Facts no match for false beliefs, OSU study finds; implications grim for conventional journalism

[BurtWorm]

Granted, this is one little study and it wasn't designed to reflect the population as a whole. But it was designed to test if standard approaches the media take to correct false rumors work to better inform people. By and large, they don't.

Clearly American media are broken, and, in their brokenness, are helpless to counter the continuing ignorance of vast portions of the American public.


http://bigthink.com/ideas/24771?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bigthink%2Fmain+%28Big+Think+Main%29

...

The false rumor that researchers used in the study was that Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Imam backing the proposed Islamic cultural center and mosque, is a terrorist sympathizer who has refused to condemn Islamic attacks on civilians.

...

Overall, only 35 percent of the participants who previously encountered and believed the rumor held more accurate beliefs after reading a rebuttal, and even fewer – about 28 percent – were moved to reject the rumor.

...

This result is particularly disturbing because it means that standard journalism practice may actually make it more difficult to persuade people of the truth, Garrett said.

“Typically, journalists trying to write a balanced article would include views held by the Imam that some people might find objectionable, but that would help readers understand him better,” he said.

“But what we’re finding is that, in an effort to report both sides, journalists may be actually undermining some of the factual information they reported.”

...

[Motown_Johnny]

1. maybe they should not have picked a rumor that scared the crap out of conservatives

some people would have assumed those things even if they were not told the lie

fundamentally flawed study IMO

[lob1]

2. They make it sound like a human failing.

We might be more affected by the truth if the press would ever tell it to us. I'd say 90% of they time they lie or distort "the Facts" to project their agenda. Believe me, I'll stick with my beliefs rather than believe one word Fox tells me.

[BurtWorm]

4. Is there any evidence that would convince you otherwise?

;-)

One of the things going on in this media climate is people are split into camps and neither side (or none of the sides?) tends to trust the media to have no agenda beyond presenting the facts. Personally, I don't trust the media either, to be honest.

I think John Stewart is right about the effect 24-hour news has had on the national discourse. Until 1980, people read a morning and/or evening paper, got an hour of news in the evening--local, followed by national--and another half hour of local news in the late evening. That was enough news for most people. You could supplement that by reading more than one newspaper and a news magazine or two each week. You might listen to 22 minutes worth of news cycling over and over on some radio stations, and a call-in show on the radio at night, where all sorts of views were welcome.

Then TV producers discovered how cheap news was. Ted Turner put it on 24 hours a day for the first time. Local stations stretched their evening newscasts to an hour in the afternoon and late evening. And they filled all that time with crap, less to inform than to entertain. The original agenda was profit. I think for most media venues, that remains the central raison d'etre. Fox is unusual in being both for=profit and the quasi-official organ of one of the major political parties.

How does the nation get out of the media mess it's in? How do we return to a journalism designed to be a check on the government and the powerful?

[Fumesucker]

5. But the actual number of people who watch the cable news networks is miniscule..

Their total audience is somewhere around maybe five percent of American adults at the outside.

[BurtWorm]

7. But their effect on the rest of the media magnifies their impact.

If you get news in America, you're getting it filtered through the cable-news lens. Whatever the cable networks obsess about, the New York Times will eventually obsess about. And so on.

[lob1]

8. What we have to do is break up the monopolies.

It's disgusting that five people own the news. We need lots of voices with lots of points of view. The loss of that variety has helped push our country farther and farther to the right.

[leveymg]

3. Kant: "Attend to the middling student. The bright teach themselves, and the dunces are unteachable.

The latter part about sums it up the Teas of 2010, and that was written in the late 18th Century.

[spanone]

6. “A lie goes around the world while truth is still putting its boots on.”

the republicans know this well.