Why is everyone so badly informed?
... we're all ignorant amid the information avalanche
I’ve been very absorbed by the US election, as Christian faith is an important part of understanding the story, so there’s been a lot to write about. It has distracted me a little from the proposed euthanasia legislation here. But with a number of senior politicians on the left now publicly opposed to the Bill, including Lib Dem leader Ed Davey, mother of the House Dianne Abbott, health secretary Wes Streeting and justice secretary Shabana Mahmood, I’m more hopeful it will not succeed. That’s no reason for complacency in my action or prayers, however. A fruitful focus for those prayers might be the Christian Rachael Maskell, Labour MP for York Central, who is leading the parliamentary group against assisted suicide, whose membership was seriously depleted at the last election. She appears to be working hard on this, as are all the organisations involved - Care not Killing, Right to Life, SPUC, Anscombe Bioethics Centre, among others.
This week highlighted the difficulty of being a writer at the intersection of culture, politics and faith today - a broad remit at the best of times. Even if focused on just one particular subject - the election, or the assisted suicide bill - it is impossible to keep on top of all the output on any particular subject. The volume of content produced is enormous and far more than one person can follow if they also need to write for a living at the same time.
It was not always so unmanageable. When I was a newspaper journalist in the 00s, it was expected that before the morning ‘conference,’ every reporter would have read all the national newspapers, listened to Radio 4’s Today programme, and also be abreast of any upcoming news in their specialist area if they had one. So if your brief was politics, periodicals like the New Statesman and The Spectator would be read, and so on. It took me an hour at the start of the day.
Today, with the unprecedented explosion in the number of blogs, publications, podcasts and YouTube channels via the internet, it would take a large team to try to keep abreast of it all, and they’d hardly have time to write anything. This must be one reason why there are “echo chambers” where we only hear one side of the story - because it is just literally impossible to listen to all perspectives when there are so many of them.
So what is the result? If it is impossible for journalists to read or listen to most of it, then the algorithms have more power. What is rated as ‘top’ on social media in their timeline is usually the angry posts that generate more clicks. So we might see only the most unreasonable opinions from outside their particular political silo. If a person appears to have a completely different understanding of an issue to you - they may not even have been exposed to the information that you have encountered.
Then consider how difficult it is for an ordinary person to stay on top of events, or discern fact from fiction, when they only have time to read a sliver of all the available data. “Fact checking” websites are intended to help the hurried reader decide if an online claim is true. But this past week has increased my concerns about their impartiality. When I used a couple related to Trump, the declaration of ‘true’ or ‘false’ appeared misleading, to me, when I checked the raw data.
Others have raised problems about the impartiality of BBC Verify. But at least the internet means that any interested person has access to a lot of the information and so they can make their own mind up, if they have the time - although they might not have the skills to do so.
But the big story about the mainstream media this week is how out of touch it was with the US election. Most in the US, and all of the UK variety, backed Harris and assumed her victory. I think this is inevitable because of the volume of information, so it is not a reason to condemn them.
What can be done? Clearly we in the media need to be more aware of this problem. I try to follow at least a few of the blogs and social media accounts of people I disagree with. Sometimes this exposes me to opinions that I find annoying, but it does help me to have a broader picture of what is going on than just listening to the outlets I prefer. However I’ll be honest - there is still so much of it, that I don’t have time to do more than check the headline and skim the content, unless I’m researching it properly for an article I’m writing.
Healthy scepticism is always important. There is disinformation from many sources, including those that appear reputable. This isn’t always deliberate - it can be hard to get to the bottom of something and genuinely fact check a news story.
Perhaps what is most helpful is to cultivate virtue, so we can seek to be fair and charitable to the people of different viewpoints, and pray to have love for all, including those who we disagree with or who are rude and insulting. Even if we are not certain what the truth about any political event really is, we can still love all the parties involved. The outpouring of hatred from the losing side in the Brexit vote and now the 2024 US election has great potential to be damaging to society and to souls. It will do nothing to improve the quality of debate and the fabric of politics which seems to have got so much worse in recent years.
As I’ve pondered before, maybe I should specialise in one subject, in order to be able to keep up with more of the output in that field? It would be difficult to choose as there are many subjects I am interested in and I think are really important, including: life issues, evangelism, extremism and “Christian nationalism”, marriage and childcare, immigration, aid and development, sexual politics, critiquing feminism, church politics… and more. Perhaps I should choose the area where I have most life experience, or there are fewest writers? So far I have had no clear communiqué from God. Until I do, I will likely remain a generalist in the Christian media space. But let me know if you have an opinion on the matter!
To end this crazy week in politics, I think this article is a helpful perspective on why the Democrats lost, from
via - the latter is well worth following, and I’ve just signed up to the former. I haven’t fully digested the article in Time that he links to, written in 2021, which provides evidence that Democratic Party supporters manipulated the outcome of the 2020 election in Biden’s favour. It certainly seems worth reading, and reflecting on, for anyone who wants to have an opinion about US politics, at least.