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Blur: How to Know What's True in the Age of Information Overload
Blur: How to Know What's True in the Age of Information Overload
Blur: How to Know What's True in the Age of Information Overload
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Blur: How to Know What's True in the Age of Information Overload

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Amid the hand-wringing over the death of "true journalism" in the Internet Age-the din of bloggers, the echo chamber of Twitter, the predominance of Wikipedia-veteran journalists and media critics Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel have written a pragmatic guide to navigating the twenty-first century media terrain.

Yes, old authorities are being dismantled, new ones created, and the very nature of knowledge has changed. But seeking the truth remains the purpose of journalism. How do we discern what is reliable? Blur provides a road map, or more specifically, reveals the craft that has been used in newsrooms by the very best journalists for getting at the truth.

In an age when the line between citizen and journalist is becoming increasingly unclear, Blur is a crucial guide for those who want to know what's true.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 5, 2010
ISBN9781608193028
Blur: How to Know What's True in the Age of Information Overload
Author

Bill Kovach

In his 50-year career, Bill Kovach has been chief of the New York Times Washington Bureau, served as editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and curated the Nieman Fellowships at Harvard University. He is founding chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists and senior counselor for the Project for Excellence in Journalism. In 2004, he was named to the John Seigenthaler Chair of Excellence in First Amendment Studies at Middle Tennessee State University.

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Awesome! It really, really embodies everything that the book needs.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book has two main themes: how to be an informed consumer in today's news environment, and what news organizations can do to adapt and prosper in this changing environment (a particularly relevant subject right now). The bulk of the book is focused on the former theme, covering such topics as adopting a position of skepticism and critical inquiry when it comes to the news, considering sources and evaluating evidence, and testing for completeness and meaning/sense-making.Overall, I liked the book. It's well-written, if a bit repetitive in spots. I didn't find it to be a particularly enthralling read, though, at least until the final few chapters. That said, it's a very rewarding read if you keep plugging away at it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This is a well written book that reinforces the basics of good journalism. The difficulty that I have with the book is that the title seems to imply that the discussion would focus on critical thinking and fact-finding in the Internet era. Although the Internet is mentioned, most of the focus is on tried and true techniques illustrated by examples that are quite dated. Watergate, for example, is an excellent example of investigative journalism, but what would that investigation look like in the context of today's technology? The message seems to be 'let a couple of old-timers tell you about the fundamentals of journalism - they never change'. Well, I suspect journalism has changed significantly but you won't find anything specific in Blur. For example, say you were receiving messages on Twitter or Facebook from an journalist in, say, Egypt. Are there any tools or methods that could be used to verify this source? This book will not tell you about that kind of thing, it will just tell you that if you want to be a good journalist you should get your feet on the ground like journalists did in Viet Nam. So I was educated by this book, but disappointed.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The most common criticism of late-20th and early 21st century journalism seems to be that it's not "real journalism" anymore. Kovach and Rosenstiel offer a model which considers that the thing we call "journalism" might not be a monolith. They find historical precedents for 4 different models - a "journalism of verification" which matches that "real journalism" category, a "journalism of assertion" which values immediacy over analysis, a "journalism of affirmation" which presents news in a way most likely to reinforce the beliefs of its audience, and an "interest-group journalism" in which special interests create content which looks like news to an uninformed viewer. They also recognize a "journalism of aggregation", in which organizations and individuals curate the "news feed" that is interesting to them.While the bulk of the book talks about the first 3 models, and how to recognize and analyze them, the real theme of the book might be the last category. Individuals have increasingly accepted more of the responsibility for collecting their own varied sources of news, and the broad journalism industry has responded in logical ways to stay in business. If we are all becoming "aggregators" in one sense or another, we need to understand the different kinds of journalism, and know how to evaluate them (as what they are, not what we wish they were).I didn't find the last section, on the future of news, as satisfying as the rest of the book. As good journalists, Kovach and Rosenstiel are measured in their language and conservative in their predictions. Unfortunately, that style which works so well for the rest of the book doesn't match the job of forecasting. (This is also the section where I felt too many sentences began or ended with "as we discuss in our other book...")This book should be taught in high school, as part of preparation for informed citizenship. (Sadly, it probably will mostly be taught in college journalism classes.)
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A handy primer of news media and the impact various forms of communication have had on what constitutes “news.” Kovach and Rosenstiel focus on four key models of journalism: verification (emphasizing accuracy of facts and context); assertion (more passive, focusing on immediacy and volume); affirmation (selective data delivered to an existing audience, less to inform than to affirm a given ideology or mobilize audience members for action); and interest-group journalism (biased, funded by special-interest groups). In examining each of these models in detail, the authors provide readers with a solid introduction to the concept of critical thinking. With the advent of digital technology, where more and more people are self-reliant in sourcing (and disseminating) information themselves, this kind of questioning is vital to determine how meaningful and trustworthy the news we access really is.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I was impressed with this book. It covers a range of information while still remaining accessible and entertaining. It starts with a brief introduction on how technology has changed the media (newspapers to radio to tv and now internet) and what the traditional role of the media has been. It then goes on to discuss the main 'types' of media out there, and how to distinguish between them. From 1) Journalism of Verification (traditional model with high value on truth) to 2) Journalism of Assertion (24hr news stations that don't have time to fact check. 3) Journalism of Affirmation: Less a news source, less emphasis on accuracy, more emphasis on a particular type of politics, cherry picking information that supports a particular type of view and on to new watchdog news sources on the internet (Who tend to only watch one particular group or type of law, leading to a slanted website) and some of the more reliable/balanced websites out there (e.g. polifacts).Within each of these descriptions are interesting real life examples of journalism done right (early examples include reporters who actually went to Vietnam) which help to keep the book interesting. The author concludes with a discussion of what role the media needs to take in the future.The examples are American based, however you could apply them anywhere. Given the state of the media in the USA right now, I think this book should be required reading for all. Four and a half stars.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The author Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel attempt to resurrect good journalism with their book Blur. Both being authors of The Elements of Journalism, this book also has the failing of being as dry as a textbook. However, most of the book has interesting examples of how the government, corporations, and media manipulate the public, and it is our job to be able to identify what is happening. There are different kinds of ways to report a story and if the public can identify what that is, we can better decipher the information or identify manipulation. It’s critical with so much information and disinformation being thrown at us to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff. This book can help us do that, but the book can also address concerns directly at journalists rather than the general public. I’ve read other accounts of media manipulation from the Net Delusion to The Filter Bubble. Where those two fail, is where Blur succeeds. It’s the ability to provide tools to decipher the lies and manipulation in a story. Furthermore, it doesn't have quite the dire and cynical perspective about the manipulation, there is something that can be done about it. When it is not attempting to get journalists to go back to their roots, the authors provide examples of key journalists and their investigative techniques. I found these histories fascinating from Homer Bigart’s reporting that changed the way journalists reported on Vietnam (not taking the government’s word for anything) to Seymour Hersh’s reporting (journalism by verification). The authors go on further to identify types of journalism to look for in order to determine if someone is simply stating facts or attempting a journalism of assertion, where facts are picked selectively to prove a point. We have to be vigilant and have “Skeptical Knowing” so that we use our analytical and skeptical mind to find what’s being attempted information or disinformation. In todays rush the facts find the truth later type of news as well as the change the information to suit the political points kind of news it's important to understand the distinctions. It’s also a great analysis of what the news should be, and while much of that is directed at journalists in attempt to turn the ship to best serve the public, it’s a great lesson everyone needs to learn. Favorite parts/passages:“Our understanding of the news must be built on a foundation of facts—an accurate understanding of what has occurred. And this process of moving from understanding to assigning meaning is one that should be arrived at through a sequence.” P. 31"When everything is unchecked, all assertions become equal--those that are accurate and those that are not. The news, and journalism, becomes more of an argument than a depiction of accurate events that argument, debate, and compromise can build upon." p. 126"In the new world of information and self-editing, we should be just as wary. Anecdotes illustrate; they do not prove. Single statistics hint, but they do not establish. Examples or stray numbers offered as proof are a red flag. When you see them, take care. They are a sign of cherry-picking, a hallmark of the journalism of affirmation." p. 136"This bring us to the checklist we introduced for becoming a more conscious and careful consumer (a skeptical knowing) of news about the world:1. What kind of content am I encountering?2. Is the information complete; and if not, what is missing?3. Who or what are the sources, and why should I believe them?4. What evidence is presented, and how was it tested or vetted?5. What might be an alternative explanation or understanding?6. Am I learning what I need to?p. 168(less)
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Everybody complains about the quality of the media, but nobody does anything about it . . . in part because few of us know what to do about it. Happily, thanks to Bill Kovach, Tom Rosenstiel, and Blur, I now know a whole lot more about what to do about it than I did before. Blur is the textbook for the "Print Journalism" segment of the "Media Literacy 101" course that we all should have had in school but virtually none of us did. It explains what good journalism is, how to recognize it, and (just as important) where journalists can go wrong . . . and how to recognize that. The biggest problem with journalism today, Kovach and Rosenstiel argue, isn't political bias as such, but laziness. Reporters transcribe official statements without investigating them, interviewers fail to do the necessary background research, and publications that should no better fail to corroborate statements with two independent sources before publishing them. The result is a sea of information . . . some of it based on solid, careful research, but much of it misleading or completely erroneous.Blur is, in the space of 200 pages, a (very) brief sketch of how we got here -- specifically of the ways in which information technology shapes the way we receive information -- a guide to how to deal with things as they are, a call for journalists to do better, and an examination of what the "next journalism," now emerging, might look like. Along the way it touches on subjects such as why (and how) people get news, and what good journalism looks like -- the latter illustrated with examples that are enough to make me want to change careers and become a reporter (not because they make it look easy -- far from it-- but because they make it look like an extraordinary challenge, in which the rewards come from making the world a better place. Blur is, in short, an extremely rich and wide-ranging book. That it's never confusing or dull (though it is serious) is a testament to how skillful the authors are at their trade.The majority of readers will see the chapters on how to be an informed consumer of news as the heart of this book, and its most valuable feature. They'd be right, but the last 30 pages of the book -- two chapters on the "next journalism" -- also deserve notice. Its analysis of one potential road that the fusion of print journalism and the internet could take is lucid, innovative, and surprisingly compelling. There's a great deal of writing out there about the fact that jouralism is changing radically . . . not so much about where those changes might lead. Here's one very plausible-sounding possibility, embedded in one very thoughtful book. Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    As a librarian, I find my profession facing many similar challenges to those faced by traditional journalists. People today are less inclined to get their information through trusted intermediaries that vet and edit content for their consumption. There are both positives and negatives to this but as former information middle-men, librarians and journalists are both in positions in which they have to both justify the value work they do and think about changes to that work to make it more relevant to consumers again.Blur is a great little book that lays out these challenges by trying to help individual consumers to parse the news for themselves. By providing a sort of toolkit to digest the increasing amounts of information with which we are bombarded daily, the authors make a case for journalists more as teachers and assistants to an information-savvy public and less as the gatekeepers with total control over the framing of news stories.This is a great little book that I'll be referring to often as I try to consider how my own profession must adapt to the same challenges.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A powerful indictment of the channels through which we now receive our information. The authors identify four models of content: journalism of verification (the traditional mode, in which journalists serve as thoughtful gatekeepers, and provide accuracy and context), a journalism of assertion that emerged with 24-hour cable access, offering a passive conduit for speakers with little challenge or editing, the journalism of affirmation that caters to like-minded consumers tending to cherry-pick information to confirm preexisting convictions; and interest-group journalism that includes targeted websites funded by special interest organizations. The existence of this growing variety, the authors argue, places greater responsibility on the consumer to be aware of the nature of the information being received and to find for themselves the now-scattered bits of information they need to make valid decisions. The majority of the book is designed to equip the reader to make these distinctions.One can readily concede the characterization of the largely disintegrating (in both senses, as concerns quality and progression from a prior unity of professional objective) state of news media, while not accepting the authors' optimism about the ability of the population at large to be either motivated or equipped to take the necessary steps to obtain anything better. This is, after all, the same public that has fueled the growth of the journalism of affirmation embodied in Fox news and even, although less successfully, some few offerings on the opposite end of the political spectrum. The appetite and energy to individually acquire the skills upon which we used to expect from the traditional media seem in short supply. That should be of small surprise, given the critical comments about the negative impact of internet use and a general lack of intellectual depth that becomes more common (e.g., Maggie Jackson's Distracted, and Nicholas Carr's The Shallows).If it is true that a thriving democracy depends upon an educated and informed citizenry, and if it is also true that the plethora of information has decreased the amount of actual knowledge, and further that the burden of bridging the gap falls on each person where before we could rely on a skilled profession to do most of the heavy lifting, then perhaps we are in for a bleak future. Although the authors no doubt intend this solid work to offer encouraging instruction to the reader, the outcome is as likely to be a sobering pessimism arising from consumers' lack of critical curiosity.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    As a librarian, I found that this book just confirmed what I already knew: Not everything can be found on the internet and certainly not everything found on the internet is true. But the latter can be said for anything really; not everything you read or hear is true. Where the information is coming from is extremely important. The person's agenda is important. While it is difficult, it is extremely important for us to be able to discern what is reliable and what is not, but to do that is not easy. This book is a good primer for trying to figure that out, but it all comes down to the reader being able to figure out what is truth and what is not.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Kovac and Rosenteil are journalists turned critics/educators, founders of The Committee of Concerned Journalists and authors of the textbook The Elements of Journalism. They carry a little weight.Their goal in this short (200 pages or so) book is to provide a way to evaluate the credibility of news reports. The main tool is a set of questions we are urged to ask ourselves about the news reports we encounter, the answers to which will determine to what extent we can trust the information.For the time-challenged, here are the questions: 1. What kind of content am I encountering? 2. Is the information complete; and if not, what is missing? 3. Who or what are the sources, and why should I believe them? 4. What evidence is presented, and how was it tested or vetted? 5. What might be an alternative explanation or understanding? 6. Am I learning what I need to?The authors cite Walton's Informal Logic at one point, and I was already comparing the two works. Both deliver important information as first-rate content. They are well-organized, carefully thought out, clearly written, concise and well-documented. But in both cases, I found myself wishing for some small gift -- a clever phrase, a telling metaphor -- but it never showed up. Superb clarity. No grace whatever.Don't get me wrong, this is a good book and you should get a copy and read it. You'll be a better person and better prepared to face the daily onslaught of news. But it is dry. Have a beverage nearby.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Blur is a dense look at how journalism is changing and how consumers can utilize journalistic skills to understand the news and information around them. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel discuss the challenges facing anyone who is trying to determine the truth of what they are reading online, the different types of journalism that you are likely to encounter, and how to identify not just the reliable sources but, on any given news-related Web site, the types of content that require more or less additional skepticism.Although this book is placed under the journalism subject heading, it is perfect for just about anyone who spends time reading news and opinion content online. Kovach and Rosenstiel write engagingly, and any jargon is clearly explained both in general terms but also by providing context through examples. This makes the text accessible and they further break down the process - using the clever term, tradecraft of verification - to enable any information consumer to create the habits necessary to look at online information with the appropriate level of skepticism.I read Blur during a week when the Pew Research Center for the People & Press report on news media was released (66% of Americans say news stories are often inaccurate, overall performance grows more negative) and the satirical news Web site, the Onion, was dealing with a Twitter post that had caused strong negative opinion because some people had been unable to identify it as fake news. The lessons to be learned from Blur make these sorts of stories more relevant and underscore the need for more people to be increasingly curious about their information sources and what those sources say.The authors are not saying that everyone can be a journalist, or that everyone is. Instead, they highlight techniques that journalists use and explain how the average reader can use the same methods to identify the fact and fiction of what they read online.The paperback edition has an afterword and has clearly been updated to incorporate examples from 2010, making the book feel very timely. But the underlying tips and guidance that the authors provide are timeless in an age where trust in the news and news organizations is lower and when nearly anyone can publish information online. Excellent read. I would especially recommend this for anyone who deals with information - lawyers and other professions, librarians, business leaders - and who may need these sorts of tools when they research outside their own content area.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I hold BS and MA degrees in journalism, but it's been so long since I worked for or with newspapers, I thought I needed a refresher course. Wow ... Blur fills the bill.In fact, I think every citizen needs to read this book to learn how to hack through the crap news that's out there. This book is not a diatribe about the awfulness of journalism today or a lament that newspapers are dying. It's a very practical and easy-to-read guide to figure out what news sources and reporters to believe. It made me see the reasons for my dissatisfaction with the Nightly News on PBS and its endless parade of talking heads who seem to be unable to answer a direct question -- and aren't pressed to do so. It doesn't make the situation better, but at least I have a name for that type of journalism. The chapter on what journalists/newspapers need to do to survive in the future is a revelation. I checked out Blur from my public library, so I started taking notes as I read it. I soon decided this book is a KEEPER and that I needed my own copy (hardcover @ $26.00). I can't remember a recent read that influenced my thinking the way Blur has. If you are a consumer of news, you need to buy this book.

Book preview

Blur - Bill Kovach

C H A P T E R   1

How to Know What to

Believe Anymore

Melanie Moyer first senses something is wrong when she arrives to pick up her father at the hospital.

At the nurses’ desk, she overhears a doctor telling people he has already sent his wife and children north to New England. If we start taking in all kinds of people, I don’t want to have to worry about my family at home, he says.¹

Taking in all kinds of people from what, she wonders?

I got into the car and turned on the radio and started hearing that there was an ‘incident’ at the plant, a nuclear power facility nearby, she recalls later.

Across town, Maureen Doherty first sees something on the TV news. I remember thinking I was going to die, she says later.²

As word spreads, workers at the plant begin contacting family and friends to warn them that something very serious is wrong. Many, like the doctor Moyer overhears, advise their families and friends to assume the worst and react accordingly.

These people, in turn, begin e-mailing others about their plans to flee. Grainy cell phone images and video of emergency vehicles, worried officials, and panicked plant employees begin to appear on local TV and then on cable news. Experts, uninvolved but supposedly knowledgeable, are invited on the air to speculate on the possibility of a nuclear meltdown. Video clips from the movie The China Syndrome are played and go viral on YouTube.

The message, offered sometimes in apocalyptic terms and other times more cautiously, is that there’s a problem in the reactor core, which threatens to spew radioactive particles into the atmosphere, turning a local electricity plant into an international nuclear nightmare. The entire mid-Atlantic region of the United States is at risk. Roughly a third of the U.S. population could be contaminated.

The blogosophere moves even faster than TV news and YouTube. Within moments, established bloggers begin to expound on the safety of nuclear power. Soon new blogs, including some by former plant employees, are launched and linked to by others. Within hours, competing blogs appear, some defending the role of nuclear power, and some of these include inside information. The plant’s owner also creates a blog. Then three sites appear that present themselves as independent information providers but in reality are controlled by political groups, including one by the nuclear power industry, and are designed to counteract the critics. Their backers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in keyword fees to make sure that in any Google or Yahoo search, these are the sites Americans would likely see.

The news on more-conventional news Web sites is fragmentary and often contradictory. The mix of messages is hard to sort through and depends on which site one visits and when.

On drive-time radio that afternoon, the nuclear event, still only a possible disaster, becomes a political wedge issue about power, the environment, and federal policy in the war of words among talk radio hosts on the left and the right. The same stylized talking points play out again on cable talk shows in prime time later that night. The message on cable news is particularly confusing. One channel seems to tilt toward the idea that the government is covering up the seriousness of the incident. A rival channel, in a manner equally hard to pin down but just as unmistakable, seems to infer that there is no incident at all and that the whole thing may be a rumor designed to destroy the U.S. nuclear power industry all over again, just as it was finally getting back on its feet after a generation of misguided and exaggerated claims about safety. A third cable channel seems to veer in both directions, inviting familiar political advocates along with various hazily identified experts to debate the meaning of the event that is unfolding.

As for print editions of newspapers (whose staffs are down by roughly 30 percent from ten years earlier) and for network news (where cuts in news gathering have been even steeper), they offer careful reportage but seem slow and out of step—appearing late in the day or the next morning.

The people around the nuclear site itself operate in still another world, buffeted by rumors electronic and in person that create randomly fragmented communities of information. One neighbor is convinced that a nuclear catastrophe is at hand, another that a minor incident has occurred. Others anxiously trying to weigh contradictory messages consider leaving the area but worry that could become deadlier than the nuclear threat if choked roads turn mass evacuation into mass hysteria.

Welcome to the Three Mile Island nuclear accident imagined in the age of the Internet.

This is not how the story played out. The reactor core of the nuclear power plant near Hershey, Pennsylvania, did overheat in 1979, but the incident occurred in a very different information world.

Melanie Moyer is real, and she did first hear about the accident at the hospital and then rushed to listen to her car radio. So is Maureen Doherty, who first learned about it on the local TV news. As they and people everywhere waited and watched, almost everything they learned about the incident was filtered through a mainstream news media at arguably the height of its prestige, trust, and influence in American history. On television, a handful of anchormen, whose networks did not expect their newscasts or their news divisions to make a profit, told the country what they knew without trying to dramatize for ratings. Newspapers, most of them flush with cash after vanquishing their rivals and becoming a monopoly in their markets, sent their reporters to nail down a single accurate account for that day’s edition. It was an industry that all but controlled the news, took that responsibility seriously, and by and large did not recognize its own shortcomings. As such, it tended to speak to the public with a tone of authoritative reassurance. It did not, generally, shout or even raise its voice to attract attention.

Though it did not know it, Three Mile Island would become one of the last great domestic emergencies the media covered before the age of cable news, the concept of the message of the day, the reinvention of the word spin, and the notion that mainstream media could be a slur. And what occurred showed how the gatekeepers of public knowledge could verify the news before publication or broadcast and help calm a panicky nation with facts.

The crisis began at about four A.M. on Wednesday, March 28, 1979. A valve in the plant’s cooling system got stuck in the open position, letting water that would have cooled the reactor leak out. Without the coolant, the reactor core began to overheat and the nuclear fuel pellets began to melt. At nine fifteen A.M., the White House was notified. At eleven A.M., plant officials ordered all nonessential personnel off the plant’s premises. With that, word of an event at the plant began to filter out through the surrounding community. Workers called family and friends and neighbors with the news, which sputtered through the grapevine, often growing ominously with retelling. By midday, helicopters hired by the plant’s owner, General Public Utilities Nuclear, and others from the U.S. Department of Energy could be seen circling above the plant, sampling the radioactivity in the atmosphere.

The worst, witnesses recalled, was grappling with the unknown. The fear generated by rumors and confusion was more intense for those nearby than for those further away. The situation changed hourly, Maureen Doherty said. I lived three miles away, in Hershey, PA. Evacuation routes were slid under the door to my apartment. But that information helped little. As it turned out, she said, There was no gas available at the gas stations. The highways were jammed with people trying to escape.

Unable to flee, Doherty began to rationalize: I was very afraid, but resigned to the situation. Dying of radiation poisoning was not how I wanted to die, but I felt that it was already too late; we had already been exposed. I remember putting white sheets over the windows—I’m not sure why.³

That night, the nation’s most watched newsman began his broadcast in a tone that was serious but not panicked. It was the first step in a nuclear nightmare. As far as we know at this hour, no worse than that, CBS anchor Walter Cronkite said in opening his evening newscast. But a government official said that a breakdown in an atomic power plant in Pennsylvania today is probably the worst nuclear accident to date.

The news reports also recalled the harrowing scenes of the hit movie The China Syndrome, starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, and Michael Douglas, which had opened nationwide to huge audiences only eleven days before. People knew from the movie the possible result of a nuclear plant meltdown: Molten reactor core products could burn through containment and into the Susquehanna River, creating a steam cloud that would produce radioactive fallout over the entire region. Eerily, the movie even had a scene in which gauges in the control room showed water levels in the reactor core rising to high levels. The scene exactly paralleled the event being described in the news.

With all those scenarios in mind, for the next two days a carefully restrained mainstream news media nonetheless conveyed a sense that the situation was an accident but not yet a disaster. The reactor had not melted down. The area had not been evacuated. We’ll stay here, Sue Showalker, the mother of two children and pregnant with a third, told reporters. They won’t let us rot under the sun.

Then on the morning of Friday, March 30, plant operators released a significant dose of radiation from an auxiliary building. The maneuver was a gamble. It relieved pressure, which would maintain the flow of coolant to the core. But it was also possible that the hydrogen released could burn or even explode and rupture the pressure vessel. If that occurred, it would mean a full-fledged radiation disaster. The governor of Pennsylvania, Richard L. Thornburgh, in his first year in office, consulted with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about evacuating the population near the plant. He decided to evacuate those most vulnerable to radiation and publicly advised pregnant women and preschool-age children within a five-mile radius of the plant to leave the area.

On the ground, rumors swirled. One night, around nine P.M., all the lights in town went out. We later found out that a car struck a utility pole, but no one knew that then, an eyewitness told the Washington Post. Within minutes, most of my neighbors had loaded their cars with prepacked suitcases, and were leaving. The sense of fear and uncertainty that night was incredible.

The press, however, remained cautious. Networks held meetings to choose among words like accident, incident or disaster, a reconstruction of the media’s behavior reported. "ABC decided never to use an adjective that had not been used by authorities. Americans everywhere had a solid dose of information about nuclear energy and radiation. Useful features included glossaries of nuclear terminology, medical stories on the impact of radiation on humans, advisories for pregnant women, reports on nearby reactors, analyses of low-level radiation studies and even a report on how to decontaminate a reactor (‘very carefully’ advised the New York Daily News)."

Finally, on Sunday, April 1, experts determined that the hydrogen bubble inside the plant could not burn or explode after all. There was no oxygen in the pressure vessel to make it flammable or explosive. The utility company had also managed to reduce the bubble’s size. To register a sense that experts now considered the crisis averted, President Jimmy Carter visited the plant and, accompanied by TV cameras and reporters, casually walked through the control room where the incident had begun.

After four fear-ridden days, during which most of the media stayed on the story around the clock, radio and television stations stopped their continuous news updates and resumed regular programming, a signal, unmistakable to Americans, that life had returned to some sense of normal. Newspaper headlines now deemed events in distant places more important. People around Three Mile Island began picking up the threads of their lives.

A generation later, how would the Three Mile Island incident play out? Is the scenario we imagine far-fetched? No matter what one thinks of the changes technology is bringing, it is certainly hard to imagine such a relatively orderly or homogenous process of information dissemination. It is easier, rather, to see something more chaotic. The question is how each of us, as consumers and citizens, will make sense of information about the next crisis. And how will we understand even the day-to-day events that play out more incrementally? How will we decide what information to believe and what sources to trust? And what, increasingly, will be the role of the old press? In other words, what is the future of truth and how as citizens are we to discern it?

That is what this book is about.

Some people observing the media landscape today have wondered whether truth even matters anymore. Perhaps, they speculate, in the new information age reality is simply a matter of belief, not anything objective or verified; now there is red truth and blue truth, red media and blue media. Perhaps gatekeepers such as Walter Cronkite have been replaced by cheerleaders such as Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann; rather than trying to find out what is going on, they have already decided. Perhaps, in a sense, we have already moved from the age of information to the age of affirmation.

What is really occurring is different. Most of us have not retreated to ideological corners for our information. Not yet. At least so far, as we end the first decade of the new century, the old brands of journalism, and the old journalistic norms they represent, dominate the new information ecosystem. The problem these institutions face is that the Internet has decoupled advertising from news. Advertisers, including individuals connecting with one another through Web sites like Craigslist, no longer need the news to reach consumers. Old journalism’s problems have much more to do with a loss of revenue due to technology than a loss of audience.

The most fundamental change is that more of the responsibility for knowing what is true and what is not now rests with each of us as individuals. The notion that a network of social gatekeepers will tell us that things have been established or proven is breaking down. Citizens have more voice, but those who would manipulate the public for political gain or profit—be it corporations or the government—have more direct access to the public as well.

Utopians have heralded this as the end of journalism and the information monopoly of elites and see a citizen media culture that instantly self-corrects—a kind of pure information democracy. Critics see a world without editors, of unfettered spin, where the loudest or most agreeable voice wins and where truth is the first casualty.

We think both of these views are overwrought. The reality of the change is not the end of one media and the rise of a new we media culture but a blending that is tending toward a new way of knowing.

This new way of knowing is no longer a lecture by professional authorities but rather a dialogue, with all the strengths and weaknesses that implies. It is a partnership between all of us as consumers of news and information and the former gatekeepers we once relied on to verify and vet information for us.

This is an enormous change. In many ways, it even redefines what we mean by the idea of citizenship. The old idea, operating for the past three hundred years, was that people engaged periodically. They might vote in elections, attend the occasional town meeting, or work through other mediating institutions to pick leaders or monitor government. That old idea is giving way to something new. Rather than relying on the press, Congress, esteemed commissions, or other social authorities to filter information for them, citizens increasingly will filter information for themselves from a competing array of sources. Though we may little understand how, we are all assuming more control over what we know about the world beyond our direct experience. We are becoming our own editors, our own gatekeepers, our own aggregators.

The problem is that much of what this implies about our responsibilities as citizens is unresolved. What is the role of the new citizen—a realistic role, not a utopian one? What responsibilities does it convey? What are the skills we need to be our own editors? What is required of us in the new way of knowing?

There is no code written down. There are no mathematical equations for good citizenship. Whatever the skills required, they have been left largely and curiously untaught, even unexamined. As a society, we preach the virtues of an informed public. The corporations that profit from the business of media claim to champion its cause. The government and many of our best thinkers justly applaud technology for giving us more tools to engage. But generally our culture does little to teach what those skills might be. Our educational system by and large has not imagined them. Many of our journalism schools would be hard pressed to catalog, even for their own students, how to test the veracity of the news they produce. Those skills, however, can be identified. If we look at those who have been in the business of empiricism—people in journalism, law, intelligence, science, medicine, and elsewhere—we will see a set of common concepts and skills that have developed over generations. There is a discernible discipline of mind. Those skills and that discipline amount to what could be called a tradecraft of active skepticism. This book is an attempt to distill that tradecraft. It draws on the skills that were once the province of experts in discerning the truth about public life and outlines a method that citizens can use themselves—a new role for consumers in the do-it-yourself information world. Those skills center on knowing how to evaluate information from the press and other sources so that people can become participants in the new age of information rather than its victims.

It is important to know first that this kind of disruptive technological change has happened before. We can identify a half dozen similarly major advances in technology that have transformed communication and human learning. Each occurrence has, in sometimes larger or smaller ways, redefined the role of citizenship. And each occurrence has seen certain patterns repeat themselves, patterns that we can see today, including disrupting social orders, creating new authorities, and reviving simmering tensions in the two major approaches to learning about the outside world.

Today, as it occurs anew, it is critical to know how to cope with what might otherwise be a sense of chaos or, worse, the feeling that the truth is becoming irrelevant, a casualty to prejudice and to the might of those whose rhetoric is loudest or simplest, or whose marketing and spin are cleverest. There are, we submit, six steps in what can be called the way of skeptical knowing, the discipline and skills required of a discriminating citizen. The first step is identifying what kind of content one is encountering. There are several distinct models of producing journalism in the contemporary culture—with different and in some ways competing sets of mores. Many of the new forms of dissemination, from social networking to blogs to citizen journalism, may involve any one of them. As consumers, we must first recognize what we are looking at.

The second step is identifying whether a news account is complete. Next comes the question of how to assess sources, something even many journalists have approached too hazily. Discerning consumers have often perceived this and have questioned how journalists work. Lawyers, doctors, police, social scientists, and those who work in other realms of empirical knowledge often have more refined ideas about sourcing, which some of the best journalists have adopted.

The fourth step in evaluating the news involves assessing evidence. This book will explain the difference between observing and understanding and the difference between inference (forming a hypothesis about what something means) and evidence (proving or establishing that this inference is true). Next we will explore how the more recent news models tend to use or interact with evidence, and how that is often a key way of establishing what kind of journalism you are encountering.

The last step in the process of evaluating the news involves exploring whether we are getting what we need from the news more generally. There are several tests and telltale signs that journalists themselves have used or identified to question the news they encounter. These bits of hidden tradecraft can be a key to discovering and creating great work.

Finally we also must ask what should become of journalists and the press. The dominant metaphor used to describe journalism in the twentieth century, that of the press as gatekeeper, no longer works when the press is only one of many conduits between newsmakers and the public. A new descriptive metaphor is required. What is it? What is role of journalism in the twenty-first century? And how do the new journalist and the new citizen work together? We will outline what we call the next journalism. We will describe what we think citizens require of journalists. We will offer ideas about how newsrooms must change to provide it. And we will describe a newer, broader definition of journalism’s function in a community that suggests a window into new business models and a path to a commercial reinvention of journalism.

The outline we offer here of how citizens can function as their own more demanding and discriminating editors is not a strict formula. It is intended, rather, to describe ideas, to open a way of thinking about information. We hope it may start people on a path to being more conscious of their consumption and evaluation of news, whether they are journalists or not—in much the same way that studying algebra or chemistry or English in school helps us navigate the activities of our lives, even if we do not become mathematicians or chemists or English professors. People who are more conscious of how the news is put together will find themselves talking back to the television set, stopping and rereading paragraphs of text, or commenting on the quality and content of news accounts to friends. To these seemingly odd behaviors, we say bravo.

The issues are vital. The future of knowledge is the overriding question in our new century, as we struggle again between modernism and medievalism, between information and belief, between empiricism and faith. These forces in the end must coexist.

They have in the past. Haltingly, often against the interests of a powerful status quo, the march of the human family through history has been toward a more accurate understanding of the world. Sometimes, with two steps forward and one step back, risking imprisonment, even death, with wars fought over the progress, we have learned that the earth moves around the sun, the secrets of the atom, and that people can rule themselves rather than believing their rulers talk to god.

Key to this march have been professionals who work at the boundaries of knowledge, who consider themselves part of a trained cohort, schooled in certain methods and techniques and dedicated in their particular disciplines to learning what is true. In medicine, it is the doctors who fight disease. In knowing the stars, it is the astrophysicists who study how our universe came to be. In biology, it is the geneticists who study the building blocks of life. They study, err, share, and debate, striving for an objective search, which they call the scientific method. As theories become accepted realities, their knowledge is embraced by a more general population.

It has been an accumulation of ever-increasing knowledge of the world around us.

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