There used to be a time, not so very long ago, when “the facts” referred to something confirmed, certain, clear, something in which we could have shared confidence–and therefor agree upon. Not anymore. America don’t seem to agree on much of anything these days, not even what constitute the facts in many cases.
Many have suggested that polarization is to blame. It’s a plausible explanation: partisans interested in promoting their values might well be disposed to twist the facts or even invent entirely separate ones to fit their purposes. As partisanship has increased, it’s reasonable to expect this tendency to grow.
But according to a group of scholars participating in a recent workshop entitled A Modern History of the Disinformation Age convened on December 13–14, 2018, by the independent non-profit Social Science Research Council at George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, this picture only scratches the surface.
A summary report on the event identified three deeper forces undermining society’s capacity to agree on “the facts”:
- The “coordinated efforts of ideologically motivated actors”, including “extended networks of funders, think tanks, academic research centers, pollsters, marketing agencies, political parties, and public relations firms”, to undermine not only an individual fact or sets of facts, but the very sources that until recently we have trusted to supply them: the academy, the media, and government.
- The “failure of traditional bulwarks, such as legacy media, to curtail disinformation”. Among the sources of this failure identified by workshop participants: “The end of the ‘Golden Age of Capitalism’ reactions to the cultural changes of the 1960s, the consolidation of mass media news producers, and the shift of advertising revenues away from newspapers toward cable news and social media…”.
- The “emergence of institutions that facilitate new modes of disinformation”. Among the examples workshop participants cited were: “increased economic incentives for journalists to produce clickbait and for entrepreneurs—those seeking to profit off the demand for fake news, particularly through ad revenue—to fabricate news stories out of whole cloth; decreased legal or ethical disincentives for politicians to lie to the public (there may even be strategic rewards for lying); and a widespread belief in ‘the magic of the marketplace’ that has prevented Americans from understanding the root causes of a number of preventable market failures.”
Workshop participants were in consensus about why these trends should concern us. As the authors of the summary report on the workshop put it:
[W]hile democracies may be designed to accommodate differences of opinion, they are ill-equipped to sustain differences in perceived reality. We depend on institutions that constrain the most polarizing elements in our political discourse, which contributes to a shared sense of reality. Our contemporary crisis of epistemology [knowledge] reflects the fact that the decline of traditional institutions has outpaced the emergence of new ones—and it is precisely at such times that the coordinated efforts of actors motivated by political gain have the greatest impact.
The challenge, then, is to accelerate the development of new institutions capable of contributing to a shared sense of reality–of shared truths. EnCiv was founded with the goal of developing into just such an institution. In future posts we will be exploring others as well.
