{"id":1982,"date":"2014-10-27T22:07:08","date_gmt":"2014-10-27T22:07:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=1982"},"modified":"2016-09-09T14:38:45","modified_gmt":"2016-09-09T14:38:45","slug":"a-scarce-commodity-trustworthy-and-relevant-information","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/a-scarce-commodity-trustworthy-and-relevant-information\/","title":{"rendered":"A scarce commodity: trustworthy and relevant information"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Thomas E. Patterson<\/a>, Harvard University<\/em><\/p>\n

Foundation essay:<\/strong> This article is part of a series marking the launch of The Conversation in the US. Our foundation essays are longer than our usual comment and analysis articles and take a wider look at key issues affecting society.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Conversation alone won\u2019t save us from ourselves but it\u2019s hard to imagine a time when it was needed more.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re losing touch with the facts. Take global warming. An overwhelming majority<\/a> of scientists agree that climate change is happening and that it is manmade. But 26% of Americans<\/a> say there is no solid evidence that the earth is getting warmer and an additional 18% attribute it primarily to natural causes rather than human activity. Here is another example: 20% of Americans<\/a> believe doctors and the government want to give children vaccines despite knowing that they cause autism – which they don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Toss in such truly wacky ideas as death panels being part of the new health care system and you have a public mired in misinformation.<\/p>\n

Ever since the first scientific polls revealed that most Americans are marginally informed about politics, analysts have asked whether citizens are equipped to play the role that democracy assigns them. Cause for optimism occurred after World War II when, as Markus Prior<\/a> showed in Post-Broadcast Democracy<\/a>, increased education levels and the emergence of television news as an almost inevitable part of a family\u2019s evening viewing contributed to a better informed public.<\/p>\n

That trend has reversed itself. Misinformation is on the rise. Whatever else one might conclude about self-government, it\u2019s at risk when citizens don\u2019t know something but think they know it. They\u2019ll have opinions, but the opinions will be grounded in something more fanciful than real.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t have to search far for reasons why citizens are losing touch with reality. Our information system has been corrupted by talk show hosts who tell tall tales, politicians who concoct self-serving half truths, journalists who orchestrate phony debates, public relations specialists who spin nearly everything imaginable. Sadly, some of them have been at it so for so long that even they can no longer tell fact from fiction.<\/p>\n

Ideally, the media is a source of information that is not only accurate but also relevant. On this second dimension, too, we\u2019re being shortchanged. Media outlets put out a torrent of news about celebrity misdeeds and weird events. A few years ago, the antics of Lindsay Lohan \u2014 a B-list actress by any standard \u2014 received a level of news coverage that would be the envy of a cabinet secretary. So would the name recognition she acquired. A poll<\/a> revealed that Lohan was more widely known than all of the then-cabinet members except Hillary Clinton.<\/p>\n

Nearly a century ago, Walter Lippmann<\/a>, one of America\u2019s best known journalists, and John Dewey<\/a>, one of its best known philosophers, criticized the quality of public information, saying it was more likely to distract than inform.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Walter Lippmann<\/span>
\nPirie MacDonald via Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the years that followed, their agreement on that point was largely forgotten because of a point on which they disagreed: the public\u2019s capacity for informed judgment and the type of journalism that could fortify it.<\/p>\n

Lippmann was the skeptic, Dewey the optimist. Strengthen public education and tilt journalists toward citizens’ everyday concerns and the public will meet its democratic responsibilities. That was Dewey\u2019s view. Lippmann thought there were inherent limits on the citizens’ willingness to engage with public affairs, which led him to a more elitist view. As Lippmann saw, journalists needed to harness knowledge so that their reporting is as precise as possible.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n

John Dewey<\/span><\/p>\n

Although Dewey and Lippmann never held a public debate, scholars have since acted as if they did and have claimed that journalists need to make a choice: Dewey\u2019s model or Lippmann\u2019s. Yet the need to choose disappears when one focuses on their main concerns. Lippmann\u2019s objection to the practice of journalism was its lack of discipline \u2014- the result being inaccurate and misleading reporting. Dewey\u2019s objection was journalism\u2019s lack of relevance \u2014- the result being a focus on the powerful at the expense of the interests of ordinary citizens.<\/p>\n

The fact is, democratic societies need information that is both trustworthy and relevant. Today\u2019s media system is deficient in each respect.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say that all involved in public communication contribute to the problem. Many journalists and public servants strive to keep the public informed and engaged. But there aren\u2019t enough of them and too many of them lack the knowledge and the resources to do it well on a regular basis. Few examples illustrate the point more clearly, to my mind, than the blithe reporting that portrayed the Arab Spring as a flowering of Middle Eastern democracy.<\/p>\n

Lippmann argued that the accuracy of public reporting is an index of the state of knowledge on the subject in question. But it\u2019s also a function of whether that knowledge is readily accessible. The Conversation helps unlock what we reliably know.<\/p>\n

As one examines the information available through The Conversation, one is struck by the fact that much of it is contextual. Not, for instance, the news-borne details of today\u2019s events, but instead the underlying causes and consequences of these events. Such information has never been daily journalism\u2019s strong suit. In 1947, the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press<\/a> concluded that reporters routinely fail to provide \u201ca comprehensive and intelligent account of the day\u2019s events in a context that gives some meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n

The news media is arguably better on that score today but there\u2019s still a long way to go. A study<\/a> of economic news coverage by Ted Smith and Robert Lichter, for example, found journalists\u2019 contextual explanations to be \u201cepisodic, shallow and formulaic, focusing on the most obvious short-term effects \u2026 [like] \u2018the dropping dollar got a lift today, and that pushed up stocks on Wall Street.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Public information that is at once trustworthy and relevant is a scarce commodity. That\u2019s why The Conversation\u2019s arrival in America is worthy of celebration.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

Thomas Patterson is a member of The Conversation’s editorial board.<\/em><\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>.
\nRead the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Thomas E. Patterson, Harvard University Foundation essay: This article is part of a series marking the launch of The Conversation in the US. Our foundation essays are longer than our usual comment and analysis articles and take a wider look at key issues affecting society. The Conversation alone won\u2019t save us from ourselves but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":7862,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[36],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1982"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1982"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1982\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7863,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1982\/revisions\/7863"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7862"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1982"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1982"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}