This post is a departure from my usual presentation of
quantitative, objective data in the form of charts. This post is more personal, less quantified,
and possibly more important.
This post is about truth.
It is about misinformation campaigns in the media. It is about people who believe in propaganda,
and people who create an alternate, irrational reality.
This post is about how news media have been subverted by
political interests in the United States, and by state interests in other parts
of the world. It is about how news media
use human psychological weaknesses to manipulate public opinion.
This post is about people who believe in nonsense. It is about those who believe the Apollo moon
landing was faked in Hollywood. It is
about people who don’t believe in climate change. It is about those who believe President Barack
Obama plans to mobilize the U.S. Army to declare martial law in Texas. (And about the Texas governor who gives credence
to such nonsense). It is about those who
believe President Obama was born in Kenya, or is a Muslim, or would in any way betray
the United States. It is about those who
believe anti-American propaganda in Russian state-owned media.
It is about people choosing to believe nonsense instead of
documented truth. It is about people
choosing to live in deliberate and willful ignorance.
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Willful
Ignorance
Not long ago, I had an altercation on Facebook.
A friend posted something about American astronaut Buzz
Aldrin, the second man to step on the moon.
I commented that my uncle, a former military pilot and aerospace
engineer, had designed the antenna on the lunar lander. My uncle’s antenna allowed the lunar lander
to communicate across 250,000 miles to earth, sending mechanical parameters,
voice and video signals across that vast distance. My uncle was quietly proud; he never spoke
about the work, but a plaque hung in the hallway of his house.
Someone commented that he didn’t believe that men had landed
on the moon.
I was astonished. I
was outraged.
We argued.
I wrote about the tens of thousands of people, like my
uncle, who worked on the program. I
mentioned 4 billion-year-old moon rocks, which were analyzed at my university
while I attended graduate school. Such
rocks could not have been counterfeited.
I wrote about the cost of the program, representing 0.5 % of America’s
GDP during the Vietnam War. There is
physical evidence. There are photos of
the abandoned landing modules made by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. There are laser reflectors placed on the moon
by Apollo astronauts which are still used for precisions measurements of the
moon’s orbit.
All of my words were futile.
My antagonist was unmoved. His
arguments became more absurd; his comments became more insulting. He suggested that robots had landed on the
moon in the 1960’s – ridiculous, as the required computer technology did not
exist in the 1960s.
Words cannot express my anger. With unbelief, this apparently intelligent
person dishonors one of the greatest accomplishments of mankind. He dishonors those who accomplished the feat.
This person chooses to reject all
reasonable evidence of truth and to believe something nonsensical.
I call that willful ignorance.
--
Misinformation
We live in an age of misinformation.
In America, commercial interests with a political agenda have
taken control of many of the major news services in the country. At best, these
commercial interests have abandoned the idea of objective reporting, in favor
of “news-ertainment”, anything that produces better ratings and advertising
revenue. At worst, these interests have
deep political objectives and are manipulating the news for political
gain. Journalistic ethics are failing,
and objective reporting has been replaced by advocacy journalism, or in simpler
terms, propaganda. Reporting is
relentlessly biased, opinionated, incomplete, and constructed for the purpose
of manipulating public opinion.
In many countries, the government or government-controlled
organizations have taken control of new services. Governments are increasingly aggressive in
censoring the internet and censoring the news.
Some nations have hired armies of shills (“trolls”) to write commentary
on the Internet, and funded false “independent” websites dedicated to spreading
government lies. Currently, Russian
state-owned media is engaged in propaganda campaigns against America, western
Europe, and to justify Russian intervention in Ukraine. This propaganda uses distortion across a wide
spectrum from fascism to homosexuality to impugn the character of the
west. The strangest accusation that I
encountered in Russian media was that American psychologists approve of
pedophilia. Social media is used to
spread such lies and deception; I just watched an anti-American video posted on
You-tube. The video is a fraud; the
events it depicts did not happen. But
the video allegedly attracted 500,000 views on the first day.
Misinformation is generally not in the form of outright lies. Rather, the general technique in America is
more subtle. Misinformation consists of innuendo,
irrelevant negative associations, selective and incomplete evidence, pejorative
photography or reporting, etc. Many of
these techniques are based on well-known psychological phenomena, such as those
discussed by Dan Ariely in Predictably Irrational (http://danariely.com/the-books/),
and Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow (http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555). It is disturbingly easy to manipulate the
human mind and modern news organizations are ready to do it.
Techniques of Opinion Manipulation
News organizations are increasingly manipulating public opinion for
political gain. Here are some of the
techniques used to influence the public perception of a story.
Confirmation Bias
One of the strongest techniques of manipulation is self-induced by
viewers. People invariably favor
evidence that reinforces existing beliefs, and tend to discount or discredit
evidence that opposes their existing beliefs.
Anchoring
Anchoring is the technique of providing a reference point to the
viewer. The viewer is biased by the
reference point in weighing deviations from that point.
Emotional Arousal
Emotional arousal is used to influence viewers. Typically, something of highly negative
emotional content is used to smear a political opponent. I sometimes call this “pushing the ‘outrage’
button”.
The Halo Effect
An irrelevant positive or negative trait is associated with a target,
in order to bias the viewer’s perceptions about unrelated traits.
The Endowment Effect
People value things they possess
higher than things they do not possess.
Suggestions of possession are used to promote nationalism.
“Expert” Opinion
Disproportionate or illegitimate “expert” testimony is broadcast to
influence viewers, regardless of whether the expert opinion actually represents
the mainstream expert viewpoint.
These techniques can be seen every day on Fox News (with its
Orwellian motto “Fair and Balanced”), on MSNBC, on RT (Russia Television) News,
in the opinion pages of The Dallas Morning News and other papers, and sadly,
the newest acquisitions of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp, the Wall Street Journal
and Barron’s magazine. These formerly
had the highest standards of journalistic integrity, and are now corrupted. It is becoming more and more difficult to
find objective news.
Integrity in Journalism
I intend to write further about integrity in
Journalism. Truthful information is the
lifeblood of every society. Propaganda
is a cancer which will destroy the society.
There should be a Hippocratic Oath of Integrity for journalists, binding
them to truthful, complete and accurate reporting. But in the current, real world, such a thing
does not exist. And it becomes the duty
of the citizen to become informed, and to make reasoned judgments about truth while
being bombarded by propaganda. It will
not be easy.
Conclusion
We live in an age of misinformation. Misinformation and political propaganda are
found on state-sponsored media, commercial media, and social media. Our laws restrict untruthful claims about
simple products, but allow truth to be trampled in political discourse under
the protection of free speech. (But I
will defend free speech unto death.)
Author Nate Silver
(The Signal and the Noise, http://www.amazon.com/The-Signal-Noise-Predictions-Fail-but/dp/0143125087)
compared the early age of the Internet to the early years following the
invention of the Gutenberg printing press.
The new media removed the barriers to publication, and enabled both good
and bad material to be published (including this blog). What followed Gutenberg was a period of chaos
in publishing, until society developed standards which ensured the quality of books. A similar process may be unfolding now. But the power of state and commercial
interests will be difficult to overturn.
In an environment of misinformation, people will believe the
damndest things. I don’t know why. People realize that the news is unreliable,
and grasp at straws to make sense of the world.
Some people accept propaganda as truth.
Some people recognize that media cannot be trusted, and fall back on crackpot
conspiracy theories as an alternative set of beliefs. In part, irrational beliefs represent
confirmation bias, running wild. People
believe crazy things because they want to believe crazy things. People reject uncomfortable truths because
they don’t like the consequences of those truths.
People have a responsibility to think rationally and
truthfully. To live in a world of
propaganda, of half-truths, of irrationality is chaos and madness. For a society, the prevalence of such beliefs
can only bring about chaos and destruction.
People need to think critically about the news presented in the media,
and choose rationality instead of willful ignorance.
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References
Apollo moon landing conspiracy theories:
Dan Ariely, 2008, Predictably Irrational, 349 p., http://danariely.com/the-books/.
Daniel Kahneman, 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 499 p., http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555.
Nate Silver, 2012, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions
Fail, But Some Don’t, 534 p.
About FOX News
Gabriel Sherman, 2014, The Loudest Voice in the Room, 560 p.
David Brock, 2012, How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a
Propaganda Machine, 336 p.
Joe Muto, 2014, An Atheist in the FOXhole; A Liberal’s Eight-Year Odyssey
Inside the Heart of Right-Wing Media, 336 p.
Russian State-Sponsored Propaganda
News website seemingly representing Russian state media:
