… We ordinarily tend to think that perception — the evidence of your eyes and ears — provides pretty strong justification. If you see something with your own eyes, you should probably believe it. By comparison, the claims that other people make — which philosophers call “testimony” — provide some […] Read more »
Is Robert Mueller an antique? The role of the facts in a post-truth era
Lee McIntyre, Boston University In just a little over eight minutes – on the morning of Wednesday, May 29th – the post-truth era came to an end. Or did it? That’s when Special Counsel Robert Mueller took the podium and addressed only the facts concerning his two-year-long investigation into Russian […] Read more »
Politics Is Not Total War: Having a realistic view of government can be an antidote to disillusionment
… One of the problems with the rise of what we have come to call populism in America is that in many instances it has gone well beyond expressing legitimate grievances in the face of political failure; it has instead sown corrosive distrust of and cynicism about our governing institutions […] Read more »
In the war against misinformation, fact-checking works. Big Tech needs to do more of it
Amid a continued public outcry over the influence of fake news and misinformation, tech companies are scrambling to generate effective solutions. … Our new research shows that fact-checking prevents misinformation from shaping our thoughts — even our automatic and uncontrollable perceptions. When fact-checking calls out what isn’t credible, much of […] Read more »
Worry About Facebook. Rip Your Hair Out in Screaming Terror About Fox News.
… Just about every political lie that has dominated American discourse in the past two decades — the Swift Boaters and the birthers, death panels, the idea that undocumented immigrants pose an existential threat but climate change does not — depended, for its mainstream dissemination, on the Fox News machine. […] Read more »
How actual news consumers grapple with fake news and (sometimes) tune out
“Residents cycle between verifying information and disengaging from news to relieve stress.” In the International Journal for Communication, Temple University’s Andrea Wenzel looks at how consumers — in 13 focus groups across cities in California, Indiana, Kentucky, and New York — “navigate vast quantities of often conflicting information and misinformation […] Read more »