Does News Polarization Lead to Truthiness?

Blogger Alex asks if a polarized news environment may lead to what some call truthiness? Very provocative. (Accoding to Wikipedia, truthiness is a word that U.S. television comedian Stephen Colbert popularized in 2005 as a satirical term to describe things that a person claims to know intuitively or "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.[1])

I think truthiness is a very real risk. You have at least two trends playing out here. First group polarization: People converge to parts of the Internet that they agree with, fostering extremism. Related to that, you have news polarization, the market reaction to satisfy the demand for polarized takes on a narrow set of issues--Iraq, U.S. politics, etc. Meanwhile, media is losing an ethic that may have been unique to newspaper people. As Eric Alterman writes in the New Yorker article this week "Out of Print:"

Among the most significant aspects of the transition from "dead tree" newspapers to a world of digital information lies in the nature of "news" itself. The American newspaper (and the nightly newscast) is designed to appeal to a broad audience, with conflicting values and opinions, by virtue of its commitment to the goal of objectivity. Many newspapers, in their eagerness to demonstrate a sense of balance and impartiality, do not allow reporters to voice their opinions publicly, march in demonstrations, volunteer in political campaigns, wear political buttons, or attach bumper stickers to their cars.

By contrast, new media is very much about satisfying the desire for opinions on why things matter and what should we expect. Alterman writes:

Rupert Murdoch, in a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, in April, 2005—two years before his five-billion-dollar takeover of Dow Jones & Co. and the Wall Street Journal—warned the industry’s top editors and publishers that the days when “news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deigned to tell us what we could and should know,” were over. No longer would people accept “a godlike figure from above” presenting the news as “gospel.” Today’s consumers “want news on demand, continuously updated. They want a point of view about not just what happened but why it happened. . . . And finally, they want to be able to use the information in a larger community—to talk about, to debate, to question, and even to meet people who think about the world in similar or different ways.”

Group Polarization to News Polarization

Legal scholar Cass Sunstein has described an undesirable phenomenon he calls "group polarization"—the Internet can accelerate the tendency of people to gravitate to groups that agree with their views, thereby making extremism more likely (from his Oct. 2000 Yale Law Journal):

The central empirical finding is that group discussion is likely to shift judgments toward a more extreme point in the direction indicated by the median of predeliberation judgments. This is true if a group decision is required; if individuals are polled anonymously afterwards, they are likely to shift in precisely the same way.

A new study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism shows that a similar polarization or "narrowing" is happening in news coverage as well.

As AP writer David Bauder puts it, "The Internet has profoundly changed journalism, but not necessarily in ways that were predicted even a few years ago."

The most worrisome statistic might be this (from Bauder's article):

Two stories — the war in Iraq and the 2008 presidential election campaign — represented more than a quarter of the stories in newspapers, on television and online last year, the project found.

Take away Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, and news from all of the other countries in the world combined filled up less than 6 percent of the American news hole, the project said.

Blogger Expands Languages

If ethics can be viewed as the expansion of choice, the Blogger service is trending in a good direction. They recently started offering blogs in three new languages: Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian. These languages posed a programming challenge because of their right-to-left orientation. Blogger responded with new templates and bi-directional text editing.

It will be interesting to see how this expanded reach impacts the blog communities in politically sensitive countries where these languages are spoken, in a region that could really benefit from more positive dialogue. Policy Innovations has covered a little bit of the Iranian Internet censorship story, and the revolutionary potential of blogs, but there is also the risk that this language customization will feed into the group polarization effect that Cass Sunstein identifies in Republic.com 2.0.