 There's a little lag time and now we are live. So this is our first video chat for the mass com 101 class that I teach here John And we've got a couple people watching and then this will be archived on YouTube So the rest of the class will watch it, you know sometime in the next next week or so So I'm really glad that you could join us. Thank you so much I'm sorry for maybe being confusing with the technical aspects of this, but hey, we're connected now. So that's cool my pleasure so Over the past couple of days students have submitted some questions by email on Facebook on SurveyMonkey And I shared those with you. I know we don't have time in 30 minutes to do You know all of these questions by thought let's pick some of them and and kind of unpack them Okay, sure and maybe the first thing is just a short bio Students have read your bio on Amazon in connection with Detecting Bowl so they they know a little bit about you but Elaborate on your your career both as a journalist and as a scholar Okay, I grew up or sort of came of age in the 1960s back in the last millennium and At that time there was a lot of optimism among young people That we could change the world and so I was very eager to do that And then I thought that journalism might be a good way a good vehicle for that ambition and So I became a journalist and I worked at small very small papers And then somewhat larger papers and finally at a moderately large paper at the Norfolk newspapers the Ledger star first and then later the Virginia pilot I left journalism to write a story about it One of the things that I encountered in journalism pretty consistently was what I would call commercial bias Which is to say pandering to market pressures rather than reporting the news For the public good and so I managed to secure a Fellowship to Stanford to go and study and earn a PhD and I then for my dissertation I had the pleasure really of Being able to explore some of the ideas and looking at how market pressures affected small medium and large television stations And I think a lot of what I learned generalizes to to all media Whether it's online or paper or on TV or radio or other media that I'm not aware of So that's how I came to this then I was I I taught for a few years As a journalist and professor After leaving Stanford and then left that to do research for the Berkeley Media Studies group And then created my own project at Stanford called grade the news Which was an effort to do for news in the San Francisco Bay Area What consumer reports does for new does for products like, you know, televisions and cars and computers So we randomly sampled the most popular Bay Area media both broadcast and newspapers and We chose we sampled them on the same news cycle the morning paper and the previous evenings news broadcasts and we evaluated them on seven yardsticks of journalistic quality and I found We basically rated them from A to F and I promised the Knight Foundation and the Ford Foundation which supported this work that I would write a book that would Detail what I had learned and help consumers do their own news evaluation. So that's how I got to Writing the books detecting bull and don't be fooled. Mm-hmm interesting Let's see In in the lecture that we did this week I introduced students to the smell test Because we were talking about media literacy news literacy and one of the students Online suggested could you walk us through the smell test and how we might apply it to a particular news story? Sure, I'd be happy to do that. I chose when I was writing this I Was trying to find an acronym that would Basically be comprehensive enough to cover the important questions one should ask when interrogating the news for its validity And yet still had some sort of intuitive appeal to it and I came up with the smell test because I think throughout time humans have used their sense of smell to avoid Consuming things that might harm them and I think to some extent We are what we read and watch in terms of our understanding of the the environment around us. And so the S stands for source Who's telling me this? And we'll come back to that in a moment to flesh it out a little bit the M stem stands for motivation We know that when someone's trying to persuade us of something That they tend to cherry-pick facts and not give us the full story So when we sense that there is a persuasive agenda We should be particularly on guard for bias the E is for evidence what evidence to do Does the source provide to persuade to to flesh out the story to? Give us a sense of why they've made the conclusions that they've made even if it's just a conclusion and the lead of the story The sort of a number or print premise of the story The first L is for logic. Does the evidence compel the conclusions they reach? The generalizations that they they provide and the last L is for left out. What's not here? What are they not telling us? I? Think probably the biggest story Globally is about global warming because it affects all of us in very profound ways as we're seeing Every day there have been terrible fires in California as you may have read about their and fires even above the Arctic Circle in Sweden the climate is changing and in ways that are creating multiple disasters and So if that's the major issue, it's certainly a controversial one We have a president in the White House who denies that it's happening we have People leading the environmental protection agency which is supposed to protect us That are trying to suppress the evidence for global climate change and trying to destroy the regulations that might help us Head it off or protect us from it So I can't think of a bigger issue Or a more controversial one. So a friend of mine who is a Libertarian as an engineer from South Carolina sent me a link to a story from the Daily Mail a tabloid actually the second best-read tabloid in Britain and It was basically making the claim that the warming in the Land at least was due to an El Nino event Which is a warming of the waters in the Western Pacific which tends to Heat up the planet and that that's all it was it was basically a natural cycle And there was no need for governments to do anything drastic to change the production of co2 and other So-called greenhouse gases Because it really was just natural variation that we're seeing and so I looked at that article I thought well, this would be a great one to walk through the smell test and see if it works so the first thing I did is I looked at the source of course and The immediate source was my friend who is he's not really a friend. He's an acquaintance who is really a rabid conservative a Trump supporter But a very bright guy very clearly and well educated So the secondary source was the Daily Mail So first thing I did is I googled the Daily Mail and I found out that it's a very popular Tabloid, but that it tends to have a very conservative take on the world So I raised my skepticism levels a bit just to analyze it so I read the article and I looked Tried to see what its motivation was if its motivation was journalistic It would simply be giving all the facts as best the journalists could discover them But when I looked more closely at it, it struck me that It was really trying to persuade us But I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt for the purpose of my test and so I said, okay Let's assume That this is really a serious journalistic effort because it's going to be read by many people and it clearly was Influential it was online. It was picked up with my friends in South Carolina and spread through conservative networks So I looked for the next element of the test the evidence that they provided They quoted three sources about climate change one of them was a Very very eminent source the head of the EPA. I'm sorry the head of the the climate change part of the government that part of the government studied it the guy named Gavin Schmidt and He was an excellent choice of source because he was Hands-on he had knowledge of it. He had expertise and working from the government's point of view. He was independent He wasn't tied to either an environmentalist group or to a fossil fuel company It was also a professor from Georgia Tech who since retired who was skeptical of climate change Gavin Schmidt the he was actually at NASA Is a strong proponent of the science behind climate change that it's real that it's man-made And the third was someone who worked for a foundation David Whitehouse worked for foundation In England which has as it's a vowed purpose Debunking climate science basically claiming that there's no such thing as global warming or if there is it's natural variation and not human originated That was only only three sources for such an article that was basically claiming that That the evidence shows that climate change is simply due to natural variation in this case and El Nino year Struck me as very light sourcing for a story that was such a broad claim. So the evidence struck me as pretty insubstantial and Basically, we had is a very strong source Saying basically arguing against the thesis of the story saying no, it's real We had a professor who studies this Saying that she's a skeptic and then we had someone from a skeptic foundation saying no, it's not real It's it's just natural variation so from evidence we want to go to logic the first L and It was interesting looking at the site. They produced a graph And I'm gonna refer to my book here so that I get it right the graph showed temperature fluctuations on land from 1995 to 2020 projected to 2020 And the baseline was the long-term average which they Establish as 1978 to 1998 What's interesting about this graph and it's included in my book is That if you really draw the midpoint between the fluctuations each year and the temperature You'll find that it's about half a degree warmer than the long-term average between 78 and 98 Which is a direct contradiction of the thesis of the story now clearly graph shows that El Nino temperatures were higher than non El Nino years, but the average for all El Nino years and non was Substantially elevated particularly over the short period of time of the graph above the average from the 20 years previous 1998 going back 20 years so the the evidence that they provided contradicted the thesis of the story because it showed that temperatures have risen even in the short period of time over land in a Regardless of whether it was an El Nino year or not so the evidence the logic of the evidence essentially contradicts the thesis of the story now there's another problem with this That some of you may already have discovered which is that the earth is only about 30 percent covered by land so saying that temperatures on land have Fluctuated only due to natural variation ignores the ocean ignores 70 percent of the issue and If you've taken any physics, you know that water absorbs heat More deeply in over a longer time it holds it more than land does so What we're seeing here is essentially a One-year reading of a temperature fluctuation in 2017 a drop of about a degrees Celsius due to El Nino Being extrapolated into a trend that if you've had statistics You know that it takes at least three data points and usually a lot more to establish a trend also, even if you look at their own data the the temperature of 2017 was higher than the average the 20 years before and The their conclusion is based on 30 percent of the world's global Covering which is which is the land So it's it's really pretty a pretty ridiculous argument then you go to the last cell which is left out and and What what you can do what I really encourage you to do whenever you're trying to Analyze a story and you wouldn't do this on every story all the other things you think are more important Is to Google the thesis of the story, which is in this case Global warming is due to natural variation not man-made factors and We're just global temperatures global temperatures, not just land temperatures And look for graphs and look for them from authoritative sources such as the national the you know, NASA or EPA or other Independent sources and what you find is that? the story left out the fact that global temperatures and sea temperatures have risen sharply and that the last three years that the 2014-15 and 16 were the hottest years on record since the any government has been keeping records So those are pretty significant omissions for a story with his broader claim is this so I think the smell test did a good job of Unmasking What's essentially propaganda? But it was clever enough propaganda that even my friend who is a very sophisticated engineer took it as truth I think the most dangerous stories are not the ones about say some really fake things such as a a The Clintons operating a pedophile ring out of a pizza store Parlor in Washington, DC But I think the most important ones are the ones that have a real factual Veneer that seem like they're real that seem they do provide evidence. They do seem to To be authoritative at first glance But when you examine them and fortunately, it's really easy to examine them now given the resources of the Internet you find that It's simply clever propaganda And one with enormous consequences for all of us Well, and I think a great example of how the smell test whoops, I'm getting some feedback here John you might mute your microphone When I speak so we don't get that reverb although it sounds seems like it's working now The I think the smell test a great idea for breaking down and you know a news story like that and really kind of looking at Whether it holds together And having read your book, of course I know you've got another mnemonic device for Assessing the trustworthiness of the source itself the pie test or Pie chart so can you walk us through that as well? Sure one thing that I sort of alluded to in this analysis with the smell test of the Daily Mail story Is the quality of the sources not all sources are equal And so what I suggest you do is you pie chart which is another acronym of the sources within the story and The P stands for proximity is this first-hand information is was this person an eyewitness or is it hearsay? Are they someone who is sort of has a hands-on perspective on whatever they're reporting? The eye is for independence are the independent of conflicts of interest Do they have a neutral view or do they have skin in the game? It's likely to bias the answers they give to the reporters questions and the e is for either deep experience Experience or expertise do they know what they're talking about? And I think if you do this you'll find oftentimes that Sourcing is pretty Half-hazard and random and oftentimes you're seeking a source if you're an ideologically oriented newsroom That supports your viewpoint rather than a source that really has something important to say to the public in this case It was really interesting Journalists often will sort of triangulate toward the truth They'll look for somebody on one side somebody on another side assuming the story is so simple that it only has two sides and Then some independent expert in the middle in this story the Independent expert was the Gavin Schmidt of NASA who you know who's really off the charts and certain in terms of his pie score The the source on the deny the first denial source The professor actually gave up her position. I googled her at Georgia Tech because She was kind of hounded out for ignoring science and the second source came from a foundation Whose purpose is to try to diminish belief in climate change? And so very compromised and so if you look at those sources instead of using Gavin Schmidt the NASA source as your independent expert You say he says she says but the independent expert says will the strongest evidence is on this side Which helps the public make decisions Instead they were using Gavin Schmidt as simply a source a partisan source on one side of the story and if you're an experienced journalist you would see that pretty quickly that they were basically mishandling triangulation And the fact is you'd want many more if you're gonna make a claim as broad as global warming as a hoax Then you would need a lot of sources to try to substantiate that Interesting um one of the members of our class after looking at the smell test Information that we found online an article that you had written, you know As opposed to this question, you know, should we discount information just because a source is sketchy You know if I'm looking at a dredge report for example, and I know that you know dredge is often Sensationalistic and you know would prefer to be first than right But Should how should I parse the trustworthiness of information? Just based on the source itself. I guess, you know, does does the source alone? negate Whether I should believe something This reminds me of What editors often said to me and you might have had this experience to Jeff when you're in the newsroom the typical first response of an editor to or reporter coming in with some sort of wild-eyed story is interesting if true and Also, I think of my youngest son Adam when he was about four years old his lips were smeared with Chocolate and I accused him of getting into the cookie jar and he looked at me wide-eyed and said how can you know? And it struck me that he was a compromised source So I didn't believe anything. He said The trouble is that all sources are biased All humans are biased. We can't escape it but what we can do using techniques like the pie chart is to try to Distinguish between better and worse sources and us Just because someone said it just because it's printed just because it appears on television or on the internet Doesn't mean it's true. We are seeing a tsunami of of news Which is deliberately falsified and we're seeing people make money you think of of Alex Jones in his info war He earns a very handsome salary as this rush rush Limbaugh and do the owners of Fox news by peddling nonsense from a perspective on the right that they know is going to sell well and So they're basically essentially Ranting for ratings. They're basically making money off of the lack of skepticism and the prejudices and the resentments of substantial part of the public And that leads to consequences such as we see currently in the White House That that kind of anticipates actually a question that a student posed I think this is interesting because it comes out more from the standpoint of being a journalist So this student asks Um, is it is there ever a point at which it's impossible for Journalists to be unbiased about a news story or use facts that don't come from biased sources and you know, I guess The the you know, how do you how do journalists avoid? Injecting opinions into stories Or can they can they avoid that and if they can't is there something else that journalists can do to make their stories? Fair I get you know fair and balanced to use Fox's phrase The short answer is that Journalists are never impartial completely never unbiased nor are any sources that they quote Humans are inherently biased there's a good analysis of this I think by one of the early black journalists at the Washington Post kind named Robert I think Maynard and He created something called fault lines analysis. He said that he's writing from California He was the publisher of the Oakland Tribune at the time and he was saying California has is Divided by all these fault lines, but so a society In those fault lines. He listed were things like gender generation Groupings that we're in such as you know political affiliations and He gave good examples of this like I use all in the book and I'm sorry that I can't immediately Reproduce all of them, but we do see that Men and women often see the same thing as very different from each other that people of different generations Millennials see things oftentimes quite differently than their elders That geography was another one that people who live in wealthy neighborhoods Don't look at the problem say police violence the same way that people live in poor neighborhoods Who are more likely to experience that kind of violence look at things? so there are all these things that are baked into our viewpoint and The best that journalists can hope for I think is to try to be aware of his or her own biases And something is helpful in this is something called project implicit or the implicit bias test which you can look up online and take yourself which indicates that You may have prejudices maybe against fat people or dark people or light people or whatever it may be that you're not even aware of and it tries to help surface those and Surfacing our biases is the first step toward trying to get some sort of hold on them We're not able to see all of them. I think and I think journalists need to be much more humble and Basically give up this nonsense that they can be objective or their sources can be objective and instead be Empirical which means that they look for the best data the best evidence They try to find the best sources the ones who they feel are telling the truth most clearly And that's our best hope Journalism is often called or sometimes called the first draft of history and it's very much a rough draft And the fact that even excellent news media such as the New York Times or NPR or the Washington Post Get it wrong is partly a Is something they can't avoid if they're trying to Respond to things very quickly and they can't stand back for You know a week a year 20 years a generation the way that historians or others can To find out what's really going on. They have to put together a picture of the world as best they can and That's why newsrooms need to be diverse because a Black reporter for example who comes out of a poor neighborhood is going to write about Say housing in a community much more probably differently than a white reporter who looks at gentrification as a positive thing and say rich people moving in and displacing the people who live there Whereas the African-american reporter Might see it as displacement of people who've been longtime residents who are being evicted simply because they don't have the means to to stay so And we've learned a lot, you know with the me too movement about women's perspectives and about how widespread kind of a sense of male privilege and the abuse of power in jobs and other things to take advantage of women's vulnerability, so The best you can hope for as a journalist is to be an empiricist Sort of like someone with a white lab coat a scientist in a hurry mm-hmm I'm really glad you brought up the fault lines paradigm because I use that a lot in my teaching While i'm teaching journalism classes about how you need to see Where your own blind spots are and then reach across those fault lines, you know get the voices that Don't look like you into the story get those perspectives And make that story more comprehensive more accurate and I think the the bob maynard's legacy The maynard institute, you know has been really good at at helping journalists come to grips with that Yes, yeah, it's an excellent resource It's one of the first things I saw when I was doing research for my books was you know, this is a nifty analysis of Why we don't understand each other The very difficult task of a journalist to to sort of be a bridge to stretch across different constituencies and try to present A picture of the world which is empirically accurate as as best they can Yeah, it also to to come back when they're wrong and to admit it that's There's a new book out of harvard that looks at How people Use media that's ideologically oriented and they found that that news sources on the left um will often Published stories that are incendiary that later turn out to be false But once they're discovered to be false The mainstream media tends not to pick these up. They tend to say oh, we checked it out. It doesn't it's not true We're not gonna we're not going to give them more oxygen We're on the right They found that uh, it didn't matter whether the story was true or not. It's still sold to their audience it's still stoked the passions of their audience is had commercial value and Who cares if it's true or not? There's one other area that you mentioned jeff. You talked about fair and balanced, which is a Roger Ailes phrase. I think designed to confuse people about fox news, but even the notion of balance It goes back to objectivity, which I think again is impossible for anyone much less a journalist Um, I think we shouldn't be balanced. I think we should be biased I think we should have three biases the first the most important of which is a bias for the public good and I think that We often strive for balance for giving each side equal space When in fact the evidence doesn't support that it's it's called false equivalence And journalists because they usually operate in commercial environments don't want to alienate any readers or viewers or web visitors And so they're always eager I think to try to get To find balance and stories when it doesn't exist in nature And doing so I think misleads the public And the the climate change issue is probably The first the poster child or the primary exhibit for that Where you know, you talk to somebody who is a discredited or non-scientist And give them equal weight with someone who is a long established scientist who really knows this material, you know That's a really good example. I and I've seen that same um False equivalency been be applied to things like intelligent design, you know the Controversy over creationism and things like that where The two sides are portrayed in the press as if they have equal weight And in fact the scientific community would certainly scoff at that Right. So yeah, I can definitely see your point. Um, one last question and this kind of circles back to um You know trustworthiness in news and that is um a student asks what news sources do you trust? When you know, what what's your news consumption diet like? What do you read or listen to? Yeah, um, I um Get a daily paper subscription to the New York Times It costs me about 90 bucks a month But I'm happy to support good journalism because I think We're in a period now where the the business model of particularly print journalism Is is imploding So I I paid and I delighting going out in my front porch and picking up the New York Times every day and read it with my breakfast I also listened to national public radio. I listened to other programs Carried through that network such as terry gross's wonderful interview program fresh air Um, and I listened to planet money and other you know npr products I listened to on the media, which is out of wi myc in new york That come out every week I Look at the san francisco chronicle. I have electronic subscription to them as well as the mercury news in san ose and I look I get us have a subscription to new yorker to columbia journalism review um, I read academic journals When I can stay awake And uh, uh, those are my primary sources of news And if I see something that Over time you develop a picture in your head of the world and how it works And when something challenges that I'll often go deeper. I'll look for a magazine article. I'll look for a government report something an authoritative source um, that explains an issue particularly if it contradicts my worldview because I think journalists should always be curious. You should always be looking for For information that contradicts the way you understand the world because you recognize that your understanding of the world is Imperfect, it's evolving And you have an obligation to the public to try to be as accurate as you can Great. Well, um, I think that is going to be a wrap So, um, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts with the class We'll um, probably take a deeper dive into detecting bull later this semester. So um, thanks again for sharing your thoughts especially about media literacy news literacy and um Uh, we'll be in touch. I guess at some point Yeah, and I'm happy to answer any any further questions that come up because Once you've read something, you know, something may strike you and uh, As a question, I'm happy to follow up. Great. Thank you so much. Sean. Take care. Have a great day My pleasure you too. Okay, and for everyone else watching, um, this will be archived on youtube it takes maybe 20 minutes or so for the the Video to process but then I'll put the link on blackboard for people to watch. So thanks again for Tuning in live if you are watching it in real time Bye everybody