Chapter 2

Becoming an Active User: Principles “What I like about April Fool’s Day: One day a year we’re asking whether news stories are true. It should be all 365.” The above quote is a Twitter “tweet” by Prentiss Riddle (@pzriddle) of Austin, Texas, posted on April 1, 2008. It’s a line we should all live by. Why don’t we ask ourselves, every day, whether the news reports we’re reading, listening to and watching are trustworthy? The fact that most of us don’t is a vestige of the bygone era when we used to watch the late “Uncle” Walter Cronkite—called the most trusted person in America before he retired as CBS Evening News’s anchor in 1981—deliver the headlines. It’s a vestige of a time when we simply sat back and consumed our media. At the risk of repeating this too often, let me say again: We can no longer afford to be passive consumers. In this chapter, we’ll look at the core principles for turning mere consumption into active learning. Even those of us who spend a good deal of our time creating media, as I do, are still consumers as well. In fact, we are and always will be more consumers than creators. Principles of Media Consumption The principles presented in this chapter stem mostly from common sense; they involve the exercise of our inherent capacity for skepticism, judgment, free thinking, questioning and understanding. The tactics, tools and techniques we use to achieve this goals– blog commenting systems, for example—change with sometimes surprising speed, but these principles are fairly static. Essentially, they add up to something that we don’t do enough of today: critical thinking. The following sections look closely at the five principles of media consumption. Some of what this chapter covers may not be news to you, but in context it strikes me as worth saying. At the end of the chapter, I’ll step back and consider the more philosophical question of how we can 16 Mediactive persuade ourselves to, as a smart media critic has written, “take a deep breath” as we read, watch and listen to the news. The next chapter will present some ways to apply these ideas to your daily media intake.

1. Be Skeptical We can never take it for granted that what we read, see or hear from media sources of any kind is trustworthy. This caution applies to every scrap of news that comes our way, whether from traditional news organizations, blogs, online videos, Facebook updates or any other source. The only rational approach, then, is skepticism. Businesses call the process of thoroughly checking out proposed deals due diligence, and it’s a term that fits here, too. Let’s bring due diligence to what we read, watch and hear. I don’t have to tell you that as their businesses have become less stable, the quality of traditional media organizations’ content has been slipping. You’ve seen this for yourself, no doubt, if you still read your local newspaper. In theory, traditional journalism has procedures in place to avoid errors and wrong-headed coverage. But as discussed in the previous chapter, even the best journalists make factual mistakes— sometimes serious ones—and we don’t always see the corrections. Anyone who’s been covered—that is, been the subject of a journalist’s attention—knows that small flaws inevitably creep into even good journalists’ work. And anyone sufficiently familiar with a complex topic or issue is likely to spot small, and sometimes large, mistakes in coverage of that topic. When small errors are endemic, as they’ve become in this era of hurry-up news, alert and rational people learn to have at least a small element of doubt about every assertion not backed up by unassailable evidence. Matters are worse, and the audience response potentially more troubling, when journalists get big issues wrong. Most worrisome are errors of omission, where journalists fail to ask the hard but necessary questions of people in power. As noted earlier, the American press’s near-unanimous bended-knee reporting during the run-up to the Iraq War was just one catastrophic recent example. Another was its apparent failure to notice the financial bubble that may still lead the world into a new Depression—in fact, some financial journalists were among the most ardent promoters of the practices that inflated the bubble. Both failures demonstrated that all-too-common activity that constitutes much of modern reporting: stenography for the powers that be. The Washington press corps and financial journalists, in particular, Dan Gillmor 17 have shown again and again that they crave access to the rich and powerful more than they care about the quality of their journalism. This is not entirely surprising, but it’s no coincidence that the best journalism is often done, as in the case of the Knight-Ridder (now McClatchy) Washington Bureau between 2002 and 2006, by newspaper reporters and editors who have less access to the people in charge and spend more time asking real questions of the people who work for the people in charge. The Two-Sides Fallacy Another reason to be skeptical is modern journalism’s equally unfortunate tendency of assigning apparently equal weight to opposing viewpoints when one is backed up by fact and the other is not, or when the “sides” are overwhelmingly mismatched. This is often called “providing balance” by journalists who are typically afraid that one side in a political debate will accuse them of being biased in favor of the other side. It is not “balanced,” of course, to quote a supposition or a blatant lie next to a proven fact and treat them as having equal weight. To use an admittedly extreme example, when you’re doing a story about the Holocaust, you don’t need to balance it by quoting a neo-Nazi. Nor is it “showing balance” to quote a climate-change denier in every story about global warming—not when scientists who study these issues have concluded with rare, near-universal fervor that climate change is not only real but presents an existential threat to civilization as we know it, if not to our species. Nevertheless, in a mid-decade study the media researchers Jules and Maxwell Boykoff wrote that “53 percent of the articles gave roughly equal attention to the views that humans contribute to global warming and that climate change is exclusively the result of natural fluctuations” while “35 percent emphasized the role of humans while presenting both sides of the debate, which more accurately reflects scientific thinking about global warming.” Sometimes the dissemblers are genuine believers in what they say, even if they marshal non-factual evidence for their arguments. Worse are the paid liars: the people whose jobs involve the manufacture of fear, doubt and uncertainty about truth. The tobacco industry’s long and infamous record of denying and obfuscating the dangers of its products is just one example of a case where deep pockets were enough to forestall, but not ultimately prevent, wider public understanding. 18 Mediactive Paid to Persuade Even more insidious are the deceptive people who are selling things or ideas but hiding their tracks. If you follow any major issue you’re encountering them, though you may not know it. Sometimes they engage in what’s called astroturfing, the creation of phony grassroots campaigns designed to persuade the public and public officials. Many deceptions originate in “think tanks” and lobbying firms paid by political and corporate interests—often their reports are widely quoted, generating commentary that often appears in newspapers and on TV, seeding blogs and comment threads, and generally trying to sell the products or ideas of the people paying them. I call this “opinion laundering.” We’ll never be able to stop it, in part because freedom of speech comes into play here, but at least we can try to spot it, as we’ll discuss in the next chapter. Whom do we trust? Sometimes, the wrong people. According to the public relations company Edelman’s annual survey of trusted institutions, “people like me” are considered the most reliable, ranked above traditional media and other sources. This is a questionable attitude if taken too far. I trust a software-programmer friend to help me understand certain kinds of technology, but I don’t have any idea whether he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to wine or Middle East politics, and I factor that into our conversations. The liars, dissemblers and opinion launderers are contemptible. But remember that they rely on credulous journalists who are too lazy or fearful to do their jobs properly. They also rely on us not asking questions ourselves. It’s important to disappoint them. Sidebar: The Apple Scare In October 2008, someone using the pseudonym johntw posted an item to CNN’s “iReport” site claiming that Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, had suffered a major heart attack. This claim made its way to a financial blog and circulated quickly. Apple’s shares tumbled briefly, recovering when it became clear that the posting was a hoax. The incident led to something of a frenzy in financial and journalistic circles, including widespread condemnations of citizen journalism. In my own blog, I urged people to calm down. CNN got used. Maybe it was an innocent mistake. Quite possibly, however, this was the work of someone whose intention was to briefly torpedo the Apple share price. As of this writing, while it’s clear what happened, we still don’t know who did it or precisely why; I doubt we’ll ever know. Dan Gillmor 19 This wasn’t the first time false information had affected a company’s market value. In the semi-famous Emulex case in 2000, for example, a profit-seeking fraudster who was trying to game share prices, posted false reports about the company to public-relations wires. He was caught and punished. CNN’s iReport had been running this kind of risk for some time. The labeling of the site has never been, in my view, sufficiently careful to warn readers that they should not take for granted that the postings by its semi-anonymous contributors are accurate—or that readers who make any kind of personal or financial decision based on what they see on the site are idiots. CNN did learn from the experience, though. Today, if you go to the site you’re greeted with a pop-up saying, among other things: “So you know: iReport is the way people like you report the news. The stories in this section are not edited, factchecked or screened before they post. Only ones marked ‘CNN iReport’ have been vetted by CNN.” Is that enough? It helps, but not every news-reporting outlet— traditional or new media—can be counted on to disclose such things, despite the fact that they all should. What does that suggest? We each bear our own responsibility to be skeptical, especially when we have little or no clarity about the source. The fact that Apple’s stock dropped, albeit briefly, was testament to the sellers’ own stupidity. Yes, they were victims, in a sense, of fraud. And they had every right to be angry at the supposedly responsible financial bloggers who picked up the false report and repeated it (though the bloggers did qualify their reports by saying they didn’t know whether the story was true). However, the sellers mostly had themselves to blame. They were fools not to take a second to consider the source, which was not CNN at all but a pseudonymous writer. Investors fall into a special category as news consumers; they tend to operate on a hair trigger so they can profit from breaking news before other investors act and wipe out their advantage. As a result, they need to be particularly careful about where they get their information: The more they have at stake, the less they can afford to rush to judgment based on anything but trusted sources.
2. Exercise Judgment It’s not surprising that more and more of us are giving in to the temptation to be cynical. Institutions we once trusted have proven 20 Mediactive unworthy, in an era when greed and zealotry have prompted lies and manipulation to further personal and political goals, and when the people who should have been pushing back the hardest—including journalists— have failed us in so many ways. Unfortunately, generalized cynicism feeds the problem. If we lazily assume that everyone is pushing lies rather than trying to figure out who’s telling the truth and who isn’t, we give the worst people even more leeway to make things worse for the rest of us. That’s why it’s insane to generalize about our information sources, and why I want to tear out what’s left of my hair when I hear Big Media advocates talking about “those bloggers” as if bloggers were all the same—or, for that matter, when I hear bloggers talking about “the evil MSM” (mainstream media) as if there were no differences among journalism organizations. I’ll discuss more in the next chapter some of the ways we can sort out what’s true and what’s false. The vital point here is that we have to give some level of trust to people who earn it. That doesn’t mean we should turn over our brains to, say, the New York Times or The Economist, but it does mean that we should give them more credence than, say, the celebrity-driven tabloids that exist not to help us make good decisions, but rather to entertain us. Nor does it mean that we should rely entirely on what a single blogger, however talented, tells us about a narrow niche topic. It means exercising judgment. According to danah boyd, a researcher at Microsoft (and friend) who’s become perhaps the preeminent expert on young people and social media, our kids have embedded this thinking into pretty much all the media they use. They assume, she told me, that “somebody’s trying to tell them a story and trying to manipulate them.” To an extent, I share this attitude. When I see a commercial product in a movie, I take it for granted that the company selling the product has paid the film production company to place that product in the movie. I think of it as an advertisement embedded in the entertainment, no more or less. But if adults tend to separate news media from mainstream entertainment media, boyd says teens have a naturally media-critical sense that they’re being given a story for some particular reason and they know people are making money off of it. “But it’s not a level of in-depth media criticism,” she says, “and so there’s just this sort of—’Hmm, do I trust this? I trust my friends and what they tell me much more than I’ll trust what these entities are telling me.’” Dan Gillmor 21 Is that good or bad, or something in between? boyd worries that young people, for all their skepticism, aren’t thinking things through in a truly critical way: We don’t live in an environment where teachers or parents or the people that are part of your adult world are actually helping you make sense of it and figure out how to be critically aware, but also to read between the lines to get something out of it. So as a result we end up throwing away the baby with the bathwater. Or we throw away all of it. We say—all of it must be irrelevant to us. When in fact there is a lot that is relevant. And this is where we need to get media literacy actually at a baseline into everyday conversations, where it’s not saying that everything should be just consumed or rejected, but something where you consume critically. We’ll come back to this later, in a broader discussion of what has been called “media literacy.” Clearly, we need to ask ourselves what kind of society our kids will inherit if they don’t trust or believe anyone but their friends, regardless of whether those friends are well informed.
3. Open Your Mind The “echo chamber” effect—our tendency as human beings to seek information that we’re likely to agree with—is well known. To be well informed, we need to seek out and pay attention to sources of information that will offer new perspectives and challenge our own assumptions, rather than simply reinforcing our current beliefs. Thanks to the enormous amount of news and analysis available on the Internet, this is easier than ever before. The easiest way to move outside your comfort zone is simply to range widely. If you’re an American, read Global Voices Online, a project that aggregates blogging and other material from outside North America. If you are a white American, stop by The Root and other sites offering news and community resources for and by African Americans. Follow links in blogs you normally read, especially when they take you to sources with which the author disagrees. Diversity can be a little harder to find in traditional media than online media, but there are numerous excellent publications focusing on different political points of view, different ethnic and national groups, and other types of differences. Spring for a subscription or pick up a recommended book on a topic you don’t know about. 22 Mediactive Whatever your world view, you can find educated, articulate people who see things differently based on the same general facts. Sometimes they’ll have new facts that will persuade you that they’re right; more often, no doubt, you’ll hold to the view you started with, but perhaps with a more nuanced understanding of the matter. Challenge Your Own Assumptions Have you ever changed your mind about something? I hope so. Evidence matters. One of the most serious critiques of today’s media ecosystem is how it enables people to seek out only what they believe, and to stick with that. Television news programming is especially insidious. As Jon Garfunkel, thoughtful commentator on new media at his Civilities.net site and longtime commenter on my blog, notes: In October 2003, the Program of International Policy at the University of Maryland polled people about their perceptions of the Iraq war and corresponded it with the media they watched/read. The results aren’t at all surprising: “Those who primarily watch Fox News are significantly more likely to have misperceptions, while those who primarily listen to NPR or watch PBS are significantly less likely.” Fox took the lead in featuring commentators with a particular ideological perspective; meanwhile, MSNBC has realigned its commentators so they have a mostly liberal world view. By all means, you should constantly be looking for evidence to support your beliefs. However, it’s also important to look for evidence that what you believe may not be true. This means seeking out the people who will make your blood boil. Rush Limbaugh frequently infuriates me—not because of what he believes, but because he takes such enormous liberties with the truth and uses language that seems designed to inflame, not enlighten. Even so, I regularly read and listen to what Limbaugh and his allies say, because sometimes they make good points, and I can learn something useful. Going outside your comfort zone has many benefits. One of the best is knowing that you can hold your own in a conversation with people who disagree with you. However, the real value is in being intellectually honest with yourself, through relentless curiosity and selfchallenge. That’s what learning is all about. You can’t understand the world, or even a small part of it, if you don’t stretch your mind. Dan Gillmor 23
4. Keep Asking Questions This principle goes by many names: research, reporting, homework, etc. The more important you consider a topic, the more essential it becomes to follow up on media reports about it. The Web has already sparked a revolution in commerce, as potential buyers of products and services discovered relatively easy ways to learn more before purchasing. No one with common sense buys a car today based solely on a single advertisement; we do research on the Web and in other media, making comparisons and arming ourselves for the ultimate confrontation with the dealer. There’s a lesson in this caveat emptor behavior. We generally recognize the folly of making any major decisions about our lives based on one thing we’ve read, heard or seen. But do we also recognize why we need to dig deeply to get the right answers about life and citizenship issues that are important to us? We need to keep investigating, sometimes in major ways but more often in small ones, to ensure that we make good choices. The rise of the Internet has given us, for the first time in history, a relatively easy way to dig deeper into the topics we care about the most. We can ask questions, and we can get intelligent answers to these questions. Investigation has limits, of course. No one expects you to travel to Afghanistan to double-check the reporting from the New York Times (though we should maintain a healthy sense of skepticism about what even such reputable sources tell us). However, there’s no excuse for not checking further into the closer-to-home information that informs your daily life. Near the end of the Cold War, President Reagan frequently used the expression “Trust but verify” in relation to his dealings with the Soviet Union. He didn’t invent the saying, but it was appropriate for the times, and it’s an equally rational approach to take when evaluating the media we use today.
5. Learn Media Techniques In a media-saturated society, it’s important to know how digital media work. For one thing, we are all becoming media creators to some degree, as we post on Facebook, write blogs, comment, upload photos and videos, and so much more. Moreover, solid communications skills are becoming critically important for social and 24 Mediactive economic participation—and we’re not just talking about the reading and writing of the past. Every journalism student I’ve taught has been required to create and operate a blog, because it is an ideal entry point into serious media creation. A blog can combine text, images, video and other formats, using a variety of “plug-in” tools, and it is by nature conversational. It is also a natively digital medium that adapts easily over time. Over a lifetime, most of us will pick up many kinds of newer media forms, or readapt older ones; a personal blog, for example, is a lot like an oldfashioned diary, with the major exception that most blogs are intended to be public. Media-creation skills are becoming part of the educational process for many children in the developed world (less so for other children). In the U.S. and other economically advanced nations, teenagers and younger children are what some call “digital natives,” though some of the most savvy users of digital technology are older people who have learned how to use it and who bring other, crucial skills—most notably critical thinking and an appreciation of nuance—to the table. Young or old, learning how to snap a photo with a mobile phone is useful, but it’s just as important to know all the possibilities of what you can do with that picture and to understand how it fits into a larger media ecosystem. Also, it’s essential to grasp the ways people use media to persuade and manipulate—that is, how media creators push our logical and emotional buttons. Understanding this also means knowing how to distinguish a marketer from a journalist, and a non-journalistic blogger from one whose work does serve a journalistic purpose; all create media, but they have different goals. All this is part of the broader grasp of how journalism works. The craft and business are evolving, but they still exert an enormous influence over the way people live. In one sense, some journalists are an example of a second-order effect of the marketers’ trade, because sellers and persuaders do all they can to use journalists to amplify their messages. Happily, as the mediasphere becomes ever more diverse, it is unleashing forces that ensure greater scrutiny of journalism. This helps us become more mediactive. Media criticism was a somewhat sleepy field until bloggers came along, with only a few publications and scholarly journals serving as the only serious watchdogs of a press that had become complacent and arrogant. Journalists themselves rarely covered each other, except in the way they covered celebrities of all kinds. This wasn’t a conspiracy of Dan Gillmor 25 silence, but it was taken as given that only the most egregious behavior (or undeniable triumphs) were worthy of note in competitive journals or broadcasts. Thankfully, bloggers, in particular, have become ardent examples of the new breed of media critics. Some are small-time jerks, dogs chasing cars because it’s their instinct to do so. But many are the real thing: serious, impassioned critics who deserve respect for performing the watchdog role so important to the rest of us. We all need to help each other sort out the information we can trust from that we shouldn’t. This will be complicated, but if we get it right, the value will be immeasurable. Toward a Slower News Culture On Nov. 5, 2009, in the minutes and hours after an Army officer opened fire on his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, the media floodgates opened in the now-standard way. A torrent of news reports and commentary poured from the scene, the immediate community and the Pentagon, amplified by corollary data, informed commentary and rank speculation from journalists, bloggers, podcasters, Tweeters, texters and more. Also standard in this age of fast news was the quality of the early information: utterly unreliable and mostly wrong. The shooter was dead; no he wasn’t. There were two accomplices; no there weren’t. And so on. Several critics tore into a soldier who was using Twitter, a service noted for rumors, to post about what she was seeing. Indeed, some of what the soldier posted turned out to be wrong. But was it fair to extrapolate this to brand all forms of citizen media as untrustworthy and voyeuristic? There was plenty of wrong information going around that day, at all levels of media. Lots of people quoted President Obama’s admonition to wait for the facts, but almost no one followed it. And almost no one heeded Army Gen. George William Casey Jr.’s advice the following Sunday not to jump to conclusions “based on little snippets of information that come out.” Greg Marx at the Columbia Journalism Review was among several commentators to catalog some of the misinformation that raced around. He wrote: It’s not fair to lay too much of this confusion at the feet of [traditional media] reporters, who are mostly diligent and 26 Mediactive conscientious, who are basing their claims in good faith on what they are hearing from their sources, and who are under tremendous competitive pressure to get the story first. But on a story like this, tendencies toward error, exaggeration, and inconsistency are built into the system, at least in the first days of reporting. In due time, a clearer picture will begin to emerge; in this case, we’ll even hear from the shooter himself. There will be plenty of time for analysis. Until then, let’s all take a deep breath. Like many other people who’ve been burned by believing too quickly, I’ve learned to put almost all of what journalists call “breaking news” into the category of gossip or, in the words of a scientist friend, “interesting if true.” That is, even though I gobble up “the latest” from a variety of sources, the sooner after the actual event the information appears, the more I assume it’s unreliable, if not false. Still, I’m no different from everyone else in a key respect: When it comes to important (or sometimes trivial but interesting) breaking news, I, too, can react in almost Pavlovian ways from time to time, clicking the Refresh button on the browser again and again. I don’t tend to immediately email my friends and family or tweet about unconfirmed reports, though, and if I do pass along interesting tidbits I always make it a point to add “if true” to the might-be-news. What is it about breaking news that causes us to turn off our logical brains? Why do we turn on the TV or click-click-click Refresh or scan the Twitter feeds to get the very latest details—especially when we learn, again and again, that the early news is so frequently wrong? Ethan Zuckerman, a friend and colleague at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, has some ideas:  The media make us do it. [As noted below, I give a lot of credence to this one.]  We’re bored.  Knowing the latest, even if it’s wrong, helps build social capital in conversations.  We’re junkies for narrative, and we always hope that we’ll get the fabled “rest of the story” by clicking one more time. “I suspect there’s some truth to each of those explanations, and I suspect that each is badly incomplete,” Ethan says. “I also suspect that figuring out what drives our patterns of news consumption, and our Dan Gillmor 27 susceptibility to fast, often-wrong news is critical” for having a sounder grasp of what we can trust. Remember: Big breaking stories are literally exciting. They’re often about death or the threat of death, or they otherwise create anxiety. Neurological research shows that the more of your personal bandwidth anxiety takes up, the less clearly you think. To get even more neurological: The amygdala takes over from the prefrontal cortex. Slowing the News A wonderful trend has emerged in the culinary world, called the “slow food movement”—a rebellion against fast food and all the ecological and nutritional damage it causes. As Ethan suggested to me at a Berkman Center retreat in late 2009, we need a “slow news” equivalent. Slow news is all about taking a deep breath. One of society’s recently adopted clichés is the “24-hour news cycle”—a recognition that, for people who consume and create news via digital systems, the newspaper-a-day version of journalism has passed into history. Now, it’s said, we get news every hour of every day, and media creators work tirelessly to fill those hours with new stuff. (Happily, a few newspapers and magazines do continue to provide actual perspective and nuance.) That 24-hour news cycle itself needs further adjustment, though. Even an hourly news cycle is too long; in an era of live-TV police chases, Twitter and twitchy audiences, the latest can come at any minute. Call it the 1,440-minute news cycle. Rapid-fire news is about speed, and being speedy serves two main purposes for the provider. The first is gratification of the desire to be first. Humans are competitive, and in journalism newsrooms, scoops are a coin of the realm. The second imperative is attracting an audience. Being first draws a crowd, and crowds can be turned into influence, money, or both. Witness cable news channels’ desperate hunt for “the latest” when big events are under way, even though the latest is so often the rankest garbage. The urge to be first applies not just to those disseminating the raw information (which, remember, is often wrong) that’s the basis for breaking news. It’s also the case, for example, for the blogger who offers up the first sensible-sounding commentary that puts the “news” into perspective. The winners in the online commentary derby—which is just as competitive, though played for lower financial stakes—are the quick 28 Mediactive and deft writers who tell us what it all means. That they’re often basing their perspectives on falsehoods and inaccuracies seems to matter less than that they’re early to comment. I’m not battling human nature. We all want to know what’s going on, and the bigger the calamity is, the more we want to know—especially if it may affect us directly (if a hurricane is approaching, the latest news is not just interesting but potentially life-saving). Nothing is going to change that, and nothing should. Nor is this a new phenomenon. Speculation has passed for journalism in all media eras. Every commercial plane crash, for example, is followed by days of brazen hypothesizing by so-called experts, but now we are fed their ideas at hourly (or briefer) intervals, rather than only on the evening news or in the daily paper—and even that frequency was too much. Only months of actual investigation by the real experts—and sometimes not even that—will reveal the real truth, but we are nevertheless subjected to endless new theories and rehashings of the “facts.” The New News Cycle The advent of the 1,440-minute news cycle (or should we call it the 86,400-second news cycle?), which has fed our apparently insatiable appetite for something new to talk about, should literally give us pause. Again and again, we’ve seen that initial assumptions can be grossly untrustworthy. Consider, for example, the Fort Hood shootings. We learned that the perpetrator wasn’t killed during his rampage, contrary to what was initially reported. And that fact stayed with us because the story was still fresh enough, and the saturation coverage was ongoing, when reports emerged that he hadn’t been shot dead by law enforcement. However, we all also “know” false things that were inaccurately reported and then later disproved, in part because journalists typically don’t report final outcomes with the same passion and prominence that they report the initial news. We’ve all seen videos of dramatic arrests of people who were later acquitted, but still had their reputations shattered thanks to the inherent bias in crime reporting. And how many of us have heard a report that such-and-such product or behavior has been found to raise the risk of cancer, but never heard the follow-up that said the initial report was either inaccurate or misleading? The abundance of wrong information in the rapid-fire news system has other causes than simple speed, including the decline of what’s Dan Gillmor 29 supposed to be a staple of journalism: fact checking before running with a story. As Clay Shirky (who contributed this book’s foreword) has observed—in a Twitter tweet, no less—“fact-checking is way down, and after-the-fact checking is way WAY up.” Clay’s point lends weight to the argument for slow news; to the idea that we all might be wise to think before we react. That is what many of us failed to do during the early hours and days of the “#amazonfail” event of April 2009. As Clay described it afterwards: After an enormous number of books relating to lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgendered (LGBT) themes lost their Amazon sales rank, and therefore their visibility in certain Amazon list and search functions, we participated in a public campaign, largely coordinated via the Twitter keyword #amazonfail (a form of labeling called a hashtag) because of a perceived injustice at the hands of that company, an injustice that didn’t actually occur. Like Clay, I came to believe that Amazon hadn’t deliberately made a political decision to reduce the visibility of these books; it was, the company said (as part of an inept PR handling of the situation), a programming error. But I was one of the people who flamed Amazon (in which I own a small amount of stock) before I knew the full story. I hope I learned a lesson. I rely in large part on gut instincts when I make big decisions, but my gut only gives me good advice when I’ve immersed myself in the facts about things that are important. This suggests not just being skeptical— the first of the principles I hope you’ll embrace—but also waiting for persuasive evidence before deciding what’s true and what’s not. It comes down to this: As news accelerates faster and faster, you should be slower to believe what you hear, and you should look harder for the coverage that pulls together the most facts with the most clarity about what’s known and what’s speculation. Wikipedia, that sometimes maligned mega-encyclopedia, can be a terrific place to start; more on that in the next chapter. Can we persuade ourselves to take a deep breath, slow down and dig deeper as a normal part of our media use, and to deploy the other principles of media consumption to figure out what we can trust and what we can’t? We can. And if we want to have any reason to trust what we read (hear, etc.), we’d better.

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