Guarding against misinformation

​By Trip Jennings, New Mexico In Depth
​This story was originally published by New Mexico In Depth

This column was written for El Rito Media, which owns newspapers in Española, Artesia, Alamogordo, Carlsbad and Ruidoso.

“Don’t believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.”

Those lyrics come near the end of the sixth song, Last Great American Whale, on Lou Reed’s 1989 classic album, New York.
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I was reminded of these lyrics recently as I observed several friends on both sides of this year’s presidential election reposting photoshopped or Artificial Intelligence-distorted images and misleading or false memes. 

Accompanying the images usually were accusatory or angry words. 
I’m not advocating for anyone to abide by Reed’s command to disbelieve half of what they see and none of what they hear so much as reminding myself and everyone else to take a second, or better, however long you need, before believing anything you see or hear in this age of rage posting and AI. 

Especially over the next few months as the United States picks a chief executive.

We live in a world where our need for certainty or to score points to win inconsequential political spats — especially given the urgency surrounding this year’s presidential election — undermines the arduous, sometimes unsatisfying search for the truth. 

Perhaps, even more importantly, instantaneous posting or reposting frays at relationships and the communal bonds that are necessary for any healthy society. 

It’s no secret that stopping and thinking is much more difficult than reacting. 

The great satirist Jonathan Swift recognized this particular human weakness nearly three centuries ago when information moved at a much slower pace, measured in days, weeks or months. 

“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect:”

It was ancient wisdom by the time Swift got around to making his observation. The great stoic Roman philosopher Seneca, who lived nearly 2,000 years ago, counseled that it was better to walk around the block before reacting while angry. 

These days, gossip, lies and falsehoods fly nearly instantly, much faster than when Swift or Seneca were alive.  Combine that reality with another well-known hack of human psychology — if you repeat something enough, even a lie, a substantial portion of people who see or hear it will believe it’s true without questioning how they know it to be true — and you’ve got a ready-made recipe for disaster.  (Political campaigners and marketers have exploited this hack for more than a century to sell people candidates, party platforms and consumer goods.) 

Together, these hacks of human psychology make it all the more challenging to be the thoughtful, deliberate person the founding generation hoped for as they set up the institutions we’ve inherited more than two centuries later. 

While I do not hold myself up as a model of discernment, I have spent decades as a journalist and one skillset a reporter has to learn is how to assess the value of the information he or she comes into contact with. 

Here is some advice I’ve found helpful over the years:
First, there’s the humorous but valuable instruction “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

This is not a disparagement of mothers everywhere so much as a reminder to journalists to always document what they are told. The same goes for people on the internet or social media. Just because a site says something, that doesn’t make it true. Especially if you happen to believe what they’re saying. 

It’s always helpful to question your assumptions, particularly about how the world works. Intellectual humility is a powerful invitation to learn. It’s one of the most difficult things journalists are asked to do, but good journalists do it, with varying degrees of success. 

Next, check the source of the information you are passing along. You can do this by searching to see if it’s been verified by reputable media sources. (I mostly rely on newspapers for my information, but I realize not everyone can afford several digital newspaper subscriptions. A simple search, however, often can reveal the source of the information and whether the information has been vetted and is good or whether it’s unverified and merely opinion or worse, misinformation or disinformation.) 

If you track down the information to a particular website, check it to see if it has an about us page. If it doesn’t have one, that always makes me leery.  Because you don’t know who or what interests are behind it. If it does have an about us page, check it out to see where the outlet’s funding or capital comes from and who their staff are and what their backgrounds are. 

One additional tidbit: Just because an outlet is identified as conservative or liberal doesn’t mean the news it produces comes with a conservative or liberal slant. Usually, an outlet — and I mostly am talking about newspapers here — is viewed as liberal or conservative because their editorial pages lean liberal or conservative, not necessarily the newsroom, which produces the newspaper’s reported stories. At well-run newspapers, the wall separating an editorial page and its newsroom is robust. Newspapers without a robust wall are more suspect, in my opinion, than ones with robust walls. For example, there are newspapers whose editorial pages do not reflect my understanding of how the world works, but their newsrooms produce extraordinarily well-reported stories, and I trust their process. In other words, I trust their reporting process. One way to check to see how robust the wall between the editorial page and the newsroom is, is to see how often reported stories clash with the conclusions of the paper’s editorials, or at least present a picture that is more complicated than an editorial’s slant. 

I hope this helps a little. The next few months are not going to be easy for any of us.