First Media Report Card of 2022
Drumroll please. . .
The Connors Forum’s first national news media report card of 2022 is here! So how did the outlets score? You can check it out below:
We use a rigorous, objective, rule-based, and nonpartisan rubric to produce these ratings. Outlets that score as trustworthy have demonstrated that they routinely produce credible news coverage with limited bias—and when they make mistakes, they correct them. You can take an in-depth look at our rubric at our website.
You will notice that many of the cable news outlets and partisan websites (both liberal and conservative) scored poorly.
Relying on 3 or 4 of the trustworthy news outlets above and sticking to those sources allows you to be a well-informed citizen who is getting a balanced view of the stories of the day.
Because Americans have easy access to so many trustworthy outlets, as our report card indicates, we believe it is best to avoid untrustworthy outlets altogether. Most of us do not have the time or skills to fact check every story that we read, and any one of us could potentially become addicted to “junk” sources. The best defense against misinformation and disinformation is to avoid unreliable outlets in the first place and only consume information from the highest quality sources.
As we have discussed previously in this newsletter, our human brains are all hard-wired to look for information that makes us feel good, avoid information which does not, and interpret information in a manner that seemingly makes it consistent with what we already believe and maintains our highest sense of self. This is true for everyone regardless of their political orientation. Relying only on demonstrably trustworthy news outlets keeps these cognitive biases in check.
Will Saletan writes in the Bulwark that:
“Americans like to think our country is immune to authoritarianism. We have a culture of freedom, a tradition of elected government, and a Bill of Rights. We’re not like those European countries that fell into fascism. We’d never willingly abandon democracy, liberty, or the rule of law. But that’s not how authoritarianism would come to America. In fact, it’s not how authoritarianism has come to America. The movement to dismantle our democracy is thriving and growing, even after the failure of the Jan. 6th coup attempt, because it isn’t spreading through overt rejection of our system of government. It’s spreading through lies.”
As Saletan correctly identifies, misinformation and disinformation have been powerful weapons that leading public figures in America have used recently to further their efforts to poison the American mind and subvert our democracy.
Let’s not give them that power.
Speaking of grading the news. . .
One of the organizations that we use in our news outlet rubric, NewsGuard, was in the news recently.
As Axios reported last month, NewsGuard will now be available to millions of public school students in the U.S. through a partnership with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). The AFT teachers union is buying NewsGuard licenses for its 1.7 million teachers so that they can make it available to the tens of millions of students in their classrooms around the country.
American children rely a great deal on the internet when completing homework and research projects. Compared to traditional academic sources, however, the quality of internet sources is much more varied. With NewsGuard installed on their school’s computers, students will know instantly how much they can trust the news website they are visiting.
In the Axios article mentioned above, NewsGuard co-founder Steven Brill was quoted as saying:
“Imagine you walked into a library, and there were a trillion pieces of paper flying around in the air, and you grabbed one, and you didn’t know anything about it, or where it came from or who’s financing it. That's the internet, that's your Facebook feed, that's your Google search.”
His point is similar to the one we included in our last newsletter post from Lee McIntyre:
“The cognitive bias has always been there. The internet was the accelerant which democratized all of the disinformation and misinformation and diminished the experts. Democratization has led to the abandonment of standards for testing beliefs. It leads people to think they are just as good at reasoning about something as anybody else. But they’re not. . . There is a scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where he is in the room with all of these goblets and chalices and doesn’t know which one is the Holy Grail. That’s where we are right now. We have the truth right in front of us, but we don’t know which one it is.”
Now that tens of millions of public school students have access to a tool like NewsGuard, they should hopefully be much better prepared to identify which online information is credible and which is not.
And our democracy will hopefully be healthier for it.
If you like what we are up to, please consider subscribing for free! And don’t forget to visit us at ConnorsForum.org.