In 2004, after two years of my Howard Dean–based information diet, I headed home to Albany, Georgia, for Thanksgiving dinner. It’s like a national holiday in my giant southern family—come to my family’s house on Thanksgiving and you’ll begin to wonder whether or not the whole thing about us all being related in the South is true. It seems like the whole state is at our house.
One of my favorite relatives is my dad’s brother—Uncle Warren. He’s got a deep drawl that makes you want to sip lemonade and sit on the front porch all day, and is so charming that he could convince Alex Trebek to give up on the trivia questions and just go fishing. He also loves Fox News, and thinks that if we all listened to a little more of it, we all might be a bit better off.
In that fall of 2004, Uncle Warren and I had very different information diets. It had become a sort of family tradition in the years prior for my uncle and I to clash, but this year I made it a point before my voyage home, that Uncle Warren—the symbolic head of the ultra-right-wing sect of the Johnson family—would be proven unequivocally wrong on all issues.
In my mind, I was right, and he was wrong. It just had to be the case. I mean—every news report I’d ever read on DailyKos, every data point I’d seen, and all the polls I’d seen on Zogby agreed with me. If I just explained the “facts” to him, he’d have to admit that, well, he was wrong and, more importantly, I was right.
What I didn’t account for was that Uncle Warren watched the news he believed in, too. He showed up with his own set of “facts.” I’d also neglected to read the aforementioned studies about how facts tend to be particularly poor at persuasion, especially the ones that you pick up on left-wing blogs or the ones that you pick up in the left-of-center bars in Washington, D.C.
The conversation, viewed from the outside, couldn’t have been considered coherent. It was just an explosion of nonsense—two grown men shouting at each other about taxes, gun control, and healthcare, with some perfectly good turkey between us. That Thanksgiving, Uncle Warren left early, and things haven’t been the same between us since.
It’s a shame, really. My uncle and I in a big fight, essentially invading a family tradition because we had developed our own biases, and had both become too attached to our separate—and separating—ideas of reality. Information obesity can inflict some pretty serious damage on families.
Our media companies aren’t neuroscientists, nor are they conspiratorial. There’s no elaborate plot aimed at driving Americans apart to play against each other in games of reds vs. blues. A more pragmatic view is that our economy is organic. Through the tests of trial and error, our media companies have figured out what we want, and are giving it to us. It turns out, the more they give it to us, the more we want. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
When we tell ourselves, and listen to, only what we want to hear, we can end up so far from reality that we start making poor decisions. The result is a public that’s being torn apart, only comfortable hearing the reality that’s unique to their particular tribe.
Even our leaders in Congress feel the effects. In September of 2011, Speaker of the House John Boehner said that sometimes talking to the President was like “two different people from two different planets who barely understand each other.”[50]
It’s a new kind of ignorance epidemic: information obesity.
According to a 2009 Public Policy Polling survey, 39% of people in the United States believe that the United States government should stay out of Medicare (a government-run program). Ten percent of people are not certain or do not believe that Hawaii is a state, and 7% believe that Barack Obama is from France.[51]
We know that we’re losing touch, too. Or at least we have a feeling that we’re losing our grasp of the facts. In a December 2010 poll done by WorldPublicOpinion.org (run by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland), 91% of voters said they had encountered misleading information. Fifty-six percent said they’d encountered it frequently. According to Gallup, only 27% of us have a “great deal of confidence” in television news broadcasts—down from 46% in 1993.
These problems don’t stem from a lack of information. They stem from a new kind of ignorance: one that results in the selection and consumption of information that is demonstrably wrong. We don’t trust “the news” but we do trust “our news,” in other words, the news we want to believe in. And that’s a far more potent weapon than our classic view of ignorance.
In 1969, the tobacco company Brown & Williamson came to the conclusion that the only way it was going to save itself from intense regulation and market loss due to health concerns over cigarette use was through the production of information, rather than the concealment of it. Here’s what it said:
“Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public.”[52]
With that, Big Tobacco started producing as much doubt as it did cigarettes. It spent millions of dollars on funding research, and academic papers were released saying that Alzheimer’s Disease is prevented by smoking cigarettes (makes sense: you’ll be dead before you get it), and that smoking may boost immune systems.
Big Tobacco created independent organizations, too, such as the Center for Indoor Air Research to “broaden research in the field of indoor air quality generally and expand interest beyond the misplaced emphasis solely on environmental tobacco smoke.” It set up Associates for Research In the Science of Enjoyment (ARISE) to provide research bolstering the idea that smoking’s effects on relaxation could boost immune systems.
Big Tobacco figured something out: it didn’t have to worry about people who smoked and didn’t watch the news. They’d keep smoking. It needed to create doubt in the minds of smokers who do watch the news to keep them as customers, and it would need to create doubt in the minds of the non-smoking public in order to keep government away from the regulation of secondhand smoke.
In hindsight, we now know that cigarette smoke causes cancer, heart disease, and a variety of other terminal issues. Your health insurance company asks if you’re a smoker for a reason: because if you are, you’re going to die sooner, and probably cost a bunch of money before you go out. We’re now so certain of it that some are suggesting that early smoking deaths could help save Social Security.[53]
The argument about tobacco is mostly settled, but we still face the production of doubt. In 2007, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists—the last major scientific body to reject climate change’s existence and cause— changed its mind. Climate scientists reached consensus: global warming is “unequivocal” and mankind is the primary cause.[54] Since then, no recognized scientific body has dissented from the theory[55] or rejected the idea of climate change.
In the five years since consensus was reached by the scientific community, the number of people doubting climate change’s occurrence has increased. When the battle for scientific minds ended, the doubt production machines shifted into overdrive.
In 1998, a public relations representative for the American Petroleum Institute named Joe Walker had foresight. He wrote an eight-page memo suggesting that the institute spend $5 million over two years to “maximize the impact of scientific views” consistent with theirs and noted that “public opinion is open to change on climate change.”[56] Fast forward to 2007, the Guardian reported that the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank funded by companies like ExxonMobil and Phillip Morris, started offering $10,000 “grants” plus travel expenses to scientists who would publish articles emphasizing the shortcomings of theories of climate change.[57]
53
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/columns/bill-mcclellan/article_080530ab-b4b2-5c26-8e44-9eb2efcf5ec5.html
54
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/03/science/earth/03climate.html?ex=1328158800&en=61f42312221df544&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
55
http://books.google.com/books?id=PXJIqCkb7YIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=isbn:9780262541930&hl=en&ei=uYyGTaz8PKKx0QHQguXhCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
56
http://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/26/us/industrial-group-plans-to-battle-climate-treaty.html