By The Conversation, August 29, 2011
Today, The Conversation launches a week-long series,
looking at how the media influences the way our representatives develop policy.
To kick off, Stephan Lewandowsky asks how media misreporting undermines a
functioning democracy.
It is a truism that a functioning democracy relies on
independent and strong media that hold the powerful to account.
A tacit, and often overlooked, presumption underlying
this principle is that the media pursue their role in an ethical and impartial
manner.
If the media themselves abandon ethical standards and
replace robust and truthful reporting with spin and the pursuit of an agenda, a
crucial element of a functioning democracy has been lost.
In fact, without vigorous competition and meaningful
legal checks, there is no reason why a privately-owned media conglomerate could
not create an Orwellian environment that deceives politicians and large
segments of the public alike.
Anyone inclined to doubt this should consider recent
events in the UK involving the Murdoch media.
The behaviour exhibited by some Murdoch ink slingers,
who by an act of grand self-delusion have labelled themselves “journalists”,
beggars belief.
To hack into the phone of a missing school child, thus
interfering with a police inquiry while arousing false hope in parents
desperate for a sign of life from their daughter, surely must be considered an
act of moral depravity.
Public revulsion at those actions has put an end to the
docility with which British politicians have hitherto served the Murdoch press.
As the multiple investigations proceed, more and more dubious practices have
come to light — the “double agents” that worked for Murdoch from within
Scotland Yard, for example — that even an imaginative novelist would not have
invented for fear of seeming over the top.
It’s an Orwellian nightmare.
In Australia, News Limited figures have been quick to
distance themselves from events in the UK, assuring us that such behaviour was
limited to rogue elements among the British tabloids, and proclaiming that
Australian outlets are serving the public with high ethical standards.
Some politicians appear to have been unimpressed by
those protestations, and calls for an inquiry into the Australian media are refusing to go away.
Many Australian scientists have also remained
unimpressed by the protestations not only of News Limited figures, but also by
the media coverage of scientific matters by many Australian outlets, from the
ABC to Fairfax to News Limited (the latter differing from the former two in a
step function of accuracy).
Simply put, the Australian media have failed the public
by creating a phoney debate about climate science that is largely absent from
the peer-reviewed literature, where real scientific debates take place.
Over the next several days, a series of articles in The
Conversation will shine an inquisitive light onto specific instances of
misrepresentation, distortion, or spin by the Australian media as they relate
to climate change.
There is an urgent need to analyse the media’s systemic
failures, not just because a democracy can only function when the media play
their role ethically and truthfully, but also because misrepresentations, once
published, have lasting cognitive consequences.
Much research on how people update their memories shows
that, well, it shows that people do not update their memories.
If people are told that Joe Blogs is a suspect in a
jewellery theft, then a subsequent retraction — “Joe is no longer a suspect” — will
often remain ineffective. Although people will recall the correction, their
behaviour in response to inference questions reveals continued reliance on the
false initial information. People will still nominate Joe when asked whom the
police should interview in connection with the theft.
Misinformation sticks in people’s memories, even when
they acknowledge a correction, and even when they earnestly seek to discard a
memory they know to be false.
The potentially tragic implications of this human
cognitive limitation are obvious in a judiciary setting.
Research conducted with “mock” jurors in an experimental
setting typically reveals that although jurors state that they have obeyed the
judge’s instruction to disregard compromised evidence, the jurors' behaviour —
as revealed by them rendering guilty verdicts — remains largely unaffected by
corrections.
Lest one think that those are “just findings from
laboratory experiments,” it must be noted that a substantial proportion of the
American public (between 20% and 30%) continued to believe that Weapons of Mass
Destruction had been found in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, notwithstanding the
fact that the search had remained futile. (And notwithstanding the fact that
the absence of WMD’s eventually became official U.S. policy with bipartisan
support.)
Of course, media coverage of the search for WMDs was
characterised by literally hundreds of reports in which “preliminary tests”
indicated the presence of chemical weapons, all of which then turned out to
have been false alarms. (And to give the media credit, they were also
reported.)
Clearly, it matters a great deal if reports in the media
turn out to be false.
Even if corrected, misinformation tends to stick around
in people’s minds.
Worse yet, there is some evidence that under certain
circumstances, a correction may inadvertently reinforce the original, false
information in people’s minds. For example, research by Professor Norbert Schwarz has shown that health-relevant
information, when presented in the popular “myth vs. fact” format, can
sometimes reinforce the myth, rather than replace it with the fact.
Clearly, it matters a great deal if the media misreport
an issue, even if they issue a correction or apology.
When it comes to climate change, an issue of such global
significance, failing to report the facts could thus have enormous
repercussions, even if corrections are later issued.
Fortunately, there are some ways by which people can be
encouraged to discount misinformation: I will consider those in a few days,
after we analyse some specific instances of media spin.
This is the first part of our Media and Democracy series. To read the other instalments, follow the links here:.
•
Part
Three: Democracy is dead, long live political marketing
•
Part
Five: Drowning out the truth about the Great Barrier Reef
•
Part
Fourteen: The hidden media powers that undermine democracy
This article is about the media’s representation of climate
change – we’d love to hear your opinions on that topic. If you would rather
discuss the existence of climate change, there are many other articles on the
site covering that issue: please take your comments to one of those
discussions.
Stephan Lewandowsky is a professor of Cognitive Science and Professorial Fellow, Cognitive Science
Laboratories at University of Western Australia
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