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People Who Know How the News Is Made Resist Conspiratorial Thinking (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Conspiracy theories, like the world being flat or the Moon landings faked, have proven notoriously difficult to stomp out. Add a partisan twist to the issue, and the challenge becomes even harder. Even near the end of his second term, barely a quarter of Republicans were willing to state that President Obama was born in the U.S. If we're seeking to have an informed electorate, then this poses a bit of a problem. But a recent study suggests a very simple solution helps limit the appeal of conspiracy theories: news media literacy. This isn't knowledge of the news, per se, but knowledge of the companies and processes that help create the news. While the study doesn't identify how the two are connected, its authors suggest that an understanding of the media landscape helps foster a healthy skepticism.
[...] "Despite popular conceptions," the authors point out, "[conspiratorial thinking] is not the sole province of the proverbial nut-job." When mixed in with the sort of motivated reasoning that ideology can, well, motivate, crazed ideas can become relatively mainstream. Witness the number of polls that indicated the majority of Republicans thought Obama wasn't born in the U.S., even after he shared his birth certificate. While something that induces a healthy skepticism of information sources might be expected to help with this, it's certainly not guaranteed, as motivated reasoning has been shown to be capable of overriding education and knowledge on relevant topics.
[...] As a whole, the expected connection held up: "for both conservatives and liberals, more knowledge of the news media system related to decreased endorsement of liberal conspiracies." And, conversely, the people who did agree with conspiracy theories tended to know very little about how the news media operated.
[...] "Despite popular conceptions," the authors point out, "[conspiratorial thinking] is not the sole province of the proverbial nut-job." When mixed in with the sort of motivated reasoning that ideology can, well, motivate, crazed ideas can become relatively mainstream. Witness the number of polls that indicated the majority of Republicans thought Obama wasn't born in the U.S., even after he shared his birth certificate. While something that induces a healthy skepticism of information sources might be expected to help with this, it's certainly not guaranteed, as motivated reasoning has been shown to be capable of overriding education and knowledge on relevant topics.
[...] As a whole, the expected connection held up: "for both conservatives and liberals, more knowledge of the news media system related to decreased endorsement of liberal conspiracies." And, conversely, the people who did agree with conspiracy theories tended to know very little about how the news media operated.
Did you know that the rates of ice cream consumption and murder both rise at almost the same rate? That's because people get irritable when it is too hot for their comfort.
The entire basis for this article is meaningless, "While the study doesn't identify how the two are connected, its authors suggest that an understanding of the media landscape helps foster a healthy skepticism." Correlation DOES NOT EQUAL causation. The study basically discovered nothing at all.
It's not quite that simple. It isn't that they are mouthpieces for corporate PR, so much as that they don't always look too carefully at the PR blurbs that corporations send out, nor apply a healthy enough dose of skepticism.
The problem fundamentally is that at the local level, journalism doesn't pay very well, and only a few people are lucky enough to make it to the top tier TV/radio/newspaper outlets where it does pay well. This means most of the best and brightest tend to avoid the whole field unless they are really motivated. You have to assume that most of the people doing the reporting and investigating did not double-major in anything, and have no deep knowledge of any other subject besides communications, lack solid grounding in statistics, and so on, which makes them easier to mislead. And by the time they get old enough to be cynical enough to distrust the corporate PR stuff, they're too expensive to keep on the payroll.
Of course, eventually even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while, and there are a lot of journalists out there, so in aggregate, mistakes tend to be self-correcting eventually, but it's a very real problem, and IMO is getting worse with each passing year.
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JournoList. Now without the autocorrect for journalist.
Passionately Indifferent
Noting that (sigh), even as of December 2017, people still believe Obama was born in Kenya
You know, the really sad part is that since his mother is a known American citizen, none of that "where was he born" nonsense ever mattered in the slightest; yet, socially, we allowed the mass media to convince us that it did.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Very interesting post. I remember as a child having a very firmly defined sense of right and wrong, truth and non-truth. It was binary and relatively uninformed, however as I began to read the encyclopedias at my house I developed a system of grading "truth" and knowledge that was no longer binary. There was true, false, told as true (or false) when it was known to bet the opposite, told as true (or false) by many but unsubstantiated, generally known as true (and it is not), generally known as false (and it is not), generally known as wither true or false (and it is!), reported as true (or false) merely for entertainment, reported as true (or false) merely to be contradictory, reported as true (or false) merely to be inflammatory, devils advocacy (I didn't call it this as a child, I leaned the phrase much later when accused of doing it by a teacher)...There were more, many more.
After a couple of years of this, at about age 9, I realized that the vast majority of human beings I was forced to interact with were completely full of shit, had no regard for actual truth and knowledge, and carried around a bunch of completely false information in their heads that allowed them to justify their own actions without ever engaging in any serious introspection or circumspect examination of reality.
Nothing I have seen in the rest of my time on this planet has contradicted this thought with regard to the vast majority of humans.
The problem with exposure as a panacea for this type of pervasive thought is that people continue to bring themselves with them to their new areas of exposure. They go to church, and because they are judgmental and small minded, turn God into a judgmental and small minded reflection of themselves. They go to school, and because they are both insecure and tyrannical, they turn their schools into adult daycare with whacked out cultural rules that prevent humans from ever having a real interaction with other humans. They go to work, and because they are obsessed with their own success as a means to quiet their own insecurity and inadequacy, they create an environment where everyone needs to watch their back, must be guarded, defensive of their position and reputation lest someone stomp all over their future prospects. Ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
I get what you are saying though. Exposure is key, like the Mark Twain quote about travel implies. However, it also takes a receptive spirit for that exposure to do it's work.
What is missing is simple, and can be summed up in one word: Humility.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Brietbart.
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const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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