Yesterday, we looked at a 15-minute game that could help young people learn to identify online misinformation by teaching them how it works: through memes, through manipulated imagery, and through incendiary language in headlines.
Problem solved, right? Media literacy fixed!
But no: only if this is your first visit to Better Worlds Theory, I’m afraid.
Although there was a lot to praise about Cat Park as a baseline introduction to the need for media literacy, there are two glaring problems with its game design, which speak to the much bigger challenge for “inoculation science”: a way of defending against the “disease” of misinformation by getting a taste for it in a controlled setting.
The first problem has to do with the labelling of this major social issue as simply “misinformation”. Last year, I published a piece on a now-gutted website that I need to rehouse elsewhere: “Meet the Fab Five of false information”.
In it, I discussed misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, truthiness, and just-so stories. Although Cat Park claims to be about misinformation, it’s not; it’s about disinformation. Misinformation can and will occur in the spread of any news event, but when errors are intentionally introduced, then we have disinformation. Another form of intentional mistruth is malinformation, which involves the weaponizing something that is technically true to carve out a disproportionate amount of media attention (“But her emails!”) despite how much other news stories better deserve prominent coverage instead. As for the other two?
Truthiness can feel like a harmless part of the Fab Five. Who among us hasn't repeated something that has the air of being true without checking their references? But truthiness, as first defined on The Colbert Report in its modern context, often emerges in political speech and punditry, two discourses where hard data goes to die. Because most people rely on others to turn facts into narrative, rather than poring through all the raw data themselves, the use of “truthy” statements in summaries of sociopolitical, economic, or scientific matters can easily mislead, without necessarily being a case of mis- or disinformation.
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Just-so stories take truthiness to the next level. These are narratives that also have a common sense feel to them: so much so that why would we bother to check our facts? Traditionally, just-so stories tried to explain the origin of a phenomenon, as in folktales about how the elephant got its trunk or the giraffe its long neck. In contemporary culture, just-so stories are often invoked to explain a given economic, political, or sociological reality. The evidence underpinning their initial construction may have long since turned another way, but they still feel right, so they stay.
All of these are important, but it’s especially important that we not mix up everyday misinformation with anything expressly done by bad actors. If we train people to see all news errors as dangerous in the same way, our efforts at media literacy can easily backfire, by teaching children and other fellow citizens that they can’t trust anything, and that any error on the part of a publication is a sign that it shouldn’t be listened to at all, going forward.
The problem, as I noted in the above piece, is that
misinformation is also an inevitable part of the journalistic process, especially in an era of gutted newsrooms. To offset the reduction in paid fact-checkers, we have to cultivate a sense of collaborative correction, and be wary of any venue that does not openly acknowledge its structural vulnerability to inaccurate data.
In other words, the strategy for countering plain-old misinformation starts with normalizing the fact that anyone can get the facts wrong, and that many facts won’t fully reveal themselves at the outset of a given news event. The more that people understand the structural reasons that some level of error is always to be expected in news coverage, the less vulnerable they’ll be to “false flag” accusations (for example) in the immediate, terrible wake of a violent event, when of course there are going to be many claims flying about, and not enough time yet to corroborate any of them.
Disinformation and malinformation are different. They arise from the introduction of bad actors into our media ecosystem, and they require a whole other level of media savvy and solution-seeking to be addressed.
And when I say “bad actors”, I should also note that some of these people won’t think of themselves as acting in bad faith when they fill the media ecosystem with bad facts. Not everyone is a moustache-twirling villain in this story: some people are just so worried about their side getting a bad rap, they don’t care how much malinformation they have to spin to engulf a news cycle. More important than conveying a situation accurately and in full is simply making sure that “their side” doesn’t get criticized.
That’s bad journalism.
That’s bad civic responsibility.
But it’s also very human—and as such, something that we can never expect individuals to be in a position to fix all on their own.
Which leads us to the bigger gap in Cat Game: the fact that it puts everything on the individual, and ignores the bigger factors behind our disinformation-ridden world. This is akin to BP Oil getting consumers to play carbon footprint calculator games to focus on individual contributions to climate change, as a way of deflecting from its own, far greater culpability in the destruction of our ecosystem.
In Cat Game, for simplicity’s sake, you’re presented as both new to the city, with no friends (an empathy-building narrative, to help people realize what makes them vulnerable to being duped) and also, as someone well-enough established that you have the ability to post incendiary news articles without any institutional oversight.
This second part is supposed to help you see how clickbait language whips up social media “discourse” around false ideas, but this part of the game’s construction also glosses over what had to happen to our journalistic economy for an average person to have any chance of tricking others with fake news headlines in the first place.
And that’s the part we’re going to talk about today: the non-individual side of media literacy, and a problem that requires more than individualized educational solutions.
The destruction of local journalism, and its consequences
For everyday readers, there isn’t usually much time to question the news in general—so people don’t. They take in passively what’s given to them on their feeds, or from friends they trust, and they filter any extraordinary claims through gut instincts around whether it “feels right”. They just don’t have time—on the way to work, while raising kids, while having an existential crisis—to scrutinize everything they take in.
Partially, they do this because we still have a level of trust built into our engagement with larger society, based on past systems of media proliferation and the propaganda we continue to absorb about those “good ol’ days” from related entertainment. The “good ol’ days” of news, in this case, include a time when you could dutifully turn in to a 7 a.m. local news broadcast, then check back again at 12 and 6, with maybe a final notice for the day, around 10 or 11, before bed.
And in those time slots, you’d get some reliable chunks of actionable, coherent news: local stories that might impact your traffic route tomorrow, your job prospects, and your weekend pursuits; lottery numbers and the weather; important updates around public safety, politics, and crime; a few international headlines and recaps to give you a vague sense of the world at large; a feel-good personal-interest piece to make you chuckle and ease the pain of disasters elsewhere.
And that felt balanced, didn’t it? Like you were getting a decent sense of the “big picture”, carefully curated for you by news anchors who made it their business to do the work of vetting wild claims before they got to your ears and eyes.
24/7 cable news, and then the internet, not only screwed with our daily viewing schedule; they also distorted our sense of what it means to have all the info we need to go about our days as well-informed citizens.
I’ve drawn up a wee visual, to explain what we’re dealing with now:
In the above graphic, “The ‘fair and balanced’ pipeline”, an event happens (in real life or online), and somehow our reader is going to hear about it. But the way they hear about it matters—because it’s now vastly transformed.
In the above causal pathway, the event is picked up by a signal-booster—an online pundit, a person with enough views on social media, a politician gunning for office or to keep their post—whose loud declarations are then picked up by news outlets. This prioritization of the signal-booster continues throughout the news cycle, so conversation about the event is carried out less through formal channels, and more through people encouraged to keep blasting their views online through informal commentary—social media posts, pundit channels, blogs (and newsletters!).
On the receiving end of all this noise is our reader, who is now inundated by every possible position on the spectrum, and who can easily conflate the existence of an onslaught of opinions with the existence of a “fair and balanced” discourse… because what else is the reader supposed to do?
There’s just so much, right? But also, how can having so much be bad for us? Surely having all these opinions from so many places is a good thing for democracy, right?
We’ve become so used to receiving our news in this mess of a new-media ecosystem that it’s easy to forget what we’ve lost—especially since our options these days tend to be “embrace the loudest messaging given to us on social media, or go to the biggest news outlets and let them tell us what’s what!”
There was another option—an option that has been aggressively gutted over the last few decades, especially by private equity firms and similar corporations buying up the prestige of media brand names, then cutting local news and liquidating their assets:
We could have had more local news: news that starts from on-the-ground professional outlets, which is then carried out under strong industry guidelines, and which is later disseminated via syndication to major papers, where it would exist alongside those major papers’ own analysis into deeper and/or larger investigative themes.
This is the approach that leads to less political schism.
This is the approach that humanizes and empowers us as democratic participants.
Is it any wonder, then, that this is an approach many actors don’t want us to have?
I remember the last gasps of that vaguely rose-tinted era—an era that wasn’t perfect, mind you, but which still upheld, say, rigorous citation practices whenever quoting from external content. (A practice now replaced by underpaid news teams ripping off late-breaking news from one another online without internal fact-checking, in everyone’s rush to capture marketshare from a digital news cycle.)
I remember when text was abandoned en masse for video, because Facebook in particular had tricked investors into thinking that this social-media pivot was where the future of audience engagement would be.
Adios to more investigative journalists. Adios to whole newsrooms.
I remember when media mergers changed standards away from taking pride in local content (and being concerned about how much syndicated content from elsewhere was in one’s pages), to local newspapers being told that they had to run X non-local article, because every paper with the same owner was expected to run X article.
I remember when social media readily came to house everything—except traditional news coverage, and at cost to one and the same.
I remember when AI-hype came for journalism—again, at cost to real journalists.
And what is a real journalist, you might ask?
It’s more than someone who reports on an issue by seeking comment from all relevant parties, researching its history, and soliciting quantifiable data from government and private sources, all the better better to inform a given readership or audience.
It’s more than someone who adheres personally to journalistic standards: who makes sure that they always seek comment from a person or entity that has been reported on in a critical light before they go to press; and who takes particular care with the replication of all pertinent quotes and facts, citing their sources in abundance; and who thinks about the construction of their argument to prioritize informing readers instead of simply waxing poetic from their soapbox and cherry-picking data to match.
It’s someone who does all of this in a formal system that allows their work to be reviewed by people with a similar, rigorous commitment to these standards.
A journalist “in the wild”—even someone who sorely strives to be accountable and to tell the truth as best they’re able—is always going to struggle for want of a proper ecosystem of checks and balances, precisely because there’s a difference between misinformation and disinformation. Misinformation happens all the time—and the best media economies for democratic practice are those built to catch it faster.
Here’s another info-graphic, to outline the difference made by greater investment in local journalism (ideally, nonprofit-based!).
In this version of our media landscape, a story starts locally and it is discussed locally, between a body of well-supported reporting professionals who can and will fact-check each other and use their regional know-how to make sure that all relevant perspectives have been considered in local coverage.
If this local discourse is notable enough (i.e., says something that might be of relevance to a larger population), one of those local write-ups might then find its way to a larger platform, through syndication practices that continue to ensure that local outlets are paid for their work so they can continue to do it well.
Still, once the local story hits a larger platform, one can expect chatter from signal-boosters, as the broader audience tries to synthesize local news into a larger cultural narrative. The difference is simply that the story hasn’t been started by those signal-boosters, so they don’t hold the lion’s share of power here. People can still expect, when they look at news articles and related discussions, to find a depiction of the story as it first emerged within a local journalistic context.
This means that the everyday reader is still going to receive a wide range of inputs about this story, including plenty of social media chatter. But it’s also not going to be as difficult to differentiate “sources that have strong legal obligations to uphold journalistic standards” from “sources that simply have a YouTube channel—or a Substack—and are waxing on authoritatively about an issue outside formal oversight”.
There also won’t be as much difficulty, in this model, when trying to figure out if a given story is coming to us from local journalism, or a third-party rehash of news events from a giant legacy media organization that’s eaten up all its local competition without coming close to operating with the same levels of staff oversight.
Fact-checking in particular used to be a much more robust practice, but quite a few major news publications don’t even come close to having the person-power for it now. An “editor” is a great idea, but also a finite resource, so plenty of websites that have the look of a more professional journalistic organization are highly reliant on the journalistic integrity of individual writers: not at all an ideal practice, even though it exists in abundance online—and among many publications you probably assume are more fully staffed and filled with heavily vetted content than they are.
In the last two years of war, I’ve also seen a tremendous number of watchdog pressers get mistaken for formal journalism, too—because most people can’t tell a statement made authoritatively from a statement made with journalistic integrity, and because most watchdog groups are more interested in your eyeballs and your re-shares than in letting you know that, actually, they have no journalistic responsibility to tell the whole truth (i.e., by seeking comment from any party negatively covered in their posts).
They are advocates solely for themselves—which doesn’t make their arguments irrelevant, but does make their claims incomplete. In a healthier media ecosystem, we would not be struggling as hard as we currently are to separate their claims, and the claims of other online signal-boosters, from the “real thing”: a rigorously vetted set of news arising from local experts up through well-funded major journalistic platforms.
But a “healthier media ecosystem”, we do not have.
And no 15-minute video-game lesson in media literacy, however useful as a starting point for the conversation, is going to fix that problem for us.
We have a lot more system-wide recovery work to do.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML