One of the things that most frustrates me is the hold that conservative media has on the Republican base in this country. I realize that the media is not the entirety of the problem (there’s also just a general stubbornness and an obsession with “whataboutism”). I say this as a former hard core Republican – fully admitting that they had me for quite a while. I was kept captive in large part due to my own ignorance and upbringing – having been raised in that context. In what follows, I’d like to share some techniques that helped me begin to understand how the conservative media works and how to discern levels of trustworthiness in your media consumption.
Are there things that are blatantly false or misleading?
When you read or watch a story, take the main point and look it up in multiple places. But when you do the search, don’t use language that assumes the story is true, or use terms that are “leading” in the search query. For example, this 11/4/2020 article on Fox News describes a situation in Michigan just after the election. The situation, according to Fox News, is one in which Republican vote challenges were being prevented from entering the building to watch the vote counting process. In the article, there are several images from a user’s social media feed. In that feed, which shows prominently on the page, you can see the user’s captions of various images, saying things like “disgraceful”, “Republican poll challengers are still locked outside”. Republicans across the social media landscape at the time seized on this, and I saw plenty of angry posts citing this as evidence that the integrity of the election had been violated. What I’d first like to point out is that this Fox News article is very intentional in both making sure that an extensive number of Tweets show prominently in the article and also that those Tweets are from a person involved with a Trump PAC. The user’s statements say things like “Detroit election officials refusing to let the public observe the counting process” and “this is a disgrace to democracy”, and “The crowd is now chanting ’Let us in!’, as many Republican poll challengers are still locked outside”. Without any other context or sources, the outcome of reading this article would be a stirring of emotion – for Republicans, anger, desperation and fear that Trump would be cheated. For Democrats, fear and shock a situation could be developing which would cast doubt on Biden’s imminent win. The question at hand is how to know if what we’re reading is false or misleading? What I did at the time that I was initially exposed to this story was to pause, and take a breath. I knew at that moment that I needed to suppress the emotions, temporarily at least, so that I could find out more information. This is key, so don’t miss this – holding the emotional response to something like this will pay dividends in learning to discern the truth. By keeping yourself emotionally withdrawn, you give yourself the space to use your rational facilities for the next step: look up other angles to the story. In this case, I did a non-leading web search of the following: “detroit tcf vote observers 2020”. Note that I said non-leading. This means the following searches would be bad: “republicans blocked by democrats in tcf building”, “disgraceful vote counting in MI”. Non-leading should be objective statements and devoid of emotion. The results that show up when doing a non-leading search allow one to gain a broader context of the situation. In the subsequent articles that I found, I learned that the law allowed each party to have 134 poll challengers. But in the building at that time there were more than 200 for each party present – so there was actually a surplus of poll challengers. Those other poll challengers outside weren’t allowed in because there were already plenty in there – not due to nefarious motives. So with this we begin to understand that the initial representation of the situation was wrong, and plainly deceitful. Upon reading some of these other articles, we learn that there were also Democrat poll challengers who were prevented from entering as well – an interesting fact omitted from the Fox News article. This lends more support to the idea that Fox News was being intentionally misleading. Here are some of the articles that came up for me in my non-leading search (article 1, article 2, article 3). I recommend trying to do this search on your own for practice if you are skeptical. At any rate, with this added context we see that the situation is quite different from what was described on Fox News (or social media or wherever else we might have heard about this situation). We can now give ourselves permission to feel emotions; and those emotions, regardless of which side you are on, will be significantly reduced, if not totally gone. Multiple positive outcomes result from this technique; we’ve prevented ourselves from being emotionally manipulated, identified an attempt at manipulation, and have made good faith efforts to validate that what we think we know to be true is actually true. There is a greater challenge for Republicans here, however. The story above virally spread throughout social media because conservatives are predisposed to believe this type of narrative – it is built into their worldview that this is something that liberals typically do. So rather than question its veracity, it’s used as a data point to enforce their prior beliefs – that is, it’s used as a confirmation of a false belief. So the path of least resistance for the conservative is to accept the story/video/post at face value as confirmation of what they already think to be true. The challenge is two-fold: first, they must make the choice to practice the technique above. Second, if and when they find that a story is misleading, they have to purposely make a note, mental or otherwise, that goes something like this: “My initial assumption was wrong and even though I wanted this story to prove that my beliefs are correct, it doesn’t. Therefore, I should question this belief”. Part of making that mental note involves remembering it; it is very easy to go on to the next story or half truth and just brush this under the rug as a one off discrepancy. By remembering this incident, and remembering that you can be wrong sometimes, you can temper future judgments. It can serve as a reminder to engage your critical thinking facilities before jumping to an emotional conclusion.
Will the article look at multiple perspectives?
In our example article above, the only perspective given is that of the angry crowd outside the TCF building in Detroit. There are no tempering alternative perspectives shared from either Democrats, city officials, or those inside. Included was a statement from the Michigan attorney general, but the statement is a general press release, and not focused on nor specific to the TCF building situation. The article states at the start that only Republicans are outside, which our other articles showed to be false; there were people from both sides of the aisle there who were being blocked from entering. The lack of perspectives and absence of any attempts to try to explain why the situation was happening should be taken as a warning sign or clue that the author might have a motivation beyond merely informing the reader of what is happening. It should be a warning that the author might be trying to manipulate the reader’s emotions in a sly way by giving a one sided view into the situation, using dubious sources of information (a Twitter account from someone who was a director on a Michigan based Trump PAC). It’s clear that there was only 1 perspective in the article, and no attempt was made to correct any incorrect understandings that readers may have had about the article. This calls into question the motive of the author, as well as why they would so transparently omit any other sources of information or perspectives which would serve to temper the interpretation of the readers. Be on the lookout for this trick – it lets Fox News amplify things which are not true, while claiming plausible deniability. They can in effect say “We didn’t say these untrue things; we just reported what some person said”. So a naive viewer might take the “reporting” at face value, and miss the warning signs that they’re consuming a one sided and manipulative narrative.
The more provocative a headline/story is, the more you need refrain from emotion
Headlines can often cause extreme emotions very quickly – take the headline of my blog post for instance. I wanted to grab attention, and to illustrate my point, produce a strong emotion from my more conservative readers. Now the headline of our Fox News article is “Locked-out Detroit Republican vote challengers furious over lack of access”. There’s a lot there, but the headline betrays the author’s goal: they want you to be as furious as the Detroit Republicans. They want you to identify with them as fellow Republicans who are being unjustly treated. Be careful of these types of headlines. The author is showing their hand from the start that it is their intent to manipulate you into feeling what they want you to feel. It also seems to me that they are showing how little they respect their audience, by telegraphing their intent so transparently. It is reminiscent of the way a dog will try to slyly glance in the direction that they are planning on running before they actually make their move. So it is with conservative media; they can’t help themselves from writing manipulative headlines – and they do it because it works. So when you are reading headlines on new sources, especially the conservative ones, try to be extra self aware when you feel your emotions rising; in most cases this is a warning that you are encountering something which is a) designed to manipulate a certain emotion/reaction b) one sided or lacking multiple perspectives c) lacking a full context, and therefore requiring some footwork by you to get the full story.
When a media outlet presents stories in the fashion outlined above, it raises a host of other questions. How often do they craft stories like this? What else might be missing from other stories you’ve read or watched? If there is information or context which fundamentally changes the emotional thrust of a story or video, and it is omitted, can you really trust this news source? How many attempts at emotional manipulation are too many before you call an information source “untrustworthy”? Most importantly, what do you currently believe to be true which can trace its origin to a half truth from one of these media sources?
If something makes you uncomfortable, it doesn’t mean it’s fake news
I think it’s really important to be upfront about something as you try to think through these issues and that is: this will feel uncomfortable. Sometimes it can feel devastating to learn that things you’ve thought were “for sure” are wrong or at least up for grabs. This is part of the process, and although it is tough, you will be better for it in the end. The reason I’m bringing this up is that for lots of conservatives, when they are confronted with something that doesn’t “feel” right, or goes completely opposite of what they thought they knew, the knee jerk reaction is to say that what they are reading is a lie, or more commonly, “fake news”. It has become something of a protective mechanism for people who are confronted with information they don’t like. But just because you don’t like some information doesn’t make it untrue or false! What you are feeling is your mind trying to make sense of conflicting information you are facing; your mind is trying desperately to find a reason to believe that what you formerly knew to be true actually still is. But it is your job to keep your emotions in check and keep your rational thinking in charge of things. It’s your job to look at the various angles, and decide when looking at the facts which narrative is most likely true (by seeing which narrative fits best with the given facts) regardless of where that leads.
It’s ok to be wrong
It’s worth repeating: it’s ok to be wrong – it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or unintelligent. (But the same is not true if you persist in your way of thinking even after becoming aware that you were wrong) Some people have worked very hard at manipulating the feelings you have while consuming conservative news. If you believed something previously, and realized that you were mistaken, or misled, it’s not too late to turn around. It has happened to everyone at some point – we’ve all believed something with absolute conviction and then later found out it wasn’t true, or was only half true. Speaking from personal experience, it feels bad; like humiliatingly bad. But there’s a freedom in turning around and heading in a different direction. There’s freedom, if you feel led, to say “I was wrong, but I know better now so I’ll try to do better”. What matters is that going forward, as you encounter information, you do your best to get at the truth.
Be wary of emotional manipulation of various kinds. Sometimes it will attempt to goad you into feeling a certain way by trickery. Other times it will attempt to affirm your belief in a certain subject area. The article we discussed here did both: it attempted to make the reader feel fury, as well as confirm the reader’s suspicions about nefarious schemes to steal an election. Depending on your buy-in to conservative political views, it may feel disorienting as you begin to slowly notice the patterns of deception that are typically employed. You may also begin to wonder how you ever believed those things – in time this will be replaced with a feeling of relief (among others) – a relief in finally having a belief system which is more consistent with the truth.
Merely Xtian 