If you haven’t heard of this thing called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, I guarantee it will ring some bells for you.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a phenomenon where a person is confident that they are great at a given thing, like breakdancing or competitive eating, but they actually suck at it. It seems anti-intuitive, but part of what’s happening is that they lack the foundational knowledge that they’d otherwise use to accurately evaluate their performance, meaning they suck so much, they don’t know just how much they suck.
Far-right writers who dismiss nonpartisan journalists as hacks may be the ultimate case of Dunning-Kruger, and this cognitive bias was alive and well last week after the conclusion of the Russia investigation headed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
A good example is this piece, where senior contributor Margot Cleveland described how USA Today “blacklisted” conservative site The Federalist. As some background, Cleveland believes nonpartisan outlets like USA Today lean left, and she also thinks Mueller’s (unreleased) report “(exposed) the mainstream media as highly paid scandalmongers.” Her piece suggested that a USA Today editor unfairly rejected an op-ed she’d written because she included The Federalist and National Review as sources.
Because Cleveland armed her petty article with the actual emails from the USA Today editor, it’s clear that the publication had attempted to factcheck her piece before deciding not to run it. The editor summarized their sourcing standards, noting, “Links to National Review or the Federalist (or similar sites on the left) are not reliable.”
Because Attorney General William Barr’s recent memo, the only public summary of Mueller’s investigation, ushered in an unprecedented amount of inaccurate coverage from partisan media, I factchecked Cleveland’s piece as a case in point. But this individual episode from a season of reality-defying partisan news touches on a number of issues I’ve seen as nonpartisan journalists fail to factcheck nonsense at the rate it’s being produced.
The overriding part of our mission here at Big If True is to fight misinformation with nonpartisan journalism, but I still wrack my brain over how to do that in the most effective way. I’m not the only one. If what we were doing as journalists were enough to conquer the problem, it would have been conquered by now.
The potential pitfalls to factchecking misinformation, myths and hoaxes feels infinite. If you write an article to debunk a hoax, you may empower it by amplifying the untruth to people who wouldn’t have heard about it otherwise. Our biases are powerful enough that people often prefer lies to truth, so some journalists worry that factchecking is, at its heart, pointless. And partisan overreactions to nonpartisan journalism, with hostility, harassment and rebooting misinformation, make efforts to correct a cracked record feel absolutely futile.
The model for nonpartisan factchecking looks like this: A single statement or idea is verified or debunked with a concise word count and the black-and-white assumption that the thing will either be true or false. Factcheckers also have in-between ratings, like “mostly false” or “mostly true” that allow for some nuance.
However, going beyond individual statements is more complicated. A single piece of partisan, and especially far-right journalism, is difficult and time-consuming to factcheck because it’s built on layers of untruths, stacked between opinions posed as facts.
A lot of times, they have the added bonus of being written in a pseudo-intellectual and condescending style, even though, like the pretentious high school debate club president who thinks he knows everything, the writers probably do not know everything. Here’s an example from Cleveland’s piece I mentioned earlier, where she wrote: “Having attended law school and practiced law in federal courts for years rather than going to journalism school, I apparently missed the lesson that reporters’ job is to purvey unconfirmed gossip from anonymous sources.”
Nonpartisan journalists don’t usually factcheck entire stories or partisan news content more broadly – and understandably so. Factchecking a single statement or idea is less complex, more economic in terms of how long it takes and yields a satisfactory thumbs up or down that lets you know the job is complete.
However, the volume of misleading, inaccurate and often intentionally false statements in partisan media are so vast that to factcheck them one at a time is like a drop in the bucket.
Another issue is that a lot of hyper-partisan pieces deserving of factchecking may appear absurd at first glance to nonpartisan journalists who assume no one will believe them. I think this causes nonpartisan factcheckers to avoid covering the most egregious conspiracy theories, like PizzaGate, until it’s become painfully clear that people have bought them hook, line and sinker.
Meanwhile, fringe views that we should call propaganda have invaded the most mainstream conservative journalism orgs, like Fox News. Well-meaning nonpartisan news orgs, too timid to call a spade a spade, still are asking themselves if Fox News is a propaganda factory.
Perhaps part of the reluctance to label propaganda as such is connected to the strange position nonpartisan journalists have found themselves in. Conservatives and conservative media have moved so far to the right that they consider nonpartisan news orgs bastions of socialism, even though that’s not the case. Journalists, doing the same job in the same way we have for decades, have stayed still, yet shifted politically by virtue of the half of Americans who think it so. Though politically agnostic, journalists are thus liberal scum.
Last week’s coverage of the Mueller report, by nonpartisan and partisan journalists alike, proved that these dynamics are worse than ever. I was confused by the focus taken by large media orgs, including headlines that suggested the report had actually been released, thus reinforcing conservative claims that Trump has been fully exonerated. I was stunned by the hostility and defensiveness of conservative media, which got in the way of them accurately delivering to their audiences the contents of Barr’s memo.
Depending on how closely people integrate politics into their lives, that hostility can bleed into the day to day.
Propaganda works, and it’s corrosive. When it becomes personal, when propaganda fuels arguments with loved ones and strangers, that’s when I feel the most hopeless. You can see it in hate crimes or Nazi vandalism like occurred here in Oklahoma City last week. You may experience it with your own family or friends. The divisions that make all of the far-right media’s arguments work – that centrists and liberals are evil, dumb and literally want to murder babies – might not overlap with people’s experiences.
But propaganda works, and it’s corrosive. It’s so corrosive that it’s capable of creating a brother-versus-brother style culture war, and it’s happening now.
The urgency to do whatever we can to fix these issues can’t be overstated. It’s not enough for nonpartisan media to factcheck individual statements and leave the truly crazy conspiracy theories to go unchecked. It’s not enough to label propaganda as information that happens to be inaccurate. It’s not enough to avoid or defame people who differ from us politically in our personal lives. It’s not enough to dismiss concerns that these dynamics are corroding American democracy, too.
So, what is enough? What are we going to do to show the charlatans who pilfer propaganda that Americans can’t be manipulated by their lies?
Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
An excerpt from this piece also ran in our newsletter, Hard Reset. Sign up for Hard Reset here.