What I’m Listening To: Losing Relatives to Fox News
The podcast explosion has been a boon and a curse. I used to crave more content and now I find myself with a 40+GB backlog of podcasts that I’m wading through which has forced me to be extremely discerning with what I listen to. (By the way, the backlog was 50+GB so yes, it’s under control and I’m making progress. Thank you for your concern.)
I’m in a strict ‘do not add’ mode. But I just discovered a new podcast that I really like called “You’re Wrong About…” and it’s basically two smart journalists who explore a topic that well…you’re probably wrong about.
I was excited about the episode “Losing Relatives to Fox News” as like many Americans over the past years I find myself positively distressed about what seems like the ‘brainwashing’ of certain loved ones who have been pulled deeper and deeper into a misinformation whirlpool. Also, the timing of this episode is perfect for all of us who will be having Zoom family Christmas calls and are already wincing imagining all the misinformation going to be flying around from relatives.
Unfortunately, this podcast can’t ALWAYS live up to it’s name (a fact they freely acknowledge, in a good-humored way) and it turns out I wasn’t wrong about it at all. But they have done a great job of collecting data and information backing up what I felt I already ‘knew’ from my haphazard learnings over the time in one place (because they are good journalists).
In a nutshell: right-wing media has much more overlap with FAR more ‘fringe’ content than people who look at left-leaning media. This phenomenon is especially magnified online where internet algorithms suck right-leaning people down a misinformation rabbit-hole.
This is dangerous because in our human brains which are super clever at creating lazy shortcuts, just seeing a certain ‘headline’ or ‘fact, even if you don’t click on it, starts to get implanted in your brain and the more you see it – the more it reinforces the validity of these crazy ideas so that they start to seem, well, like real ideas. (Also Fox News has 0 integrity so they will also let those ideas/content co-exist in their spaces, versus CNN.com or NYTimes where there are more firm real ‘walls’ not conflating real vs fantasy.
Their conclusion was something that my own brain has been leading me to even though I don’t really like it: the best thing to do is to prevent people from seeing misinformation. I resist this as the solution, because it feels like censorship and one of my greatest flaws is that I so desperately want to believe that people are rational. Aka, ‘naive realism’ see also:
In my heart I still want to believe that the answer is to teach people to think more critically, but these things are really working on a subconscious level for a lot of people which is why it’s so insidious. Although it’s another point that I think our European friends might be a step ahead of – they have more of a 0 tolerance policy when it comes to certain conspiracy fodder, especially Holocaust deniers.
Also – once exposed to all of this, it takes actual deprogramming (a several years process) to undo (again, which is why investing in prevention is a better resolution). Which is also a bit disheartening for those of us wondering “but how can I pull grandma/grandpa back to reality!?”. But again – even though this is what my heart wants, I’ve already come to this sad reality. There’s no amount of convincing or conversations or reptition of facts that are going to change things at this point.
They had some interesting examples of studies that showed the effects of the way information is conveyed:
- It’s more effective to replace false information with true information. Example: if someone says “Barack Obama is born in Kenya” don’t just say “No, thats wrong” its’ more helpful to say “Barack Obama was born in Hawaii” because if you don’t replace the fact the information never gets rewritten and the next time the person’s brain goes to search for the information they can better remember “Hawaii” than “Not Kenya”
- If people are shown a piece of false text like “The majority of the worlds windmills are in Iran” there is a certain absorption rate, but if you overlay the same text over a picture of a windmill, people will remember this ‘fact’ much more.
Anyway, I’m definitely not explaining all this as well as they are, so if you are still reading this thank you, but please stop and just go listen to them instead!
P.S. Their episodes on Human Trafficking and Homelessness really fantastic as well and I strongly recommend them.