On facts…

"Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." — Daniel Patrick Moynihan

"It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything." — Stephen Colbert

According to Thomas Jefferson, the cornerstone of an effective democracy is an educated citizenry. Not effective leaders or a 'great constitution' but an educated and well informed citizenry because a democracy by definition is government for, of and by the people. Central to having that educated citizenry is a bedrock of factual information for people. For example, we now know for a fact that smoking leads to an increased risk of cancer for the smoker and those in the immediate vicinity. Majority of people, knowing that fact, are supportive of laws that prevent public smoking at least. This fact allows for policy geared at deterring people from smoking in public and even smoking at all.

Today, rather than everyone operating off the same set of facts, we operate off information that conforms to our biases or suspicions. For some reason, we no longer have a hierarchy of trusted sources of information. We either place all news sources on the same level or only ingest news that confirms our bias. For example, I had an argument with a friend of mine about the existence of the gender wage gap. I cited statistics from the US labor department to back up my claim and he cited Milo Yiannopoulos from Breitbart to back his up. What struck me about this was his reluctance to accept the data from the labor department as more accurate or trustworthy than that from Breitbart even though Breitbart and Milo have no previous experience or known expertise collecting and analyzing labor data. His reaction represents, to me, the pervasive rejection of information from formerly trusted sources as facts.

I think technology, through various forms of social media, has played a role in this decaying of trust in traditional media sources and traditional arbiters of fact. Previously, the only news sources were the established media companies and they enjoyed a monopoly for a long time because of the high cost of entry into the news business. Today, that cost has been greatly reduced and the ability to convey information has been greatly democratized. Everyone had to choose from an established source of trusted media to stay informed but now almost anybody can upload a video to youtube and pass it off as a news report (e.g. the Young Turks and Tomi Lauren). Even though the gulf in the quality of the reporting is stark, our inherent confirmation biases take over and we tend to gravitate towards the news sources that mostly confirm our views. The major media companies trying to compete and retain straying eyeballs and ears, extensively cover irrelevant information and deliver information with hyperbole to attract as many viewers and readers as possible.

Also, the rise of partisan media to sate the demand for information that confirms our views presents the public with varying information as fact. Media companies brazenly skew information to promote an agenda and they are rewarded with high ratings and citations from politicians supportive of that agenda. For example, the POTUS' recent rant on the spike in crime rates in Sweden was based on a largely exaggerated report from Fox News on the European migrant crisis but the spike has been attributed to an increase in cyber crime by the Department of State. Also, Bild in Germany posted an article about sexual assault by mobs of Arab migrants and had to retract and apologize when the article was shown to have no merit.

Technological improvements will continue to spawn new forms of media and increase access to information and people will continue to create and share content they see as news or fact. Whether they do cynically (like the Russians), or cynically and for profit (like this asshole) or they're actually putting out valuable information, they're all protected by their right to free speech. Without a hierarchy of media and agencies based on trust and a track of record of factual reporting, we will continue to gravitate towards the extreme ends of the political spectrum and swayed by stories that are geared to play on our biases. The state at which we educate and inform ourselves on current affairs is putting the world's democracies in a negative trajectory.