Election Lesson: The Media Needs a Makeover

I was speaking with former US Representative Peter Meijer. He voted for Trump's impeachment, but now understands, and is even a little bit enthused, about Trump's victory. 

Meijer described the disconnect between Trump’s words and the public’s perception of these words as semantic slippage. This conjured a conversation I had with Manvir Singh about factual beliefs as opposed to symbolic beliefs, which are beliefs that we know deep down, might not be true, strictly speaking.

Donald Trump says a lot of things that are not true; and then he keeps saying them. His followers have a misimpression of reality for sure, but much of their professed beliefs fall into the category of symbolic. It’s hard to discern what is symbolism versus fact. Researchers test professed beliefs by paying subjects for correct answers, which tends to better reveal genuinely held opinions as opposed to professed ones. It’s worth trying understand the distinction, because when the media falls over itself with each untruth, much of the public shrugs it off as somewhere between over earnestness or naiveté. “Who are these ninnies losing their minds at every joke, misstatement, or exaggeration?” they think, when they think of legacy media at all.

The news media should convey a world view to their audience that jibes with how most people actually think. Voters are processing lies in more nuanced ways than a strict binary. 

Lies Are Sometimes Subtle Things

This is hard. When a politician lies, how do you not call him out? What is the mechanism by which you say, okay that's a benign lie, that's an inconsequential lie, that's a “greater truth”?

Should there be a way to note or cover bullshitting as one category of lies, bluster as another, and actual, substantive, meaningful lies as such?

The media needs to think hard about this, or else they won’t meet the audience where they are. When a media is literal and the electorate is not, there is a mismatch, which turns the media into a less-than trusted authority. People know how to navigate the world and judge others via tools honed over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. It is important for the media to continue be the chronicler of lies, but how it is done - surrounding lies with proper proportion - is important. The media is crying out for a rethinking of their approach.

There is also a larger tendency that hurts the media’s credibility: a mismatch in values that that steers them toward pessimism, catastrophization, and ignorance of progress.

The Predominance Of Equity

Most people in the media, academia, and the world of nonprofits, have an equity orientation. Equity is, if not as their first concern, number “1A.” Emphasizing not just fair or beneficial outcomes, but equitable outcomes is what makes them good people and shows them as educated people.