Katya Rogers:

Hi, this is Katya Rogers, executive producer of On the Media. This holiday week we're featuring a series of conversations about an alarming loss of trust, faith, and devotion by Americans for American democracy. This miniseries is part of a month long campaign called The Purple Project for Democracy, a strictly nonpartisan, apolitical effort. Our very own Bob Garfield is one of the Purple Project organizers. We recommend that you listen to this series in order. This is episode two in which Bob looks into misinformation, disinformation, and the toll of civic illiteracy. This is Pizzagate. It is absolutely possible that Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, John Podesta, James Alefantis, and Jeffrey Epstein could be involved in child trafficking group.

 

Bob Garfield:

The Pizzagate pedophile conspiracy, crisis actors at Sandy Hook, the Flat Earthers, and on and on and on, all absolute baloney peddled by the cynical and naive and eagerly lapped up by the gullible. Misinformation is a problem that Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, has studied for years. Brendan, welcome back to the show.

 

Brendan Nyhan:

It's great to be here.

 

Bob Garfield:

There have always been so-called low information voters, even when every school kid knew the branches of government and the justices of the Supreme court. It's been like that, but something has changed. What has changed?

 

Brendan Nyhan:

What I worry about is that the combination of a more partisan time and new communication media making it possible for misinformation to move faster and to reach more receptive audiences perhaps than ever before.

 

Bob Garfield:

Yeah. Obviously in a sea of low information, it's hard to correctly understand the political currents that are swirling around you, but it isn't hard to have opinions about them.

 

Brendan Nyhan:

That's right. For people who want to seek them out, it is possible to immerse yourself in a kind of digital fever swamp where your worst suspicions about the other side are confirmed. What's also interesting about this that many people don't appreciate is the extent to which actually it's not just the low information voters. Sometimes there are people who actually know quite a bit about politics who are also quite misinformed, heard the spin, they've internalized it, and it shapes their views and actions in really powerful ways, even if they are quite well-informed about many aspects of politics.

 

Bob Garfield:

Would this be happening to the degree that it's happening all around us? If we were just more grounded into certain fundamental facts about how the system was designed and how it's supposed to work and how it often does work, I mean, if we knew what the three branches of government were and who the Supreme Court justices were and how a law is made and about Marbury v. Madison, do you think that would have a calming effect on the electorate?

 

Brendan Nyhan:

I'm not sure. In some cases, it's the people who follow politics the most closely who have the most polarized views. It's not obvious that coming to know more about politics means that we'll kind of find a factual equilibrium we can all agree on. One of the things that you do is you learn more about politics and you become more educated and sophisticated about it is you start to develop more consistent views. People who are more knowledgeable about politics, more educated, they're more likely to have consistently liberal or consistently conservative views. That has lots of useful, valuable aspects according to some ways of thinking about politics, but it might also mean they might come to be more vulnerable to misperceptions that are particularly appealing to their side of the aisle.

 

Brendan Nyhan:

That's a trade-off that I think we're really struggling with as a country right now. In particular, I just want to emphasize the role of political elites in preying on those people. I think sometimes we blame human beings for being human beings. I think we should instead put the focus on the public figures and institutions that make it possible for so many people to be misled and take advantage of their well-intentioned desire to make the world a better place and to understand what's going on.

 

Bob Garfield:

Well, we'll come to that in just a moment, but I just want to latch onto the notion of the digital fever swamps, which have been variously called echo chambers and filter bubbles. But anyway they're terms, they're kind of micro tribes of Americans let's just say trapped by Facebook and Google's algorithms into receiving only the content that conforms with whatever their preexisting worldview happens to be and making them highly vulnerable to manipulation from the kind of demagogic politicians that you're describing. We have talked an awful lot about filter bubbles on this program, but you've actually done a rather famously done research questioning the panic over them.

 

Brendan Nyhan:

I certainly don't want to suggest there's not reason for concern. There very much is, but I think it's a more subtle problem than people have realized. There's an idea that everyone's in a filter bubble or that everyone's in an echo chamber when in fact the problem is more specific to relatively small subsets of Americans. It's not the experience of the average person, but people who follow politics closely often have these more consistent political news diets. The outlets they consult tend to have a more uniform slant towards their side of the aisle. Those people, while representing a minority of the population, are disproportionately represented in the political news audience that the media responds to and the voting population that politicians respond to.

 

Brendan Nyhan:

They exercise a lot of influence, and they can also have important impacts in the way they elevate claims made by elites helping them reach critical mass and the way they'd spread misinformation within social networks. It might be the case that a particular myth is only directly received by a pretty small percentage of Americans, but then those people who follow politics very closely and have these kinds of skewed information diets may spread that myth through Facebook, through conversations over the dinner table, or at the workplace and so forth. In that way, they can be a kind of beachhead for misinformation out into this larger group of Americans who don't follow politics as closely or who don't have such slanted information diets.

 

Bob Garfield:

The phenomenon you just described, that dynamic might well explain the idea that's now swamping social media and Fox News that the impeachment process is some sort of unconstitutional coup in progress, when in fact it is explicitly constitutional to the letter. The constant reinforcement of bad information doesn't exactly lend itself to civic literacy, does it?

 

Brendan Nyhan:

No, very much not. I think the point you made about Fox is important here. We underestimate the extent to which the people who are consuming huge amounts of political news are often watching a lot of cable news. This is a problem where the focus has most recently been on Facebook, but partisan cable news, while reaching a very small section of the public if you think about the whole population, again can have a really disproportionate impact. Some of the same folks who, for instance, were consuming so-called fake news websites in 2016 were the kind of older conservative Americans who also are especially likely to be watching a lot of Fox News. There is a group of kind of super users and they can help candidates raise a lot of money. They can elevate these news stories.

 

Brendan Nyhan:

They can move the algorithms that drive social media by the engagement that they give to certain stories. These relatively small polarized groups with these skewed information diets, they have a big voice. I think one of the challenges that we face is thinking about how they may be a small group, but they exercise really disproportionate influence on our politics. Those are not average people. The average person is not so polarized. The average person does not have such a skewed information diet. Yes, people have strong feelings about the parties. Yes, they disagree quite sharply about many important matters that we have to decide, but we've created a political system and a communication system that amplifies those voices so much and crowds out so many others.

Bob Garfield:

And response in political campaigns to them, right? I mean, it would appear in many of the president's activities and his statements that he is not trying to appeal to a majority. He is trying to appeal to his base and enjoy the fruits of whatever outrage he can stir.

 

Brendan Nyhan:

Absolutely. Every president responds to their base, of course, but Trump is breaking new ground in the extent to which he plays to the claims and concerns that resonate most strongly with this group of people with very intense preferences. The kinds of people who go to his rallies and cheer for the applause lines, who respond to the Facebook Ads that Trump runs at saturation levels, and who drive the audience for places like Sean Hannity and other confidants and allies of the president that can warp the kind of representation that Americans get in the White House. Because what energizes those groups is so different from what most Americans want and the kinds of language that appeals to them can be so corrosive and in some cases hateful.

 

Bob Garfield:

This whole conversation and the whole Purple Project that this series is addressing are premised on survey data that point to a staggering amount of distrust and disaffection for democracy and its institutions. Putting aside the craziness of contemporary politics, are we in an existential crisis for our form of government itself?

 

Brendan Nyhan:

I don't think we're there yet, but I'm concerned. I'm one of the organizers of a group called Bright Line Watch, a group of political scientists who come together to monitor the state of US democracy because we're worried about the potential for what's called democratic erosion. I don't think we're headed towards authoritarianism anytime soon, but we've seen in other countries degradation within established democracies, robust institutions of accountability for people in power being diminished, freedoms for the press being limited in their ability to counter the government being undermined. There are ways that democracy can be diminished even when it still exists in name, when elections are still held, when rules and laws are still on the books.

 

Brendan Nyhan:

That's the fear I think we have to keep in mind. It's not fascist marching in the streets. Everything will look the same, but the institutions and norms will degrade in ways that undermine our ability to make our voice heard in government and exercise appropriate controls over the people in power. We have to reaffirm the democratic norms that this country has embraced imperfectly through its history. In some ways, we only became a full-fledged democracy with the enfranchisement of African-Americans and the ending of racial apartheid in the South in the 1960s. While in some ways we're the world's oldest democracy, in some ways we're a very young democracy.

 

Brendan Nyhan:

This is a moment where those gains feel fragile, and it's important to reaffirm the consensus that I do think exists in many ways around those norms of democracy and rebuilds them again in an era where we are divided along partisan lines. That can't be the solution. Making people come together across party lines is a strategy that has failed everywhere it is tried. We need institutions that work when people disagree about politics. Disagreeing about politics is normal. That's what democracy is. That's the beauty of the freedoms we have. I want a system that works even when we disagree, sometimes intensely. I hope that the conversations that you're able to solicit can help further that goal because it's a long-term challenge.

 

Brendan Nyhan:

I don't expect that we will solve it anytime soon, but we need to start trying.

 

Bob Garfield:

Now, that answer isn't exactly Pollyanna, right? I'm wondering if, contrary to the premise of the question, maybe we are in a situation of such polarization that it's kind of like an antibiotic resistant bacterium and that we are so infected that all the King's horses and all the King's men and none of the basic civics information understanding will have the power to get us out of this spiral, this crisis of faith.

 

Brendan Nyhan:

We'll see. I guess what I would say is we should talk not just about factual knowledge, what people know about how government works, and more about values. Thinking about a civic education that reminds people what democracy is all about. It's not just a matter of facts. It's a matter of-

 

Bob Garfield:

Hearts and minds.

 

Brendan Nyhan:

That's right. Exactly.

 

Bob Garfield:

Brendan, thank you so much.

 

Brendan Nyhan:

Thank you, Bob.

 

Bob Garfield:

Brendan Nyhan is professor of government at Dartmouth College. On this holiday week, the Purple Project for Democracy is hosting the Great Thanksgiving Taking, asking young Americans to hijack the evening program to turn it away from arguments about politics, toward thankfulness for our freedoms and reflection on where we're headed. Learn more at wethepurple.org.

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