Twitter, journalists, and our civic conversation

How Twitter Lets The Mainstream Media Get Away With Constant Slander

Journalists can focus on viral outrage, with no fact-checking, promoting anything that confirms their pre-existing biases. Thanks, Twitter!

The problem is that social media, mostly Twitter, has gifted traditional outlets with an explicit pre-formed narrative they merely need to report on, instead of producing facts and context (albeit with a slant) with which readers can draw their own conclusions.

Twitter was the greatest gift the mainstream media ever received. It’s better than their previous monopoly on cable television; it’s better than a world where readers had to wait ’til the next morning to get the news packaged and polished for them by a limited number of papers.

The instantaneous spread of commentary from people who care about how a story can serve their worldview even more than ideological journalists––facts are nearly irrelevant––means mainstream outlets don’t have to do much in the way of old-fashioned fact-finding journalism anymore.

Related:

Journalists and Twitter redux

Why do journalists love twitter and hate blogging?

Why twitter?

Journalists need to ponder this point carefully:

By the time the contextualizing facts surface, people have already made up their minds about the story.

Once people make up their minds, it is difficult, almost impossible to for them to change them. This is especially true when they have staked out a public position.

Changing Minds

[Gardner] is especially pessimistic on our capacity to change our own minds. We do not, on the whole, accept new facts and revise our theories. Rather, we interpret or disregard the new information to make it fit our theories. This is not a matter of IQ or lack of education. He points out that intellectuals are "particularly susceptible" to removing cognitive dissonance by "reinterpreting" the facts.

Among the forces that exacerbate this tendency to lock-in a theory are emotional commitment, public commitment (pride makes it hard to climb down when everyone is watching), and an absolutist personality.

Related:

More on Changing Minds

Another key problem with twitter hot-takes is that those who excel at making them are the last people in the world we should listen to:

The most interesting of the three is the Narcissist, whose energy and self-confidence and charm lead him inexorably up the corporate ladder. Narcissists are terrible managers. They resist accepting suggestions, thinking it will make them appear weak, and they don't believe that others have anything useful to tell them. "Narcissists are biased to take more credit for success than is legitimate," Hogan and his co-authors write, and "biased to avoid acknowledging responsibility for their failures and shortcomings for the same reasons that they claim more success than is their due."

Moreover:

Narcissists typically make judgments with greater confidence than other people . . . and, because their judgments are rendered with such conviction, other people tend to believe them and the narcissists become disproportionately more influential in group situations. Finally, because of their self-confidence and strong need for recognition, narcissists tend to "self-nominate"; consequently, when a leadership gap appears in a group or organization, the narcissists rush to fill it.