and a couple of times<\/p>\n as Russian government interference was the Internet research agency of St. Petersburg,<\/p>\n which the Mueller report, apparently, according to Bach, clearly state separates<\/p>\n from the Russian government and considers to be a private enterprise operation, which doing what<\/p>\n it did would not be illegal if it had been in the United States and probably is not illegal anyway, since anybody<\/p>\n can put anything up on Facebook without legal consequences, far as I’m aware. So I’m wondering<\/p>\n in that light. First of all, how much of the burden you’ve placed<\/p>\n on President Trump and a lot of great things, but how much of a burden<\/p>\n you placed on him would be lifted if things which had he had called fake news<\/p>\n now turned out to have, let’s say, a preponderance of the evidence<\/p>\n on their side and whether this concept of<\/p>\n faith versus truth has to yield to something else, which perhaps suggests that<\/p>\n this is this this is kind of an accusation that is being used for political effect.<\/p>\n But where are they? Claire, it’s not entirely clear at any given time. What is place?<\/p>\n Well, I think, first of all, we don’t know what Mueller found. Yes, we know<\/p>\n we do. We do. The country we have. We have a summary statement<\/p>\n that I quoted and we have the proposition that if that were grossly<\/p>\n misleading, Mueller and his team would be perfectly at liberty to let us<\/p>\n know as, for example, when Arch Cox was fired. They did show up in court<\/p>\n with their materials the next day saying, you know, let’s get some rest. But there’s been<\/p>\n no sign of any such disagreement between Barr and Mueller’s abad<\/p>\n characterization and Mueller’s report. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is an important word there.<\/p>\n And also, the question the underlying question<\/p>\n that you haven’t mentioned is what criterion was Mueller<\/p>\n using in deciding that there was not evidence of<\/p>\n collaboration or conspiracy to open up? But I made clear that the proposition<\/p>\n on the critical side of the spectrum was that Mueller, given his high reputation<\/p>\n for integrity, was going to give us a true statement. Now we can question whether<\/p>\n we can now go and question his integrity, but that’s a lot to be proud of that I don’t<\/p>\n think that’s at issue. And I just said there wasn’t any evidence of conspiracy.<\/p>\n So what I didn’t say there was no evidence or transcripts. Special counsel did not establish<\/p>\n yet, but did not establish. And the assumption of many people is that that means that<\/p>\n he could not establish an prosecutorial terms that would be defensible in a court of law<\/p>\n rather than something that is that is wrong by the state,<\/p>\n which we also associate editor. But it’s quite distinct because there from what he<\/p>\n says about obstruction of justice, where he says that Mueller did not draw a conclusion, did not exonerate<\/p>\n the president. That is very different from the language he uses with respect to Russia.<\/p>\n Well, look, very different. We’ll see. But if we if we ever do get enough<\/p>\n of the report to examine, we’ll see what it says. I mean,<\/p>\n I think these are legitimate terms for discussion or items<\/p>\n for discussion. I agree with you. It raises the question about whether fake news is a<\/p>\n is a. A really useful category.<\/p>\n That’s like us voter. And then, Steve, the thing that concerns me in this whole discussion<\/p>\n is how fake news ultimately leads to fake history.<\/p>\n And we’re largely historians here. And should it take 50 years<\/p>\n to figure out what really happened in this situation?<\/p>\n I’m thinking of weapons of mass destruction. You were having a lot of fun poking at Trump to<\/p>\n our general amusement. But this goes back way,<\/p>\n way, way back. This has been going on for hundreds, if not thousands of years.<\/p>\n Fake news, false flag events have been used to.<\/p>\n Create history the way the rulers wanted to be<\/p>\n understood. And so this is with the new technology,<\/p>\n the ability to create this. It’s so much more and more<\/p>\n refined. How do we discern what’s<\/p>\n really going on? Probably good humor. I just recently heard<\/p>\n a statement by some reporters that they don’t investigate the news. They<\/p>\n just report it. Well, I think they’re admitting they’re simply stenographers.<\/p>\n I mean, to me, a journalist is supposed to investigate before they<\/p>\n report, but they’re saying, no, that’s not our job. Well, who are they in that sentence?<\/p>\n I don’t remember exactly what stenographer was. Yeah, the term of opprobrium used for Judith Miller of<\/p>\n The New York Times during the lead up. Nocera. Oh, sure, sure.<\/p>\n That’s like that. So, you know, we we’ve we’ve got these things happening<\/p>\n and. We know that Kennedy wasn’t shot by Oswald. But<\/p>\n at the moment? How do we get to the real truth? What? Separate from the fake to the reality?<\/p>\n Well, I mean, that is a very legitimate question, but there may be degrees<\/p>\n of fakeness to fake news and some of the things that in fact<\/p>\n many of the things that President Trump has uttered that have been classed as fake news<\/p>\n fall and the extreme end of that continuum. However, we<\/p>\n may characterize it, that just. I mean, he’s he states things that<\/p>\n there I mean, take they take the first thing he did upon his election, which was the two things<\/p>\n he declared that his crowd was bigger than any other crowd in history, which<\/p>\n is patently, obviously false. And everybody else recognized<\/p>\n that, except for Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer and maybe Fox News.<\/p>\n I don’t know. I wasn’t watching it at the time, but. And then the other thing was that three million<\/p>\n illegal aliens voted in California. And that’s why Hillary beat him in California.<\/p>\n Now, that is utterly preposterous by anybody’s<\/p>\n evaluation, isn’t it? There’s that Trump.<\/p>\n What about Bush? The younger, certainly. Do you think of his own?<\/p>\n Well, I’m not trying to defend Bush the younger, if that’s what you’re getting at. I mean, there’s no<\/p>\n doubt that there has been misrepresentation and governments have<\/p>\n often specialized in misrepresentation. As you were suggesting, people die<\/p>\n because Trump’s. Exaggeration,<\/p>\n say, of the situation. Whereas Bush, the younger<\/p>\n has killed, it’s been responsible for the death of millions of people.<\/p>\n That’s not a question that I would be interested in contesting. But that’s not<\/p>\n really what’s at issue here because they can use Stigall<\/p>\n and Bergan, and that’s how quickly my vow of silence again to sign it. I don’t think I don’t.<\/p>\n You said the word journalism in the room. Yes. But I think it’s really important to reflect.<\/p>\n You know, I you know, the importance of that<\/p>\n passion for mediating the news to us. For all my criticism of our<\/p>\n or practice of news consumption. Right. I do think also that recognizing<\/p>\n the ideals and ethics of that profession and holding that profession<\/p>\n to its ideals of ethics is a big part of any possible solution to<\/p>\n this situation. Steve? Well, I had a brief remark which<\/p>\n is very obvious and probably unnecessary, just that the fact<\/p>\n that it is often difficult to tell fake news from true<\/p>\n and sometimes we get it wrong doesn’t in the least imply<\/p>\n that there’s no difference and that the difference doesn’t matter. Right.<\/p>\n I. Say, that’s partly because I sense. The greatest<\/p>\n danger here is not that there’s a lot of fake news around, but they were beginning to tolerate<\/p>\n it and not care about whether it’s fake<\/p>\n or true that we. We see it as. A flag rather<\/p>\n than a quotation to the flag, you know, see that flag? True.<\/p>\n It’s a symbol of your group. And I’m afraid a lot<\/p>\n of what passes as news is. Playing that role, I<\/p>\n say this partly because a lot of this seems familiar to me from<\/p>\n commentary on the history of science. You know, when you study the history of science, you<\/p>\n learn how much it’s involved with human motivations and prejudices<\/p>\n and how often people have gotten things wrong. And some commentators,<\/p>\n mostly not scientists, but sociologists and a few historians,<\/p>\n have been led to feel that science itself is a social construct<\/p>\n and that a set of equation is governed.<\/p>\n Motion of the planets is an expression of the culture of its<\/p>\n times. And well, fortunately, that view is less popular<\/p>\n now than it was in the 90s. But in the toleration<\/p>\n for fake news, I see the same kind of.<\/p>\n Lack of. Vigilance about truth.<\/p>\n I saw it in the history of science. Yup, yup. Very good point. pro-Mitt underly.<\/p>\n Much of what you’ve talked about.<\/p>\n Our value systems and I have not heard you specifically talked of that point.<\/p>\n How do value systems figure in to. What is true and what is false?<\/p>\n Well, I thought I did refer to the impact value systems<\/p>\n and the way we encounter or.<\/p>\n And then describe whatever we’re talking about. But in any case,<\/p>\n there’s no doubt that. But there are many different types of values after all, some<\/p>\n of which are explicitly ethical and others of which are<\/p>\n are, you might say, perceptual and cognitive. And<\/p>\n obviously, those things have very significant impacts.<\/p>\n You know, I live in a retirement and I rub shoulders with lots of different kinds<\/p>\n of people that I never rub shoulders with before. I find values, value<\/p>\n systems held by these people, odd ones, not on much vakil<\/p>\n the fact that they don’t even know their value systems. Well, that may be<\/p>\n a matter of the sort of amnesia or dementia,<\/p>\n rather something about in political discourse. Well, it’s just<\/p>\n unbelievable. That’s Vera. Yeah. I guess my question is, does<\/p>\n the media I guess in some ways it seems about journalism and the speech<\/p>\n questions about anti scientism, this doesn’t journalism or actually the organized media<\/p>\n deserve a large share of the credit<\/p>\n or blame, if you will, in the following sense. Is that OK? President<\/p>\n Trump and Trump is talking about fake news, but it’s really to look at the<\/p>\n history of the media. You looked at the abolition of the fair<\/p>\n bet. You know, there was some fair news that the red line case, the fair news doctrine has<\/p>\n made candidates can look at the prohibition or the deregulation<\/p>\n that companies can own the same media markets and those same newspapers.<\/p>\n And in a town, they can own cross-media platforms. Radio is the break down of this.<\/p>\n You have also the sale of is almost now. No<\/p>\n newspapers that are owned by families anymore. It seems to me at times that, of course, a falling<\/p>\n share of the voting, but not in terms of the actual shares in terms of<\/p>\n distribution of profit. So just. Governing for governing purposes, namely<\/p>\n across the country, a on all of the all this has been absorbed by these newspaper<\/p>\n groups or newspaper chains. And so you look at that and you look at some towns and I’m familiar with Annapolis, Maryland,<\/p>\n Burlington, Vermont and freaken all think of examples of where the newspapers and statesmen. Here’s a great<\/p>\n example of this. All the other newspapers, we’ve got it. And you say this is really due to the selling<\/p>\n out of the news to the bottom line and above all else and<\/p>\n to reduce costs and to see the shutting down of farm bureaus across very grave. You have<\/p>\n bureaus in Washington. So what does this mean? It means we have these simple ideas about the world,<\/p>\n but there’s no contesting news or challenges out there locally for people alone counter.<\/p>\n And so you have and you looked at the news prior to Trump and it really depleted quality<\/p>\n of the news. And you had previous to Trump, you had all that click did the incentives<\/p>\n for quick news and so forth. And so it it seems that it’s kind of this commercialization<\/p>\n of the way by which we perceive and know the world that has been so<\/p>\n capitalized, if you will, that has really done a great deal to make it vulnerable<\/p>\n to what is happening now with artificial intelligence and Instagram and so forth, because<\/p>\n it’s still cold. If the efforts of the journalism school at Columbia was here a couple<\/p>\n of days ago and he made the extra point that the major news outlets<\/p>\n are increasingly moving to a subscriber model, which then gives them a very strong incentive<\/p>\n to cater to what they believe to be the beliefs of their subscription. Right. And so you’ve got these columns<\/p>\n of really distinct belief and fact structures<\/p>\n in the media that it’s close to the issues that is coming here.<\/p>\n So the past has to. Fifteen years we’ve inadvertently heard calls for the abolition of the Electoral<\/p>\n College, etc. Most recently, for example, by a couple of. Democratic<\/p>\n presidential 20:20 hopefuls. So a couple of questions. My<\/p>\n first is. Rarely, I’d like to hear your thoughts help us. Rarely do people really<\/p>\n kind of examine how this would work, given<\/p>\n the prevalence of what Steve Benen refers to as psyops or disinformation campaigns.<\/p>\n One person, one vote. Var. a very<\/p>\n vulnerable system. Yet people. Put<\/p>\n it forth as if it’s. Various issues<\/p>\n in our republic and my second question. And feel free to answer one or the other on<\/p>\n how much time you have. You mentioned that the RAND report on<\/p>\n tooth decay identified. I think if I understood and heard you correctly, you mentioned<\/p>\n media and academia as the source of. Just information. And so<\/p>\n I’m wondering if you can elaborate on that. And do you mean that there’s been.<\/p>\n There’s great skepticism, though, in terms of skeptics, skepticism of expertise<\/p>\n or experts. Accusation of surface track accusations,<\/p>\n sophistry and so on, so forth. And you would know what you’re if you would elaborate<\/p>\n based on. Well, I don’t<\/p>\n think so. Yeah. The Rand Corporation listed the academia<\/p>\n and in a long list of a fairly long list of other<\/p>\n actors and it was not a major focus of their study.<\/p>\n But there are now I mean, there is tremendous pressure in some quarters to diversify<\/p>\n academic faculties. For example, the National Association of Scholars is an example<\/p>\n of an interest group trying to bring that about.<\/p>\n Well, yeah. Free speech.<\/p>\n Yeah. And the free speech is a very. Has become a very controversial<\/p>\n much differentially defined as a result on<\/p>\n the Electoral College. The. I don’t think I don’t know anybody<\/p>\n who thinks that abolishing the Electoral College will solve all our problems. But the<\/p>\n big problem it will solve is the problem of most a lot of big<\/p>\n majority of people voting for one candidate and the other one winning, which. And<\/p>\n the shifting of or the placement of greater<\/p>\n weight on the votes of people in Wyoming, say,<\/p>\n than in California. And the we have lots of data about that. Now, there<\/p>\n there are particular instances where the Electoral College may favor,<\/p>\n depending on the exact situation at any given moment, way may favor some big<\/p>\n states over little states. And scholars have done a lot of work<\/p>\n on that. There was an interesting piece in The Wall Street Journal last week about. About that<\/p>\n as well. But but basically, the big problem with the Electoral<\/p>\n College from that point of view is just that it de-legitimatize the the<\/p>\n victory in terms of the principle of one person, one vote,<\/p>\n which<\/p>\n this source<\/p>\n information from, which is.<\/p>\n Certain percentage, 75 percent of revenues from Facebook or what have you. I mean, there are real<\/p>\n risks as well. Oh, that’s definitely true. But that isn’t obviated<\/p>\n by the Electoral College. In fact, it might well be worse than terms.<\/p>\n As a consequence of those things, given the election, I think<\/p>\n we’ve reached the point where we need to call for a concluding comments.<\/p>\n I’d like to reflect on the Walters comparison of fake news with fake<\/p>\n history. I was made aware of that two nights ago. I don’t know if any of you saw it on<\/p>\n PBS, a show on King Arthur. It’s on Netflix, too.<\/p>\n And it was a real eye opener, I guess. Well, in part, I guess,<\/p>\n because what they’ve determined is that the Anglo-Saxons<\/p>\n invasion of Britain was not really violent. You know that.<\/p>\n Well, we know from DNA evidence for the past 10 years that<\/p>\n a small minority of Britons are actually German. And they said that they’re<\/p>\n mostly Wrentham or Celts sensibly. So<\/p>\n now we have the archaeologists kicking in and they’re agreeing with the DNA<\/p>\n as well. And and the whole legend of King Arthur defending<\/p>\n against the Anglo-Saxons and the barbarians that I’ve been teaching this stuff,<\/p>\n you know. Oh, sorry.<\/p>\n I’m sorry. I’m sorry for yelling at you to have but you care and<\/p>\n you will repent. You know that. No. You are<\/p>\n ready to time to be home. The conference is 20 years now since, so archeology<\/p>\n determined that there was no evidence from conflict. Well, let me ask<\/p>\n you something. Yeah. It’s taken so long to sink in.<\/p>\n Well, the real fake history is jefferey of ground with respect.<\/p>\n That’s right. So far, we have not mentioned that. Yes. The bottom line is skewed since a chronicle<\/p>\n of dimensioned George. I feel with classic rock we haven’t had a problem throwing<\/p>\n nonexistence at the Trojan War for centuries. But I do want to point out this one<\/p>\n name has not turned up in Scotland at all. Harry Frankfurt. Some of you will<\/p>\n note the property. An article in Britain in 86 executed as a best selling book<\/p>\n in 0 5. I won’t use the 8 letter word in this gathering, but it was on B S<\/p>\n and much of the concern of someone like Glenn Kessler enumerating Trump’s lies<\/p>\n is really misplaced because everything he says from probably Babytalk forward<\/p>\n is simply B.S. situational without regard for the truth or falsehood<\/p>\n of what he’s saying. It’s very important, I think, to realize that this underlies an awful<\/p>\n lot of what goes on in the Jonathan Haidt brightest minds thinking and mindsets<\/p>\n of people who aren’t interested in truth or falsehood about how it makes them<\/p>\n feel about themselves, about the group’s properties in a massacre. It’s that whatever<\/p>\n else you say about it, it’s all the. Yes. And I was<\/p>\n surprised that didn’t turn up at all. It’s nice to talk about the true nature news and real news,<\/p>\n but B.S. is the order of the day. I think that makes<\/p>\n a good.<\/p>\n"},"episode_featured_image":false,"episode_player_image":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2017\/09\/british-studies.png","download_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-download\/201\/fake-news-alternative-facts-and-the-question-of-truth.mp3","player_link":"https:\/\/podcasts.la.utexas.edu\/british-studies-lecture-series\/podcast-player\/201\/fake-news-alternative-facts-and-the-question-of-truth.mp3","audio_player":"