For those who want to become more media literate, the “Bad News” game is an excellent educator.
You start by going to getbadnews.com. The game asks you if you would like to accept the position of “disinformation and fake news tycoon.” You are then guided through a series of steps: creating your own fake news website, sending out attention-grabbing tweets and fabricated news stories, and enlisting an army of bots to spread your content and boost your online presence.
The game was designed by a group of academics, journalists, and media experts in collaboration with the University of Cambridge in an attempt to help participants understand how the spread of conspiracies and internet trolling works in the real world.
Concerns about media literacy have increased significantly since the Russian propaganda campaign leading up to the 2016 presidential election, and even more recently after a video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was manipulated to make her seem to be drunkenly slurring her words. But as harmful as it sounds, false content circulating on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter is not as influential as it is often made out to be.
With regard to Russian trolling, for example, a 2017 joint study by New York University and Stanford University showed that one fake news story during the 2016 presidential race would have needed to hold the persuasiveness of 36 television commercials in order to change a voter’s mind. This suggests that the Russian campaign, as successful as it may have been at creating ideological polarization, hardly influenced the presidential vote, if at all. In addition, a 2017 Digital News Report by the University of Oxford and Reuters Institute shows that more than three-quarters of respondents think social media does not do a good job separating fact from fiction, indicating that a good portion of the population is already “media literate” to some degree.
So, it’s important to clarify what the term “fake news” actually means, as it has come to encompass two very different phenomena. In some cases, it is used to denote the false, inflammatory content described above, which is created explicitly so that the creator can profit, monetarily or otherwise, from public contention.
In other cases, “fake news” denotes misleading or error-filled reporting by legitimate news sites that are supposed to be motivated by objectivity and accuracy. The real problem, arguably, is the latter category — the politically-slanted reporting by outlets that are supposed to be reputable and that have a much larger reach than fake content creators, which most people don’t take seriously anyway.
The coverage of the encounter between students of Covington Catholic High School, the Black Hebrew Israelites, and Native American protester Nathan Phillips earlier this year offers a prime example of politically slanted reporting. The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN all framed the situation as a display of racist, white, MAGA-hat-wearing Trump supporters bullying a minority, claiming that the students “mobbed” Phillips and hurled racist insults at him.
A later video revealed that Phillips had instigated the encounter himself by walking up to the group with his drum, and that the insults against Phillips’ group had come from the Black Hebrew Israelites, not the pro-Trump students. The video also shows Nick Sandmann, the focal point of the media’s attacks, merely smiling at Phillips and later on attempting to deescalate a heated conversation between one of his fellow students and one of the protesters.
Without the preconceived notion that Trump supporters are inherently racist, a widespread opinion on the political Left and likely among journalists, the National Mall encounter probably wouldn’t have even been a story.
According to an often-cited 2014 Indiana University study, 28% of journalists identified as Democrats while only 7% identified as Republicans. Another 50% identified as independents.
Even journalists who do their best to remain politically objective can’t help being influenced by their personal biases. That’s why it’s important that national media companies broaden the ideological and geographical diversity of their employees. When people only interact with those with whom they agree, they develop narrow perspectives and are more prone to mistakes than when they are challenged by conflicting opinions.
When we talk about media disinformation, the real battle is not against edited videos or sensational fabrications. The real fight is against the ideological bubble created within legitimate media companies that often leads to skewed opinions and misleading narratives. If even the supposedly trustworthy news sites can’t be trusted, then no amount of media literacy will ever solve the disinformation problem.
Brooke Conrad was previously an intern at the Washington Examiner.
