Tell Me Lies, Tell Me Sweet Little Lies

Mass media should be — but is not currently — obligated to seek out, pursue, and report the truth and only the truth. This seems obvious, but the fact that media outlets are able to post outright lies or “false, inaccurate, or misleading information that was created to ‘intentionally cause public harm or for profit’” (Durach et al.) is a problem. This should be the standard across all forms of mass media. It is important to define what “mass media” means in this context, as the term will be used for much more than just traditional news media.

When used in this paper, the term “mass media” refers to any media outlet whose aim is to inform, or at the very least, report on people, news, and events occurring in the real world. This includes everything from One America News Network to VOX journalist Aaron Rupar’s Twitter page. The “mass” in mass media does not refer to the volume of media which is produced, but rather the wide audience in which such media reaches: the masses. The entities that report information to the masses should be held to a high standard.

The instructions for this paper included a paragraph which struck me as extremely well-put, so I decided to rework the paragraph for use in this paper. Here is the edited paragraph:

As a writer/journalist/publicist/reporter of news, it is your responsibility to communicate your ideas as truthfully and unbiased as possible. As the person reading and consuming your media, it is not my responsibility to make an excessive effort to fact-check and verify what you are trying to communicate to me when you have not taken the time to back-up and source your work in a clear, concise, and honest fashion.

This should be the standard for all who report news. It should not be the responsibility of the audience to make sure that they are not being lied to. Hopefully in the years to come, we will look back on this strange, post-truth era with whatever the opposite of rose-tinted glasses are. In terms of the Information Age, the late 2010s and early 2020s (that looks so strange written out) will stand as days of antiquity; before the out-of-control fire hose that is the current standard of news reporting was wrangled into something more reasonable. Whatever precedent is set from this chapter in the history of mass media will go on to stand for decades. If we allow lies and disinformation to spread today in 2021, the children of this generation will still be plagued by this disease, and most likely do less to prevent it because it is all they know. My generation has no idea what life was like before 9/11. I am told (but do not know, as I was only 9 months old on 9/11) that it was a completely different time. If fake news is allowed to survive and thrive within mass media, the children of today will say similar things about how they don’t know what it is like to live in a place where you can rely on the media to be truthful (there have always been problems with truth and mass media, but today it is more impactful than ever). They won’t know what it is like to live in a world where it is not your responsibility to fact-check and make sure that you are not being lied to by the media you consume.

The responsibility of mass media to ensure that truth is what gets put over the airwaves (or into cyberspace) is the response to the latest epidemic of mis- and dis-information in the social media age. The 2016 election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is a fine example. “in the last 3 months of the [2016] presidential campaign [fake news] generated more shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook than the top real news stories.” Although the term ‘fake news’ was popularized by frequent users of such fabricated reporting, the term is useful in determining what should and should not be considered truthful. Fake news outlets “have the trappings of legitimately produced news but ‘lack the news media’s editorial norms and processes for ensuring the accuracy and credibility of information’” (Grinberg et al.). Such slick sophistry serves some selfish interest on the part of the speaker/writer/editor/journalist in deceiving the audience for any number of reasons. The worst part is that this dangerous pattern is self-perpetuating. Besides the fact that “the human brain is arguably biased toward acceptance and retention of misinformation once exposed to such information” (Southwell & Thorson), an individual needs to overcome the phenomenon of first impression bias (you are more likely to trust the first piece of information given to you on a subject, despite other secondary information being more truthful).

Here is a fairy tale about the dangers posed by first impression bias:

“Shortly after Donald Trump moved into the White House, a little-known filmmaker named Ami Horowitz told Fox News’ Tucker Carlson that Sweden was facing an unprecedented crime wave at the hands of Muslim refugees and immigrants. Horowitz’s claims were reinforced by a video montage consisting of a dark-skinned man hitting a policeman, shots of a burning car and short clips taken from Horowitz’s film. … At a political rally in Florida, the next day, President Trump said, ‘You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden. Sweden! Who would believe this? … Eventually, Trump would confess that he got his information from the Horowitz interview on Fox News. Yet, by the next day, many of Horowitz’s statements in the film and in subsequent interviews were ridiculed by Swedish authorities and dismissed as nonsense by most news and fact-checking organizations. The policemen featured in Horowitz’s film even accused him of distorting their views with selective editing, a claim that was backed up by Horowitz’s cameraman.” (Bennett & Livingston)

This is just one example of manipulated media to convey a specific message, but it is a story we see every day. This fairy tale articulates the danger and the complexity of misinformation spread by mass media. This obviously misleading (fake, even) story was greenlit to be aired on national television. It was only afterward that it was looked into enough to discover its falseness. But by then it was too late. The damage had been done. Old conservative Fox News watchers had seen evidence of brown people beating policemen and lighting cars on fire (even though the burning car shots did not contain evidence of who lit them, the juxtaposition of the two shots makes the connection for you). This does quite a number to confirm biases that already exist within people who do not trust people of color. It might appear that old conservative Fox News watchers are being unfairly dragged through the mud, but it has been found that “[i]ndividuals most likely to engage with fake news sources were conservative leaning, older, and highly engaged with political news” (Grinberg et al.).

What makes first impression bias so powerful when it comes to the consumption and spread of misinformation is that “major democracies, such as the United States, tend toward post hoc detection of broadcast misinformation rather than toward prevention” (Southwell & Thorson). You know what they say, the best way to maintain a healthy population is not to prevent germs from spreading, but by waiting for people to get sick before you treat them. The best defense is a good offense. Allowing untruths and disinformation to be spread before doing something about it kind of defeats the point. Besides, “studies provide mixed evidence on the effectiveness of political fact-checkers and have not explicitly taken into account that audiences nowadays can actively select or avoid this type of corrective information” (Hameleers & van der Meer). While fact-checkers can be successful, they are not a perfect or permanent solution. It is also shameful that the way our mass media works has created a need for this kind of market.

The existence of fact-checkers is a telling sign of how well mass media has failed to meet this obligation to truth. What is so confusing is that it does not seem like it would be very hard to get under control. This might sound like hyperbole, but “[o]nly 1% of individuals accounted for 80% of fake news source exposures, and 0.1% accounted for nearly 80% of fake news sources shared. … The top seven fake news sources … accounted for more than 50% of fake news exposures” (Grinberg et al.). So we have the capabilities to determine which outlets spread untruths and misinformation, but we just sit back and allow it? We are able to figure out down to a percent what kind of users spread this content, but we don’t stop them? This could turn into a slippery slope of First Amendment rights infractions, but this obligation only falls on the media, not individuals. Even then, what counts as a “news outlet” can be skewed. In a slander lawsuit filed against Tucker Carlson, famous talk show host of Fox News, U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil claimed that “the ‘general tenor’ of the show should then inform a viewer that [Carlson] is not 'stating actual facts' about the topics he discusses and is instead engaging in 'exaggeration' and 'non-literal commentary’” (Folkenflik). From the mouth of a U.S. District Judge, Fox News should not be considered news, but ‘non-literal commentary.’ This should not be allowed to happen. The mass media needs to be held at a higher standard for truth and honest reporting. Such standards are not unprecedented. “Censorship on major social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, is not a new phenomenon. These companies regularly remove content that they consider … ‘hate speech’, ‘glorification of violence’ or ‘harmful and dangerous content’” (Niemiec). Is it too much to ask for these mass media conglomerates to add “intentionally false or misleading information posed as truth” to this list of ‘objectionable content?’

The mass media system has a long way to go before it is safe to say that you can consume such media without fear of being misled or even outright lied to. But the steps to get there are not difficult. There needs to be a push from the public to demand that their role as an audience be respected. Whether we like it or not, we are all consumers of mass media. We are at the whim of whatever news conglomerate we allow to tell us what is going on in the world. Is it not fair to demand that they speak truthfully to us?

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Works Cited

Bennett, W. Lance, and Steven Livingston. “The Disinformation Order: Disruptive Communication and the Decline of Democratic Institutions.” European Journal of Communication (London), vol. 33, no. 2, SAGE Publications, 2018, pp. 122–39, doi:10.1177/0267323118760317.

Flavia Durach, et al. “Tackling Disinformation: EU Regulation of the Digital Space.” Romanian Journal of European Affairs, vol. 20, no. 1, European Institute of Romania, 2020, pp. 5–20.

Folkenflik, David. “You Literally Can't Believe The Facts Tucker Carlson Tells You. So Say Fox's Lawyers.” Npr, WHYY/PBS, 29 Sept. 2020, www.npr.org/2020/09/29/917747123/you-literally-cant-believe-the-facts-tucker-carlson-tells-you-so-say-fox-s-lawye.

Grinberg, Nir, et al. “Fake News on Twitter During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.” Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), vol. 363, no. 6425, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2019, pp. 374–78, doi:10.1126/science.aau2706.

Hameleers, M., and T. G. L. .. van der Meer. “Misinformation and Polarization in a High-Choice Media Environment: How Effective Are Political Fact-Checkers?” Communication Research, vol. 47, no. 2, SAGE Publications, 2020, pp. 227–50, doi:10.1177/0093650218819671.

Niemiec, Emilia. “COVID-19 and Misinformation: Is Censorship of Social Media a Remedy to the Spread of Medical Misinformation?” EMBO Reports, vol. 21, no. 11, 2020, pp. e51420–e51420, doi:10.15252/embr.202051420.

Southwell, Brian G., and Emily A. Thorson. “The Prevalence, Consequence, and Remedy of Misinformation in Mass Media Systems.” Journal of Communication, vol. 65, no. 4, Wiley Subscription Services, Inc, 2015, pp. 589–95, doi:10.1111/jcom.12168.