Why the Battle Won’t End

My first eye exam was administered by the ophthalmologist my father had been seeing for years, old Dr. Alvis. Reminiscent of the 1970s BBC farce, Are You Being Served?‘s Grace Brothers department store with “young Mr. Grace”, a doddering ancient, and “old Mr. Grace” (“old Mr. Grace doesn’t get out much any more”) Alvis and Alvis were father and son ophthalmologists. Dr. Alvis Senior continued to work into his 90s, performing glaucoma tests by hand. A remarkable man.

The eye test consisted of showing me a series of slides and having me identify what I saw: dog, cat, chicken, etc. The final slide was a close-up, much enlarged picture of a mouse which I dutifully and with a certain amount of alarm identified as an elephant, much to Dr. Alvis’s and my mother’s merriment, presumably the desired effect. The point of this story is that perspective is important.

I was depressed by this article in The American Interest by Peter Pomerantsev on the “polarization spiral” in news coverage. The article included some interesting insights or, at least, useful ways of thinking about things, for example:

The very architecture of the internet fosters an environment where it is profitable for news organizations and individual users to take ever more extreme and polarizing positions1—an algorithmic logic that in turn encourages the populist politicians. They, in their turn, create content that mainstream media feels they are obliged to describe…and so the spiral spins on.

This spiral can be clearly seen in action in Italy, where politicians like the Minister of Interior, Matteo Salvini, have learned to dominate the information space.

Why did I find it depressing? Here’s an example of his prescription for breaking the deadly spiral:

Breaking the polarization spiral will require, first and foremost, greater public oversight of the algorithms and social media models that currently encourage extremism. Such regulation is already well on its way in Europe, and public pressure is growing in the United States. It is important that any regulation is focused not on censorship and content “take-downs,” but on encouraging accurate content, high editorial standards, and providing people with a balanced diet of content instead of encasing them in “echo chambers.”

Breaking the polarization spiral will also mean reforming the ad-tech system. As a new white paper by the Global Disinformation Index elaborates, this will require both automated analysis that looks at the metadata of news domains to see whether they show telltale signs of being created in nontransparent ways, as well as a qualitative review of the content and editorial practices of news sites to determine which ones follow journalistic standards around accuracy, transparency, corrections, and reliability.

The reason I find it depressing is that every incentive points in the opposite direction. In Europe the form that “greater public oversight” is taking is towards increasing censorship. Examples of that are easy to find. Viewpoints that are not officially sanctioned are simply banned. That’s one way of dealing with the situation but not one that I find encouraging.

A different but related resolution would be for a single, private viewpoint to dominate the “information space” completely. In the U. S. presently there is a trend towards such a viewpoint and it is one held by, perhaps, 8% of the American people.

The present, uncomfortable equilibrium is between two competing narratives, epitomized by MSNBC on the one hand and Fox News on the other. It reminds me of nothing so much as the trench warfare of World War I.

You can also see the nature of the problem in how every “fact-checking” site has evolved. Although they may begin by actually checking facts there is a tremendous tendency for them to start “fact-checking” opinions, political positions, and wisecracks as though they were assertions of fact.

I believe that the best solution resides in a well-informed public, able on its own to distinguish between fact and politically-motivated fiction but that, too, is a fantasy. But how can you evaluate the factual basis of any report in the absence of trust or some yardstick against which to measure it? Without perspective?