Context Podcast Digital Collection

Doug Exton: Thank you so much for joining us for tonight's Connected Conversation, brought to you with generous support from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation and U.S. Bank. A program conducted by the Idaho Humanities Council. If you're not familiar with our organization, I encourage you to check out our website, Idaho humanities.org. I'd like to remind you all that you may submit questions using the Q&A feature located at the bottom of the screen.

With me tonight is Doctor Seth Ashley from Boise State University and the author of news, Literacy, and Democracy. It's an honor to have you with us tonight. And I turn it over to you.

Dr. Seth Ashley: Great. Thanks. It's great to be with you all. And, I'm excited. So many people are, interested in this topic. I've got a, ton of information to share with you, so I'm going to dive right in here. And, I look forward to hearing questions and comments afterwards. So is that working like it's supposed to?

Doug Exton: It is. Yeah.

Dr. Seth Ashley: We're so good. Okay. Fantastic. So, my my title here is Beyond Fake News, News Literacy and the Informed Citizenry. We've heard a lot about fake news over the past four years. But, my perspective is that we need to, also see the, the news and media environment, much more holistically. And, then we're often asked to.

So that's my goal tonight is to give you some things to think about. Especially in the context of, pandemic, election wildfires. The many, many thing is troubling in our, society right now. I, I usually use this metaphorically, unfortunately, things are actually on fire. And somehow we're supposed to just kind of carry on.

I think this is how we feel a lot of the time these days, because it does feel like, we're sort of living from one, one crisis moment to the next. So, so how do we deal with that? I this is my desire to be well informed is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane again.

So it's easy to do a lot of unproductive worrying these days. I think we can, we can channel our energies productively if we, if we know a little bit, you know, again, the stakes are high, right? We're dealing with some really tough stuff right now. It's tougher than usual. The worst is yet to come.

Of course. We've been we've known for a long time, that this was a real issue and that, that we have a short window to do something about it. So these are, you know, the stakes are high. We've got, a very, intense election just around the corner. You know, something that, as this headline says, you know, viewed as an existential struggle by many, many people on both sides.

So. And then a lot of us, you know, I think, need to prepare ourselves now for, it no, no longer just an election day in it's election, not just month by month. I mean, really, if you think about how voting is going to start, in just a few weeks here with all of the absentee and early voting, and then, you know, we're definitely, almost, almost certainly not going to have a final result on election night.

We need to be prepared for, a long, drawn out election, you know, month or more, you know, shows all the signs of a country spiraling toward political violence. It's not too late to bolster our democracy's resilience and pull back from the brink. This this opinion pieces. So, you know, there are there are a lot of, pretty, pretty bad, signifiers right now.

Well, of course, you know, if all these people got involved, it certainly would. So I think that's an important message for all of us. So, we can, we're offered this choice here. We can take the red pill and, pull ourselves out of the media matrix. And hopefully, you know, see things a little bit more clearly.

They have higher current events knowledge. They have higher levels of political activity. They have higher internal political efficacy, meaning they think their voice matters. They have a say in the system that lower endorsement of conspiracy theories, which is a great thing in these days and lower trust in politics, which is maybe, maybe not a great thing. But you can also imagine why that might be the case.

That's what's kind of hidden behind the scenes, for most people. So and there's the, the five key approach, context creation, how how many messages are created, what the content looks like, how they're circulated and how they're consumed. So that's where we're headed. Let's get this out of the way. What is fake news? A combination of low truth with high intent to mislead.

These messages are designed to gain profit and or power. The good news here is they have so far, it seems they have wide, wide reach and shallow impact. So other a lot of the hoax stuff reaches a lot of people. But for the most part, people are consuming a broad enough variety of information, that they, you know, it doesn't completely change people's, worldview.

At the same time, when elections are decided by 80,000 votes across three swing states, fake news can have an impact, right? And so so it is it is an issue. But it's just not the only one who consumes fake news. Well, intense partisans. These people are voracious news consumers. They're on the far ends of the spectrum.

They're the ones most likely to encounter this false stuff. Unfortunately, it's also people who do not use fact checking sites. I mean, these sites are sort of designed to help people sort through, what's real and what's not. But unfortunately, the people that are most exposed to fake news are not the ones that are going to Snopes and PolitiFact and, those kinds of sites that are designed to help us with all this stuff.

What's the evidence? Checking the date. You know, a lot of stuff appears, you know, even though it's, years out of date, a joke, you know, make sure it's not satire, comedy, checking our own biases. We'll come back to that. And asking experts. So, you know, and hopefully most of you at least, and others in the world have been exposed to just these basic ideas about how to sort through, what's real and what's not.

You've also maybe seen stuff like this, the media bias chart, where you say, hey, everybody, look, here's the center, here's what's, you know, giving it to you straight down the middle. Here are the here's the stuff on the extremes that maybe you should avoid. You know, this is a good starting point. I think this is okay.

For people that just don't know where to begin. But at the same time, this is very prescriptive. It sort of tells, you know, enforces, a certain worldview on, on the media landscape. And, you know, people who are already, you know, are already stuck on the side, might not, you know, might not accept this as a very good, as a layer for the, for the media spectrum.

It's also relative. I mean, the what's left and what's right in this country is different from, the way it is in other countries. So, that's, that's something to consider, too. Bias is often relative. Okay. So how do we get beyond fake news? Well, we asked these five questions. What's happening to real news? How is news constructed?

Am I in a filter bubble? Am I the customer or product? Is there a better way to support a well-informed society? So that's where we're headed here. Number one, what's happening to real news? Let's just look at this. And I'm going to broadly just consider this is the decline of journalism. And so I think this is where we get into media bias.

So the real bias of media is often the bias towards timeliness, towards visuals, towards the status quo and towards profits. And so it's important to consider that as much as we think about partisan bias, yelling matches soft features, this is what we see on TV a lot. This idea of false equivalence or false balance. We get two things that are, presented as equal, even though one side has, you know, plenty of evidence and another side is just people talking, almost no policy or issue coverage.

So we have a, media sphere dominated by a very small handful of players. And we haven't even gotten to social media, the media landscape, you can this is, you know, it's messy, but, you can see there's a lot of power and money in the hands of a relatively small number of players here. And then here's this another way of looking at it.

Here's a just, a local, issue. McClatchy, who owns the statesman? You know, this is the trend as as newspapers have gotten in trouble. Or if had, you know, had a hard time getting themselves out of the trouble that they've gotten in over the past decade or two, the hedge funds have taken over.

So, we'll see how all of that goes. But, but anyway, this trend is, you know, has not been a good thing. By and large, you can see this, this trend in newspaper circulation over many decades, going back to 1940. You know, from a peak in the 1990s. We're back to our lowest level ever, basically, in terms of newspaper circulation.

So you've got half the number of people working today that that we had, maybe a decade ago, produced, you know, independent producers of information, people who don't, necessarily have a point of view. They're trying to shift, sift through everything that's out there. At the same time, most Americans think their local news media are doing well financially, and fewer are helping to support it.

So, so people tend to this is all kind of like obscured from people they don't know. The financial trouble that most local news outlets are in. And they and it's just not something that most people are making a priority for, for their, you know, where they put their, their, their dollars. And this is just one recent headline in the media.

They're nothing from 2016. James Fallows says the press hasn't broken its most destructive habits when it comes to covering Trump. I mean, Trump was a he's been a very challenging candidate for, for the traditional news media. And, and the traditional tactics really haven't worked. So we'll get into what some of those are, for one thing.

You know, they they just put him on TV and let him talk. This has been the case since 20, you know, going back well before the 2016 election. And in this graph, you can see the difference in bought and free media in the 2016 and the run up to 2016. That big red block is the amount of free media that Trump got.

That means media that he didn't have to pay for. It wasn't it wasn't paid political advertising. It was just free, access to to the media that, that he got. And you can see it dwarfs every other candidate, especially his Democratic opponent. But, you know, this was, he was like, kind of, it's kind of fun to watch.

So watch this guy. Talk. And so, so news producers just put him on TV and let him and let him talk, and they're still doing that, and that just doesn't work. With with, you know, the traditional is reporting methods today. So, as CBS chair Les Moonves said back then, it may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS.

People tuned in. It was crazy. And they didn't. People know. Nobody really knew what to think of it. And so, you know, but in retrospect, maybe that wasn't the best, thing for everybody. And again, this is where false equivalence comes in. You know, we get we get these, you know, opposing, things, but and they're treated as if they're equal, when in fact they're not.

I mean, when you look at the number of true statements made by one candidate versus another, there's a big difference here. So it's just it's hard to treat them this with the same kind of tactics and tools for for reporting again policy issues nearly absent in presidential campaign coverage. We're seeing that again, just like we normally do.

And it's often about the game, the horse race, who's ahead, the strategy. Right. Everything but actual issues. And then and then we get this reporting on misinformation. This was, Trump talking about the Obama administration wiretapping him and, and the news reports, this stuff. So for one thing, it puts that out there as if it, you know, has it has this air of legitimacy to it, it, it plants the seed and lets people hang on to it potentially.

So that's been a very successful, political strategy. And again, that's why the traditional news outlets have just not been, really, really, able to handle that. Another great example is, with, with global warming, this is, you know, it goes back decades. The science on this issue has been extremely clear. And only, only, you know, becomes more so every year.

And, and yet the news media have long treated this as a 5050 story where we have to balance it with equal, points of view on this. So, so that's where, you know, these traditional tactics, where we just, you know, that different, different sides, you know, let, let them have the floor.

It just doesn't work when we need it. What we need is to know really the truth behind the facts and to know, you know, what's really what's really going on? How is this constructed? So number two, I think Jerry Seinfeld says it. Well, when he says it's amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.

You know, that's, that's a reference to the print products, but it's of course, true on the web or wherever you're getting information. No, these are constructions. These are humans who are putting these products together. They're making active choices about what becomes news. And so it helps to learn a little bit about that process. Steven Pinker similarly says news is a misleading way to understand the world.

It's always about events that happen and not about things that didn't happen. So, you know, that's sort of obvious, right? But, but I think it helps us, you know, think about what's, what's being left out when we, when we, you know, consume too much news. Walter Lippmann wrote about this 100 years ago. This book, public opinion, the world outside in the pictures in our heads, there's this gap between reality and the way it's represented to us.

This is I love this example because it really tells tells the story about. So Lincoln Steffens, he was this crime reporter in, in New York City in the 1890s. And he worked for one newspaper, and they, he, they said, you know, we need some some crime stories. So he he pretended to be asleep. He developed some new tricks to get, crime stories here.

He would feign, sleep and, and eavesdrop basically on, on what was going on at police stations. And, he got all this, you know, this great crime news that way, and started writing all these crime articles. Well, what happened? The other competing newspapers were like, why don't we have these crime stories? So they sent their crime reporters out to get the same information.

And, you know, all of a sudden, all the competing newspapers are all writing about all this crime. You know, if you're a reader, you're like, oh, my goodness, you know, we're being overrun by crime. Has anything, in, you know, actually has reality actually changed? No. But our but our perceptions have, shifted dramatically based on the information we're getting.

So I think it's just important to keep keep that in mind. The gap between reality and representation and the role our information media play in, and how that what that looks like. Chris, getting beyond bias. Again, I alluded to this earlier, but getting beyond bias, political partisan bias. First of all, bias is just a preference for one thing over another.

So not all bias is that I mean, you know, a bias for human rights and, you know, bias against slavery, like, these are, you know, these are good biases. So that's okay. Some bias is good, but getting past partisan bias and paying attention to structural bias and news frames, these are these are things that I think we can all benefit from.

They, they realized that, you know, they could be more successful commercially if they appeal to a broad audience rather than a narrow partisan segment of it. So, so objectivity is largely this historical invention, to help sell newspapers. So, so the problem comes in when we start to think about objectivity as something that should apply to humans.

You know, no human is objective. We all have backgrounds and points of view. But, but the objective method is really what, what was is the intention behind this? The idea is that, you know, sort of meant to apply the scientific method to newsgathering. And that is to say that, you know, you sort through the evidence and verify it and see what's what is left.

No, no one ever really expected humans to be, objective. So what's important is the method and then the product that results from that. Have you done a good job basically verifying evidence and examining evidence? Indexing is something we talk about. And that's the idea that news is an index of what officials say. So and that's sort of a modern trend to, the idea that you just sort of report what officials say.

And maybe they pull themselves up by their bootstraps. And, you know, here's a great success story in the end or whatever. But what that doesn't do, it doesn't it doesn't put any larger theme around this issue of homelessness or poverty or whatever the issue is. But that's really what we need. We need to understand these things in larger societal contexts and in, in terms of historical trends, the bigger picture.

And so again, when we go back to that bias towards timeliness and visuals, you know, we're we're very focused on the latest, and newest information. It sometimes neglects that context. And that's really what we need to understand. What's going on. I still pick on, this story because, you know, this is a really highly sensational thing that dominated the TV, for the better course of a day when people thought there might be a six year old boy in this balloon.

It'd be a terrible tragedy if there were, It turned out to be a, a stunt by the parents to get on a reality TV show. Crazy story. Anyway, it was it was. This is great visuals, this bizarre thing flying over the Colorado desert. And, and, you know, it was happening right now. I mean, it really checked all the boxes.

Now, this just shows you how, how much our consumption of mediated products has exploded over the past century. It's we're we're immersed in this stuff. And so, you know, this is this is from The Onion. So this is a joke, right? CNN holds morning meeting to decide what you're should panic about for us today.

So, and this applies in a number of ways, to, to our mediated reality. So, you know, kind of another way to say it is can the fish think about the water? It's hard to step back and take a look at the way reality is constructed for us. And that happens in a number of ways, of course.

But but the way our news and information environment shapes, shapes the way we think is really important. So that's the water that we have to be able to step back and take a critical look at. Okay, we're up to number three. Am I in a filter bubble. So what's that. We're going to learn about that here.

And then it really comes down to human psychology. And the way, the way this, butts up against what happens when we get online. This is Stephen Colbert talking about he and he invented this idea of, truthiness way before, you know, post-truth came along. This idea that, you know, what you feel with your gut is more important than than what you can actually know with your brain.

So, and I like how, here I puts it in sapiens today, we may be living in high rise apartments with overstuffed refrigerators, but our DNA still thinks we're in the savanna. So it's important just to think about our primitive monkey brains that our, our lizard brains, as some people prefer to them. The dictate a lot of our behavior, especially our quick, impulsive behavior.

So, so that's important. Human psychology. So the online environment takes advantage. Basic human tendency is to do these things, stick with our group, reinforce prior beliefs, ignore or reject conflicting information, prefer emotion over reason or logic and and rewards low cognition. So you know, basically not thinking too much is is actually something that gets rewarded, especially when we go online and interact there.

There are a number of ways to describe this in psychological terms. We don't have time to go through all of this, but I'll highlight a few that I think are interesting. You know, it often comes down to cognitive dissonance. It's this idea that people just don't. It's uncomfortable to hold competing ideas in your head at the same time.

So we want to avoid that as much as possible. Why would you put yourself in the, you know, create, cause yourself to go into, you know, put forth extra effort into thinking when you can avoid that. And so that's where a lot of this and that, especially combined with the simplicity bias, we like easy answers. We like simple explanations.

That's why conspiracy theories are so popular. That's why, you know. Oh, somebody, engineered, COVID for all of us to get, for some, you know, control mechanism. That's a that's a nice, simple explanation. Or there's this satanic, pedophilia ring that's, you know, responsible for, you know, what's happening in society. I mean, these are, you know, nice, easy, answers.

Jackpot. Right? So, We like to find stuff that fits with what we already think. We we know. And then that that results in selective exposure. Right? So we're much more likely to prefer a reassuring lie over an inconvenient truth. That these are sort of the names that we give to these, these mechanisms and processes, about how we consume information.

So filter bubbles, I mean, this is just the basic bubble that we put ourselves in when we, consume information. Now, we do this, all the time, right? We decide who to be friends with. And, you know, where to work and stuff like that. So. So we all live in certain bubbles, even in real life.

But certainly when we go online, we get to pick and choose a little bit where we go and algorithms heavily made that, you know, reinforce that. So, so this puts us all in these little kind of niche, market audiences, which is what, you know, social media and online companies prefer. That way they can best target us with, ads and, gather our data and all that kind of stuff.

So, so understanding filter bubbles and how they work. Now, there's some debate over how strongly the effect of filter bubbles really is. In fact, when some people go online, they're exposed to more diverse information than if they're watching, you know, cable TV news for three hours every night. I mean, that's definitely a filter bubble. So there's, you know, these work in different ways and it's kind of depends who you are and how you're consuming information.

But it's easier than ever to to go into, you know, one of these bubbles and not come out. That's largely because of the algorithm. I mean, this is just these are just a few things that we kind of know about how the Facebook algorithm works, whether something's going to pop up in your news feed, you know, how much interest have you shown in the page?

What's the performance of that post? Past performance of the page times the type of content photos do better, right? And recently, did it just happen? So and there's, you know, tons of factors that go in which we just don't know because these are proprietary black box algorithms. They're hidden from us. We can kind of guess sometimes Facebook kind of hints at what what they, what they're doing.

But we just don't know really what's going on. So we, so we have to at least be aware that these algorithms are the things that are shaping what we see in our heads when we go online. And that's true whether we're talking about social media, Google News, I mean, any kind of aggregator of information that's bringing a bunch of stuff together, it just has to have some kind of algorithm.

Unless it's just showing you everything in real time. But but most, most of these kinds of sites have preferred the, algorithmic approach. This is this came out in 2018 from a Wall Street Journal, story where Facebook had shut down a plan to try to make the site less, less divisive. I studied how the site polarized users and then just kind of ignored it.

So so that's why it's important to just slow down when we go online and just step back, and let things develop over time and see how things play out. You know, most online conversations are not terribly productive anyway. So thinking about, how that when you, when you're in that environment is important. Just a few recent examples.

Even this report from Ktvb doesn't I don't think he goes far enough to say, no, this is not this is this is not the 6% thing. It's not, accurate. It's simply reports the misinformation. It doesn't go far enough to tell us that this is misinformation. This is false. This similar thing here, when, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she, in the context of the Democratic National Convention, went on, gave a short speech, said she, she heard her job was, to to second the nomination of Bernie Sanders.

That was kind of the rule that they had given her. NBC made this tweet saying she gave us, oh, she gave this quick, abrupt speech and she didn't in there endorsed Joe Biden, you know. So that was that was a good example of how, a lot of people saw that. And just like, jumped all over her and said, you know, this is how can you do this?

You know, they're spreading this this, they didn't explain the full context of what was going on here. And that's partly, you know, the result of tweets you can really say so much. So, so, you know, a couple of things are going on here. They're sort of, leaving out this important context. It's this piece of misinformation.

And then, as she says here, it sparked an enormous amount of hatred. People saw this and, you know, they were very quick to react and, you know, if they had just dug a little bit, they could have seen there was there's certainly more to the story here. Again, Sturgis Biker rally, this is a big report just in the last week.

That because, you know, there were all these bikers gathered in South Dakota, they went went back home and spread COVID far and wide. That was based on one, one little, report that was, you know, played pretty loose with some data and didn't, wasn't peer reviewed or anything, you know, so it hadn't gone through the right very kind of process.

So, so again, we just that's that's where that elephant takes over and we really have to work hard, especially when the message is congruent with our own points of view, our own ideology, our own worldview. That's when we really have to work hard to step back. The more it feels good, the more you got to work hard to, to step back and take a critical look at that piece of information.

Am I the customer of the product? This is where we get into some internet economics. We need to understand a little bit about the attention economy. And people pick on Zuckerberg. Especially when he wears too much, sunscreen and goes surfing. But this guy is so powerful. He holds this, he holds so much power, because he's got 2 billion users on this social network site.

Great to see stuff like that. I hope it's not too little, too late. I wish they would do a lot more with the tremendous resources and opportunities they have. So this is where we need to think a little bit about the customer versus the product situation. If something is free, especially online, it's usually because we're being, you know, the, the we are the customer.

We are sorry. We are the product that's being sold. This is not a new model. This is the broadcast model that goes back 100 years. Right? We give you we give you, either, you know, fun radio shows or, public affairs programing. And then you watch, you know, you get some soap commercials, in between, our department store ad, in between.

And that's how you that's how you pay for it, which is fine. That's like, you know, that's a that's a perfectly fine, business model. Until it becomes so heavily commercialized that, that it's counterproductive. So anyway, the social media model is, is the broadcast model on steroids? Because now, not only are they able to gather, you know, sell ads to us, they can gather so much data and information from, from us and our behavior and our patterns, that's tremendously, you know, valuable information that they can then turn around and sell.

So, the number one thing to remember here is popularity equals profit. And that's the that's really what drives the attention economy. Trying to keep your eyeballs on the screen as long as possible, keep you clicking, keep you online, keep you there, keep you scrolling and keep you, you know, active. So these algorithms, though, are not neutral.

They preference, you know, what people are talking about. And that's not always a good thing. They, they give preference to, you know, things that have, figured out how to gain the, the, search systems and, and another thing. So, so, so this is, this sort of drives, you know, when you when you finish this with our psychology, you can see how this becomes a problem.

The top ten sites get 75% of all traffic in revenue. So even though, you know, there's billions of websites, it seems like, it's a total wild West free for all. Anybody can participate. Theoretically, yes. But you know who is actually consuming, you know, and just this blog, most stuff is still going to, to a very small, a small handful of, of these, these, you know, these sites that get most of the views and clicks.

And this is evidence of that digital ad revenue, which has exceeded $134 billion. Now, two thirds of it going exclusively to Google and Facebook, including 99% of all growth. So almost all new ad revenue being made on the internet is going to Facebook or Google. So that's a monopoly. I mean, if you've ever heard of one, there's so much concentrated power in that and it really shuts out.

That's part of why journalism is struggling so much, is because so much of that ad revenue is going to these, these content providers. And, and they don't even produce anything of, anything original. They don't they don't provide anything other than an empty shell, basically. I mean, Facebook is just a shell and we fill it with content.

And then behavioral targeting, that's what they do with all that data. They know how to how to reach people, with the kinds of things that are. And it keeps them clicking. So that's where the algorithms that drive us further and further down these rabbit holes. One example often point to is Dylan Roof. This was a nice kid who wasn't destined to become a murder, a murderer, a racist murderer.

But he went down this internet rabbit hole and, because he started searching about black and white crime and he learned all of this, terrible stuff that's, really not based in reality. You know, it led him to kill nine people and, nine African-Americans in the church in South Carolina. So, I mean, this is where this stuff really becomes, becomes real.

You know, that was not predestined at all. And Google could have done a much better job of making sure that you didn't go down that that rabbit hole. That those links, those clicks didn't, didn't lead in there. The algorithms didn't lead him there. So and they've done a lot they've gone a long way. A lot of, a lot of sites are doing their best to clean up the act.

But it's often, you know, in response to, to terrible events like that. So it's important to understand these are our new gatekeepers, and we need to be aware of them and how they work and how they influence, what we consume. You can go on Facebook and see your ad preferences. You can see what Facebook thinks of you, what they think that they know about you.

Of course, there's more behind the scenes that we don't know about, but, but you can go in there and see a lot about, I think a lot of people are surprised to know that this even exists, and that you can go in and see what, what they think they've gathered about you based on their behavior, online, a lot of people like to talk about how.

Oh, I just can't believe it. I was I said this thing in the car, and then, you know, I got home and I saw this, this ad or this post, and people just assume they're being listened to. But that's what's amazing. I mean, so far, most, you know, people at least mostly agree that, the, the it's not that bad.

They're not, they're not literally spying on you, but it's almost worse because that that just means they don't have to. They know you so well they can. So they can do such a good job of predicting your patterns and your behavior that, it feels like they're listening. They just know you that well. So it's kind of crazy.

Again, here's Google and Facebook dominating the digital ad market. You know, it's interesting that even in Congress, both sides of the aisle, there's been political interest in doing something about these companies, often for different reasons. But, they're both kind of, you know, under the microscope right now, I suspect eventually, we'll see some sort of regulation that will, crack down on, on, either the content that they share or the way that their organizations are structured.

...some kind of break up policy has been like taking root, you know, back in 2004 about the media environment. This gives each of the five corporations and their leaders more communication power than was exercised by any despot or dictatorship in history. I mean, think about that. That gives, you know, thinking about the amount of power that are concentrated in the hands of very few, content providers.

I think that's really important. So, so there's a number of, a number of things that we can do here. But we have we have to face the fact that we've produced a fairly uncritical public and that that maybe sounds, mean, but but that's just, mostly we have low information citizens. We haven't we haven't really asked people to get really engaged with, the political process with, you know, with what happens in civic life.

And our news media are not doing a great job of informing people, even when they do pay attention. So, first of all, though, in a high choice environment, people to note, I mean, you think about the audiences for prime time TV. I mean, people are much more likely to tune in to sitcoms and dramas on, you know, broadcast networks than they are to to watch even cable news networks.

The audiences for those are small by comparison. So, you know, and now we just have a tremendous amount of, real choices. So it's easier than ever to just ignore what's happening in, public affairs completely. And so and you kind of can't blame people because it's messy and it's ugly and, you know, you certainly, can understand why why people want to avoid all the ugliness.

So we need we need to create an environment where people can come to come to this, you know, be invited into these conversations, can be presented with, you know, important public affairs information about what's happening in the world can help them understand why they should care and can help them figure out what sort of actions and behaviors they want to take based on that information.

So, helping people understand their news and opinion is really important. That's always been a challenge. Even when in the print newspaper news is clearly on one page, opinion is clearly on another page. Even then, that's been hard. And online, everything just, you know, falls in the newsfeed. It's it's even harder to differentiate types of content. Understanding conflicts of interest.

That's really important. Knowing that, you know, there's a difference between independent producers of information that don't have a stake in what they're reporting on versus, the people that are telling us, things about things that, you know, the they have a vested interest in. So that's a big difference. In general, we have this depoliticized, hyper commercial commercial society reinforced by our media system.

This idea lazy, not biased. Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning. Humans are cognitive misers in that resource. Demanding cognitive processes are typically avoided. Again, that goes back to this idea that cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable. And why would we put ourselves in these awful positions if we could avoid it? So, so this means that, you know, people aren't necessarily, engaging in this selective process where, they're just trying to find information that only fits with what they believe.

They're just not really interested in in doing the work. And again, who can blame them, especially when you've got a million other things to attend to. So, so I think it's important to think about that, too. Again, our media system, we need to create something that will help people with this, not make it harder to navigate.

Just a little bit of history. If I may. How did we get here? Marconi? Who invented, they called it wireless back then. You know, there were a number of people involved in this, but, he was just one. This idea of path dependance is important because the path that we that we started on way back then, led us to our media system that we have today.

The qwerty keyboard is a good example. They invented it to slow down our typing so these keys wouldn't jam up on these old typewriters. We don't need that today, but we still have it because it's what we're used to and it's what we have on keyboards everywhere. When radio came along, we had to figure out how to deal with this natural resource.

It was part of the electromagnetic spectrum, the ether, they called it. And so, when the Titanic sank, people said, oh, we need to figure out a way to standardize the, the radio communication system. That was really the first attempt to to seriously regulate, that, that system. And so, so even though, you know, some people said, we're indeed upon the threshold of a new means of widespread communication, of intelligence, profound importance from the point of view of public education and public welfare.

You know, what we got is often hyper commercial and has nothing to do with the kind of public affairs information that people need. This is unfair. I'm picking on the Kardashians. Reality TV has its place, of course, but, but the system we have today is a it's a holdover from from where we, where we were 100 years ago when, when basically commercial broadcasting became the, the default, for how to, you know, regulate and create a media system.

So we got this, the, the FCC chair, in the 80s under Reagan, he famously said, television is just another appliance. It's a toaster with pictures. So just dispense with this idea that we need to treat information in any special way. We don't need to regulate it. We don't need to do anything special with it. It's just a product to be bought and sold.

Of course, it's much more complicated than that. For one thing, toasters don't receive First Amendment protection. There's a lot more to it. But but we need to get beyond this idea that, that the toaster is under the television. It's just like a toaster. So the bottom line, the question is never to regulate or not to regulate.

The question is always does this regulation improve the system of free speech and the condition of democracy? I really like that idea. It just it just shows you that, you know, we're going to have regulations, we're going to have policy, we're going to have laws. But you know what? What are they who are they really serving? Are they are they supporting a broad public interest, or are they serving a narrow set of special interests?

Which were the idea of social capital, I think is really important in the context of, you know, finding a better way. Strong ties versus weak ties, social sociologists talk about this, these lunch counter sit ins that happened during the civil rights movement. You know, this these are people exercising their strong ties. When people go out in protest, they're they're developing strong ties with other humans that they're closely linked to, versus weak ties.

This is what we see online. And those have their place and they can be very important. But at the same time, there's a lot more to, to, to, to developing, the, the way that we bond with other humans, than just interacting with them online. So, so developing that social capital, that's how we create, I think, productive social change where people are, you know, able to really participate in what's going on.

So but also certainly reading beyond headlines, knowing your source, varying your source, separating news from opinion, getting to you're as close as you can to the original report, not somebody spin or commentary. But where did it actually come from? A lot of what we see, especially on TV, is just riffing off of other people's reporting. So get to the original report, follow a story over time.

Don't make snap judgments. Challenge your own biases. Learn as much as you can about how the media environment actually works, and then take, you know, be responsible in your own consumption and production. We're all producers these days when we go online. Just a few more things. You know, I think it's important to limit our social media use and various sources, differentiate between singular facts and complex realities.

I think to some extent, listening, you know, it only gets us so far. But but we do need to do a better job of understanding each other. Getting off of the internet and interacting in real life is important. I think it's important to not to be afraid to talk about tough issues. To talk values first and then positions find common ground in terms of what we can all agree on.

It's hard. But don't be a passive consumer of this stuff. Take an active role and then do your own part to spread awareness and empowerment about all this stuff. I think, you know, we can, we can we can, really bring the internet back to the sort of democratic ideals and promise that, you know, people initially thought of it, in terms of and so, but it's going to take a concerted effort to do that.

I think, again, the stakes are high. This is just one issue. You know, inequality is also a really important issue. It's a problem when we've got, you know, political, officials who, you know, who are just deniers of the basic science. That's a big that's a big problem. And I don't know how to be nonpartisan about that.

We have to just kind of deal with that. I like to, you know, just to, for a positive, note here to end on the the Montreal Protocol is really interesting because it's a place where the US really led. I mean, there are a lot of complex reasons for how this played out, but this is when they discover this, this thing that was happening to the ozone layer, and really identified, CFCs.

Vegetables, cultivating your own critical mind, building your knowledge about the things we've talked about, exercising your sociological imagination, just stepping back and asking why? Why are things the way that they are? They have to be this way. Is there another way? Spreading critical awareness, participating in civic life? In there. And, I'm eager to hear, what kind of, comments and questions you'll have.

Thanks for listening. I know that was a lot.

Doug Exton: So thank you for that wonderful presentation. It was definitely informative. You definitely covered a lot of different topics through my life. It's very weird right now. Sorry. It definitely covered a lot of different topics. I think were very useful. So for the first question, I are there fact checkers within the realm of fake news generators?

Dr. Seth Ashley: Within the realm of fake news generators, I mean, I think I think that certainly Snopes is a great example of that. And Snopes is, they've been around for a really long time. They're, mission is to, you know, spot fake news and hoaxes online and, and highlight them. So, like I mentioned, PolitiFact, there's a number of, places like that.

You can just Google fact fact checking sites. And there's a whole bunch of them where you can turn to, it's they're great resources. You can just kind of look through them and see what are the kinds of what are the latest, fake news kinds of hoaxes that they've been spotlighting. And you can also plug in search terms to find, you know, if you've if you come across something that looks like it might be suspect, just plug it in there and, and they have, you know, there's a you can you can find results.

I hope that's I hope that answers the question.

Doug Exton: I think it did. And then what do you have as a recommendation to get out of our own filter bubbles, especially with social media sites using algorithms?

Dr. Seth Ashley: Yeah. It's tough. I mean, some people recommend that you like in Facebook. You can still change the settings to most recent instead of, top stories. So you can you can kind of game the algorithm a little bit. And that way it'll it'll show you everything that appears in real time. But, but I'm not sure that's, you know, that's sort of overwhelming in a different way.

So, so I think, one thing you can do is, is just try to, limit your social media use from one thing, get news from the actual original places that are producing that information. And give them your money if you can, because, it costs money to produce, produce information. So, you know, and I don't like telling people where to get their news.

You can you can decide for yourself what what works for you. But, but that's one way, to get to get around that, reading, reading broadly and widely as much as possible. Is, I think, a good way to just avoid the algorithms and message you can. There also, there are search engines. You know, there are search engines other than Google that, that, you know, DuckDuckGo is one of them.

There are places that they don't collect your data and they and they don't, prioritize things in quite the same way.

Doug Exton: So and then do people have a uniform definition of news?

Dr. Seth Ashley: Good question. I mean, I think, you know, the one I use is broad. I mean, I think we all talk. I mean, it's called the News feed. But if you look at what's in your news feed, I mean, it can be basically anything. So I mean, news is, has become so, so broad in terms of, any kind of information these days.

But I think that's kind of where we are now.

Doug Exton: And then with, like the endless scroll on social media and stuff like that. How many people would you say, think that they're informed just by reading the headlines? Even if the headlines can be provocative and misleading?

So, those kinds of more traditional news organizations, tend to be where people become better informed.

Doug Exton: And then do you have any ideas of how people can, kind of support local news outlets compared to, like, CNN and like the more large scale ones.

Dr. Seth Ashley: Right? I mean, if you can't support your local outlets, like, that's kind of the bread and butter for, for the, the media system. You know, they're they're basically not going to get their money anywhere else. CNN's going to be okay. And, and, you know, because national outlets are going to do. Okay. For the most part, the New York Times has done a good job of weathering the storm, and they've, they've turned to digital subscriptions and, they've, they've kind of come through, and, you know, a good a good financial note.

But it's the local news outlets where, I mean, they call them news deserts, places that have just dried up when the local news has dried up completely, it's not even available anymore. So, fortunately, we're not one of those. We have we actually have two competing news dailies here. But, you know. Yeah, they need our support.

I think, it's going to be, it's going to be hard for them to, you know, find their way with, especially with the consolidation that we see online, the, the difficulty they're going to continue to have generating, digital ad revenue. It costs a lot basically to, to staff a newsroom. And so, so the loss of advertising dollars is going to, is going to continue to be hard for them to make up.

So, you know, a lot of people have really great ideas about nonprofit and noncommercial media. There's there's lots of ways we could provide tax incentives for nonprofit outlets. You know, there's there's a there's a whole host of ideas out there. For, for ways, to, to do better. Texas Tribune versus San Diego, ProPublica.

There's a lot of models for doing noncommercial, nonprofit, nonpartisan, independent reporting. And that's on top of our traditional public media systems, PBS, NPR, I mean, we could certainly fund those, more fully than we do now. They basically have to beg for money, you know, from, viewers like you and then grants and donations. So, so I think, just from a, public policy standpoint, we could we could certainly do better with, with how we support those.

Doug Exton: And then I know you mentioned the Kardashians briefly, but do you think, like the advent of, like, reality TV and that, like, just sensation know just for the ratings form of media has influenced, the way normal media is reported since at argue that pretty much any online news site. Well, I at least have something about the Kardashians mentioned somewhere.

Dr. Seth Ashley: All right. Yeah, and it's nothing. There's nothing wrong with those kinds of, diversions and entertainment media. And certainly we've had, you know, things like that have been around for a long time. But now it's just kind of on steroids. There's just so much of it. And, and it comes at a time when our public affairs information is dwindling.

So, that's why we call it this high choice media environment. And it's just so much easier to tune out of the important stuff. And, and, you know, just we're just sort of awash in the, in the light, the light entertainment fare. So I think that's just why it's, you have to work harder if you want it to not be, not be taken in by that.

So it's important to find a balance like anything, you know? I mean, it's of course it's fine to consume entertainment media. But but it's important to find find a balance with that. And, being an informed citizen as much as possible.

Doug Exton: And then circling back to our first question about the fact checking, we had some clarification. Are there fact checkers for, like, fake news outlets specifically that, like, either make sure the news is fake itself or like, make sure that at least that they're somewhat fact or anything. Do they employ fact checkers on their.

Dr. Seth Ashley: To fake news outlets and play, fact checkers? I mean, I would say no. I mean, the whole point is to, provide false information and usually to deceive people in some way or another. So I think, I think that's the, that's the problem. Yeah. I'm not sure I understand the question.

Doug Exton: And, so then, Would you be able to repeat the name of your books that you authored that you mentioned earlier in this presentation?

Doug Exton: And then how do you recommend that we hold mainstream media news sources accountable to the citizenry instead of playing the sensationalism game? In the distorted of both sides game space.

Dr. Seth Ashley: That's a great question. I mean, there's a couple approaches. Again, I mean, we are consumers of this stuff, and so we have a say in what we consume. So I think that's important to exercise our agency and just say just turn it off. You know. So I'm not I'm just not willing to, to tolerate this. It's not doing what I need it to do.

And so I'm going to go elsewhere. I'm to find better information. Somewhere else. Then there's also the public policy approach, and that's where it requires collective action. But but we need to, you know, be able to, work together, to agree that we need to do a little better with our creating a more diverse and robust, public media environment, noncommercial media environment, so that so that it doesn't have to, sort of, appeal to that sort of lowest common denominator that's going to reach as many people as possible.

Doug Exton: And then what measures can media take to avoid just kind of an endless ramble of news that might keep people from tuning? Oh, unlike election night or other political events.

Dr. Seth Ashley: I think that's tough. I mean, you can have the greatest news outlet in the world, and if it's boring and people don't want to pay attention, then, what good is it to you? Right? I mean, and so, so I do think, you know, news outlets have to work to engage people. That's important. And that's why it's, you know, good journalists are important.

You know, so, so I don't think there's a there's an easy answer to that, but I think that's, that's basically. Yeah, that's, you know, we need people that are trained in, with the tools of the trade so that they know how to gather information, but they also know how to present it in a way that's going to, you know, bring people in and bring people to the conversation.

Doug Exton: And then in towards the middle of your presentation, you mentioned, like the media monopolies, with a lot of those big names that we see a lot in the movie theater. Do you know if there's been any effort, what? Whether it be a ground or a grassroots effort or, like, top down to break up those monopolies?

And there has been such a consolidation in media companies.

Dr. Seth Ashley: Yeah. There's a huge movement for for media democracy broadly. And that's the idea that, that we need to create a more democratic system, democratic, small, the right not not the political party, but democratic in the sense that it's, you know, equal and open to all, basically, and that it welcomes all voices and it really makes room for, for, for different points of view.

And it provides us the information that we need to participate in in democratic life. So, yeah, there's, there's, all kinds of, groups and, and organizations that are, you know, advocating for that kind of stuff out there. Free press is one of them. You might, might check out Free Press. That be a good place to start also.

Doug Exton: And I'll have them linked, in the little description, only post the recording of this and that will be up a little bit later than normal. So it'll be about a week and a half to two weeks until this one gets, but unfortunately that is all the time we have tonight for questions. So I just want to say thank you to everyone for staying along that extra mile.

And then also thank you to Seth Ashley for this amazing presentation.

Dr. Seth Ashley: Yeah, thanks for having me. Glad to be here. This is very unusual. It's weird to talk to, a computer blank computer screen, but, but I hope it was useful to someone out there.