Responsibility On Line

I just finished reading Sense of Style, a book about writing by Stephen Pinker.  After covering clarity, fluency of thought, styles, grammar and syntax, he wraps up with some general advice for writers.  I contend that the audience for his advice is much wider than he intended.  Today nearly everyone is a writer – maybe not a professional writer, but a writer just the same.

Pinker’s closing points are about the integrity of an author.  “First, look things up.  Humans are cursed with a deadly combination of a highly fallible memory and an overconfidence in how much they know… If you are making a factual claim it should be verifiable.” 

Writing is not like speaking.  There is always time to find a reliable source to check whether what you are writing is true.  Why should anyone trust a writer who had the time to check the truth of their assertions but didn’t bother?

Many journalists have learned this lesson the hard way.  They risked their careers by making things up or by being careless about material that reflected their personal viewpoints.  Here is a short list with quoted sections taken from the individual Wikipedia entries. 

• Jayson Blair: “an American journalist formerly with The New York Times. He resigned from the newspaper in May 2003 in the wake of the discovery of plagiarism and fabrication in his stories.”  The entry lists 7 cases of falsifying information about interviews he conducted and places visited from late 2002 to early 2003.

• Janet Cooke:  “a former American journalist. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for an article written for The Washington Post, but the story was later discovered to have been fabricated.”  She is the only person to have returned a Pulitzer.

• Stephen Glass:  “Over a three-year period [in the 1990s] as a young rising star at The New Republic, Glass invented quotations, sources, and events in articles he wrote for that magazine and others.”

• James Frey:  “His two first books, A Million Little Pieces (2003) and My Friend Leonard (2005), were marketed as memoirs, but large parts of the stories were later found to be exaggerated or fabricated.”  First released as brutally honest nonfiction, later editions included a note from the author and publisher apologizing. 

• Dan Rather:  “became embroiled in controversy about a disputed news report involving President George W. Bush's Vietnam-era service in the National Guard and subsequently left CBS Evening News in 2005, and he left the network altogether after 43 years in 2006.”  His report relied on documents that “could not be authenticated.” 

What do we have in common with these professionals?  Why should we care?  With the growth of the Internet and social media, most people today are writers but don’t know it.  The act of liking, following and forwarding puts them in that category.  By virtue of this "authorship" they must also accept responsibility for accuracy.  Like some of those professionals mentioned and many more, they must not simply repost material that reinforces their worldview without checking.

A widely-reported posting on Buzz Feed News a few days ago said that by the end of the presidential campaign, there were more engagements (shares, comments, likes, etc.) of fake news than of mainstream news.  Some fake news was obviously made up, but the interest in spreading it outweighed the responsibility to get it right.  (Not that most mainstream news was without an agenda.) 

This NBC News story adds to the concern.  A doctor looked into the accuracy of information spread on line about the Zika virus earlier this year.  Out of 200 posts, she classified about 12 percent as misleading.  It was bad information, usually centering on some conspiracy theory.  Now 12 percent is not necessarily bad, but she also found that the misinformation was the most popular.  “The most shared credible and useful post, for example, was a video of a WHO press briefing that was viewed 43,000 times and shared by 964 Facebook accounts. The most popular post spreading misinformation claimed Zika virus is a ‘fraudulent medical hoax’ and was viewed more than 530,000 times. That post was also shared by more than 19,600 people.”  In other words, bad information in this case had between 10 and 20 times the reach of reliable medical facts.

Apparently none of those 19,600 people recognized themselves as an author with the responsibilities to fact-check material before forwarding it.  But so much bad information is circulating on Facebook and other social media, that one source of false claims might be used to justify another faulty source.  It becomes a vicious cycle of untruth – a cycle of myths and misperception that others rely on to make decisions.

Some of this information may be relatively harmless.  People may waste a little money on a false hope, a miracle cure to a minor problem or an herb that promises longer life.  In other cases, many of them highlighted in my previous postings, the spread of false information can lead to serious health or financial problems.  Not taking Zika or any other real disease seriously is but one example.

Social media circulates bad information and half-truths daily.  The examples above imply that bad information drives out good information.  If any authors, including the likers and forwarders, don’t take responsibility, they lose credibility.  They lose the trust of friends and readers.  Then we are left with a situation where everyone must exercise critical thinking and verify before believing anything.

It used to be a common joke to say, "It must be true, I read it on the Internet."  It was well understood that the Internet was not reliable.  Today people get their news from Facebook, other social media and comedy shows, take it at face value and pass it along - scary!

Tradeoffs

Unfortunately the real world isn’t black and white or true and false.  There are shades of distinction.  Good evaluation always balances the risks and the benefits of any decision.  It is often too easy to overlook the risks or benefits when you are presented with arguments favoring one side or the other.  Some presentations come across so strongly and confidently that it’s difficult to even see that there are tradeoffs.  This is where critical thinking and appropriate questioning come in.

One blatant example was the controversy almost five years ago over pink slime, a derogatory term used to refer to and gather support against, a beef product that has been in our food supply for years with no ill effects.  Some TV chef decided it was yucky to reclaim meat waste, beef trimmings and other meat by-products, and add them to ground beef to lower the fat content.  The “crusade” began and, in response, grocery chains stopped ordering it.

There was nothing nutritionally wrong with it.  People’s jobs depended on the long-standing practice.  It reduced food waste.  As a result, we all had to pay more for ground beef just because someone dubbed it yucky and many others jumped on the bandwagon without a single thought or question – another social media triumph (?). 

It happened again to a lesser extent in Florida recently.  The residents of Miami Beach protested the aerial mosquito spraying.  The mayor insisted, “public health experts have assured him the amount of Naled [insecticide] used is harmless to humans and has proven effective” against mosquitos.  The public responded that they didn’t think the Zika threat was real.  They compared a safe, but probably scary spraying operation against an invisible, but real health threat and came down on the side of the mosquitos.

The same thing happens all the time on a variety of subjects.

Consider hydroelectric power – build a dam to capture the power of a river and provide low-cost electricity with no pollution.  Environmentalists block the project with lawsuits to protect a fish or mussel.  They don’t even have to prove danger to their fish; just raise the possibility and the developers or governments spend millions trying to prove there is no danger.  Meanwhile we all sit around in the dark.  But we are not in the dark because we still get electricity from the coal plant where other environmentalists are protesting against the CO₂ and particle emissions.  Still other protesters are busy condemning nuclear power, a safe, pollution-free option.  There is never any discussion about whether the benefits of a decision outweigh the risks (real or imagined).

Sitting around in the dark is not the big problem.  We can always light candles.  But you can’t light candles to keep the food fresh in the refrigerator, keep the house warm in the winter or keep the equipment running in the hospital emergency room.  When we have enough electricity, we take it so much for granted that we are not concerned that various groups with their different agendas keep trying to make it harder and harder to get.  At what point do we demand that they or the politicians look at trade offs and not just at one side of the story, usually the side with the most emotional impact.

Now look at all the other subjects where we are exposed only to the negative aspects:  climate change, income inequality, vaccination, the economy, air and water pollution, police interactions with the community, drug policy and the rest.  As citizens we fail to demand a balanced discussion, so get only the often-exaggerated negative warnings.  Many subjects quickly devolve into finger pointing and name-calling to silence opposition.  In some cases the cry is that all experts agree; in other cases the cry is that all the experts are wrong.  We waste time and energy with these non-critical, knee-jerk reactions.  We lose the benefits and go down the wrong road when we are only presented with and react to the risks.