Fixing the Media that Consumes Us

The cure for bad speech is more speech

What’s wrong with the way it works now?

Why Truth Matters

When humans survive, they survive by working together in groups. The larger the group, the more likely it is to survive, but there’s a natural limit we hit long before we get to things the size of a nation. It’s a bit less than 200 people, and it is called

Dunbar’s Number

This is, effectively, the number of people that the human brain can perceive as real human beings; to care about or trust at any one time.

https://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html

When we hit this limit, the tribe divides into sub-tribes, people socially distant from you become more like cardboard cutouts than real, and trust becomes difficult.

To overcome this limit, we form governments and, critically, we agree on “facts.” The “facts” don’t have to be true. The Government’s stability is based on agreement on what they are. The facts being actual facts is vital to the group’s long-term survival, but in the meantime, witches may be burned, and demons cast out.

Sanity is not required, but common knowledge is.

Which explains a lot about our governments if you think about it.

Spreading the News

We used to have town criers, and “newspapers” existed long before the telegraph, telephone, radio, television, or internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acta_Diurna

The important thing is that a larger population shares the news and is able to agree on some common reality, even if that shared reality is not actually real.

This isn’t sufficient for any enduring human society. For a nation to survive and thrive, it must, over time, pay attention to the truth. When it is a smaller group of fewer than 200 people, you already know which of them you can regard as good sources of information and who the best liars are.

Truth Matters

One problem with things that aren’t true becoming part of that reality is made clear in Voltaire's quotation.

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”

― Voltaire

The other problem is simply physics

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

— Philip K. Dick

So if the society, nation, or civilization uses agreed-on “facts” that are not true, it eventually ends up facing opposition from Mother Nature or its neighbors. Potentially fatal opposition. This is a social evolution that, to date, has not failed in its application.

If the society, nation, or civilization is not agreeing on “facts,” it is doomed to splinter into shards that agree with themselves and nobody else. So when different “news” organizations present alternative facts, they tear society apart. They can only manage NOT doing this (if they are indeed independent) by adhering to the truth, which remains singular no matter what a philosopher may argue.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-cause-of-americas-post-truth-predicament/ via @sciam

Therefore: To have a society or nation larger than the limitations inherent in Dunbar’s number, we must disseminate factual and complete information to every citizen.

We have a word for the dissemination of facts; we call it the “News.”

We also have a word for the dissemination of non-factual or intentionally incomplete “facts”; we call it “Propaganda.”

But gathering and publishing news costs something, and the larger the civilization, the more expensive that publishing becomes.

Still, the citizens have to be able to trust the media, and the news has to be provided to every citizen, no matter how wealthy or poor they may be.

Democracy

A good democracy is one in which the Government represents the people. That is, the people we elect to Government are intended to reflect the opinions of the people who are governed. They represent us, but who is leading us and shaping those opinions?

Our leaders are usually the people who control and present our news and other information or the media owners who pay them. They can be the pastors of our church if we are religious, or gang leaders, but neither a church nor a gang will be run as a democracy.

Who Pays?

The people, of course. Either through Government (indirectly), through advertising (indirectly), or by subscription(directly).

It is clear that we cannot trust an arrangement in which those in government control and censor the information we receive. No matter how well-meaning, such control arrangements cannot be trusted, and if the Government pays directly, it definitely has that control.

Advertisers take money from us indirectly (we buy the things advertised) to buy the advertising that funds our news organizations. The Corporation that places the advertisements gains control, and it was not elected. We have no say at all and won’t ever know what it has decided not to tell us.

Still, our “free-to-air” news media was funded through advertising for a long time. We had the fairness doctrine limiting the spread of propaganda and polarization of opinion. Then the fairness doctrine was dropped in 1987, and our “News” had to become a profit center. News started to be tailored to targeted demographics. Truth is not as important as market-share today.

Finally, we cannot simply base the dissemination of the news on subscriptions because the inequality of our society means that many citizens would have to starve to read a newspaper. Yet democracy works only when EVERYONE is well informed, with trustworthy sources of facts. Rationing scarce resources with wealth is a bad idea, but when it comes to the news, it is even worse.

What other choice is there?

We have to combine 2 of these to form a new structure. Vouchers that allow us to pay for subscriptions. The Government provides the vouchers to its citizens (50%), its libraries(10%), and its universities and research organizations(40%). Consider the scale and the need for aggressive, well-funded, investigative reporting to keep our governments and businesses honest; these must be generous vouchers, giving any citizen access to multiple media sources…

…but we are only half done with the problem.

Any organization providing public media entertainment or news can take subscriptions based on the vouchers. As long as it displays its ratings on its masthead or login page, the subscriptions will be honored. There is more about the ratings below, but there are three forms of ratings. The first is about the truth of any information the site provides as being factual. The second is about the diversity of opinion provided. The third stipulates that a work presented is fictional; not subject to such checking.

Telling Truth from Lies

Shaping Opinions

Now, because we get all our news from a limited set of sources, it is inevitable that the opinions about the news that our news presenters and editors happen to hold will leak into the news presentations. The best presenters try to identify and remove biases; others are less careful. Some sources appear to be intentionally dishonest.

The problem with this situation is that in any working democracy, we are governed by a government we consent to be governed by, and consent is conditional on public opinion and agreement, and public opinion is shaped by the way the news is presented to us. To a greater extent than most people recognize, the news media of any real democracy controls the Government by shaping the opinions that prevail in the society.

Anonymity is a curse

In the smaller tribes in which we knew everyone, we also “knew,” at least, who was saying something and that they were who they claimed to be. We now live in large, anonymous masses and communicate over an internet populated with ‘bots and trolls who may not be human.

To a degree, there is value in that anonymity keeping the state from persecuting people but having flipped our society on its head, anonymity then flips us all the bird.

We become prey.

The untraceable e-mail contains a virus followed by a demand for ransom. The misrepresented phish grants attackers access through our security.

The net was designed by and for the scientific community, and while people on the internet happily lie about that community, it was always so focused on finding the truth that the notion that someone would misrepresent themselves to the rest of the community remains shocking to some of them to this day. An IP packet does not have, built into it, a secure means of knowing its real origins. You can put whatever you like into the source field; all that happens is that the computer receiving the packet responds to that fake source rather than to you. This was a “feature” built into the backbone of the internet by people who, in their honesty, could never conceive of the way it is currently used.

It is not just the internet, though, because we are anonymous in any large enough community. Anonymity enables crime and encourages sociopathy, as well as shielding us from intrusive Government. The fact that we have to worry about intrusive Government points back at the problems with our definition of money, creating an owning class of oligarchs who have the wealth to subvert any government we form. That discussion was the first post I provided on this forum. The anonymity is NOT an advantage to us as humans (see the following essay on this forum).

Fixing this appears to be a matter of either altering the guts of the internet or using encryption to create virtual networks that are traceable at that basic level. A hierarchy of such networks, with infrastructure funded by subscription, could prevent some of the problems.

We need to know who and what our information source is.

Checking the Reputation of Your Source

For all media, from Newspapers to the internet, the user interface can present information about that media. For example, you may be seeing a little lock symbol next to the “https:” on your internet screen, indicating valid encryption; there is room for Pinocchio’s nose.

To display or announce, for each internet source, each news organization, each radio program or television newscast, some ratings of that source’s reputation for truthfulness would give us back some of what we gave up as we were growing so damned anonymous. We’d be able to know that our sources are who they claim to be and that what they say is more often true than false.

This modification to user interfaces would be a trivial thing. Nations issuing voucher subscriptions could require free-to-air media to display them for news shows, have them on the mastheads of newspapers, and have them announced on the radio. There are objections offered in the USA owing to the first amendment being interpreted as it is¹, but if other nations make it a requirement, the interface would appear in our internet browsers and would still be useful voluntarily, even in the USA. Good ratings would be a selling point.

The source of the ratings is, however, more complex. Fact-checking (FC) organizations to provide responses to queries about organizations are more complicated than the modified browsers displaying the length of the wooden proboscis of a fairy-tale wooden boy.

More than one organization would be needed because nobody can evaluate the truth of the whole internet. The organizations have the job of evaluating the overall truthfulness of the New York Times, Newsmax, NewshubNZ, RNZ-News, Stuff-Politics, The Australian, The BBC, RT, Al-Jazeera, and Fox News, and may drill down to individual articles. The vouchers would apply to subscriptions to FC organizations.

Some FC organizations will be biased, of course, but a fact-checker can be challenged in court (preferably in a far-away neutral country). If an FC organization provides an unjustifiable estimate of some organization’s truthfulness, it may have to defend its rating.

Why display the ratings?

Because we have to have sources we can trust

and

Because the best response to bad speech is more speech.

Not censorship

1. ”Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
It would not appear that this has any difficulties, but “abridging the freedom of the press” has been interpreted to include a prohibition against requiring the press to print anything, which means that the U.S. government cannot require anyone to display independently sourced evaluations of any reputation for truthfulness or balance. It would be compelled to offer redemption of subscription vouchers to everyone, whether they displayed the ratings or not.